In my first book, “A Pound of Cure”, I introduced the concept of the Metabolic Thermostat—a critical system that regulates your body weight. Just like the thermostat in your home adjusts temperature by delivering heat or cool air, your metabolic thermostat controls your hunger and metabolic rate in response to your body weight setpoint. This idea shifts the perspective from viewing excess body fat as mere calorie storage to understanding it as a tightly controlled physiological parameter.

The Role of Your Body Weight Setpoint

Your body weight setpoint is the weight your body naturally gravitates toward, despite fluctuations in diet and exercise. This setpoint is maintained by your metabolic thermostat, which manages hunger, metabolism, food choices, and even your willingness to exercise through a complex network involving your brain, gut, fat stores, and hormones.

Your Metabolic Thermostat

Why Is It So Hard to Lose Weight?

When you try to lose weight by reducing calorie intake, your metabolic thermostat kicks into high gear to maintain your body weight setpoint. This is why dieting often leads to increased hunger and a slowed metabolism, making it hard to lose weight. Your body is essentially programmed to resist weight loss as a survival mechanism, dating back to times when food scarcity was a major threat.

How Your Metabolic Thermostat Works Against You

As you lose weight, your metabolic thermostat adjusts by slowing your metabolism and ramping up hunger signals, making sustained weight loss incredibly challenging. When you gain weight, your thermostat will try to reduce hunger and increase energy expenditure, although this system can malfunction, leading to weight gain over time.

Lowering Your Body Weight Setpoint

The key to successful weight loss is not merely reducing calories but finding ways to lower your body weight setpoint. Instead, it requires a detailed evaluation of the factors that have led to your setpoint elevation and leveraging the four strategies available to lower your setpoint.

The Four Ways To Lower Your Setpoint

Why Your Setpoint Goes Up

Age
Medications
Processed Foods
Inactivity and Injury
Pregnancy and Menopause
Genetics
Yo-Yo Dieting
Stress and Depression

Take our “How Much Weight Will You Lose After Bariatric Surgery” Quiz

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Long-Term, Durable Weight Loss

We’ve all been told that weight loss is driven by willpower and the discipline to resist our hunger pangs, but this is difficult if not impossible for most of us. Resisting a physiologic drive is possible for short periods of time but, uniformly, will fail in the long run. Let’s use the same “willpower argument” that is used to explain why dieters fail and apply it to a similar exercise in resisting your physiologic drive – breath holding. All of us can hold our breath for 10 seconds and resist our brain’s drive to breathe. After 20 seconds, many of us will start to experience significant air hunger and be unable to focus on anything except getting your next breath. At 30 seconds, one minute, or even two minutes for the most determined, we will eventually succumb to our physiologic drive for oxygen and will give up and take a breath.

Unfortunately, our society views the success and failure of these folks and extrapolates it to the rest of us. I am completely convinced that most people are unable to lose and maintain more than 10% of their total body weight through traditional dieting methods. If you are among this majority, your focus cannot be on developing better methods of starving yourself. Instead you should focus on how to lower your body’s set point.