It Takes Time to Gain Fat

As a society, we've conditioned ourselves to believe that when we eat "bad" foods or too much in one sitting (or both!) even once, it screws up our entire health plan. This is a nasty little societal pattern we love to perpetuate called "food guilt".

Is engaging in food guilt a healthy or even factual way to live our lives?

A Refresher on Calories In/Calories Out

We need to start by reminding ourselves how it is that we change our weight in the first place.

We all have a Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), that indicates how much energy (calories) we use when we are at rest (ie. if we were sleeping all day). This is based on someone's weight, height, and muscle mass (see "Do You Have a Fast Metabolism?" for more info). Generally, an inactive person multiplies their BMR by 1.2 to get an approximate number of how many calories they spend in one day (ie. their daily energy expenditure - or DEE). There are lots of websites you can go to to calculate this, such as bmrcalculator.org.

You then use your calculated DEE to determine how many calories you need to eat per day. For weight loss, most people follow this general rule:

To lose 1 pound per week, eat 500 calories less than your daily energy expenditure.

To lose 1.5lbs per week, you could experiment with eating 750 calories less than your daily energy expenditure, and so on*.

This is a fairly common golden rule for weight loss. However, when thinking about how much weight people gain when they overeat, no one seems to consider that the golden rule could also be true in reverse.

If this rule holds true for weight loss, then wouldn't it stand to reason that:

To gain 1 pound per week, eat 500 calories more than your daily energy expenditure.

What this means is that you need to eat 500 calories more than your DEE every day for an entire week in order to gain 1 pound of fat. If you eat 1000 calories more than your DEE every day for an entire week, you'll still only gain 2 pounds.

Think about that for a second.

When you swear you've gained ten pounds because you've overeaten by 1000 calories in one day, you still have to do that every day for the rest of the week in order to still only gain 2 pounds.

And to gain 10 pounds, you'd have to eat 1000 calories more than your DEE, every day of the week, for 5 weeks straight.

That is lot of excess calories over a large amount of time!

Dammit, I ate that entire pizza in one sitting. I'm out.

So why do people give up after straying from their diet once?

How Food Guilt Undoes Progress

Food guilt has this sneaky way of tricking us into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's happened to me so many times where I've been successfully cutting fat like a madwoman, and then I have a 3-7 day run of eating more calories which convinces me that I've gone and fucked everything up.

Sound familiar?

At this point, I have two options.

1. I can stop tracking my progress and counting calories because I know I've screwed up my goals and I don't want to see how much weight I've gained or how much I've been overeating.

2. I can continue tracking my progress and counting calories because even though I haven't stuck to my goals for several days, it doesn't mean I've ruined everything or need to stop altogether.

I have chosen option 1 many times. SO. MANY. TIMES.

What ends up happening is the following:

• I stop counting calories (the most successful method of fat loss for me)

• I become less active

• I stop weighing myself

• Then, perhaps three months later I weigh myself and am like "FUCK I gained so much weight; I knew it..."

This is the perfect example of that self-fulfilling prophecy I mentioned earlier.

When I stop counting calories and measuring myself because I don't want to see how "badly" I've done, I'm removing the controls that keep me from consistently overeating and therefore gaining weight.

When I do this for three months before starting again, I've lived my life without my controls for enough time to actually gain a significant amount of weight.

THEN when I do weigh myself again, I HAVE fucked things up!

However...

What happens if I choose Option 2?

Keeping the Controls in Place

Lately when I overeat for an amount of time I've been choosing Option 2. Here's what happens in that scenario:

• I continue counting calories

• I keep my activity level the same

• I continue weighing myself weekly per my usual schedule

• My weekly weigh-ins show me that I've actually gained no weight or have only gained 1-2 pounds (since as we've discussed, that's a reasonable amount of weight to gain in 1 week. Also, it's probably just water weight and not even actual fat - see below)

Keep tracking! You got this.

This reminds me that I haven't actually screwed things up as badly as I think I have, and it's actually a good bit of encouragement to keep going. I avoid the self-fulfilling prophecy because I know how little I've actually screwed up my overall progress. In fact, I'm still 12 pounds down from where I started. Fuck yeah.

Timing of Weighing and Measuring Yourself

The other thing to consider when going with Option 2 is that usually, if you weigh and/or measure yourself the day after you overeat, the scale and tape measure are going to give you high numbers. It's important to note that this is not your true weight/measurement.

The day after you overeat, your body has all this extra stuff in it, including the excess food you ate and a bunch of water weight. This shows up in your readings and really throws a lot of people for a loop.

"OMG I gained 5 pounds after eating all that pizza!!" Spoiler alert: no you didn't.

So I say this:

Don't trust the measurements you obtain right after an overeat.

The best time to measure how much weight or inches you actually gained or lost is the day after you've eaten at your normal cutting (or maintenance - whatever you're doing) calories. This is a true measurement of your weight and circumference because you no longer have that extra food and water in your body.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, the Controls, and Measurement Timing

I have a great example to illustrate my points.

Back at the end of March last year, I'd started a new job with an extremely hectic new schedule that took some getting used to. I was tired all the time, and I'd also started biking a bit which made me even more tired. As a result, I started eating more than I had been before. Both because I was stressed and exhausted, and because I knew I needed more calories since I was standing and biking. Mostly because I was stressed and exhausted.

I was down in the dumps about my weight for about a month because I knew I'd been eating more than usual. I'd still been doing my weigh-ins, but not as frequently and usually after a night I considered as overeating.

Finally, around the end of this month, I had a day where I ate at my usual cutting calorie amount. The next day I weighed and measured myself, and what in the fuck!!!

Turns out I'd actually lost four pounds over that entire month!!!

I thought I'd been overeating, but I'd actually been cutting at the exact rate I'd have hoped for (ie. 1 pound per week)!

There are 3 lessons to take from this:

1. Don't stop tracking your progress just because you think you're overeating

2. Don't necessarily trust your numbers after overeating - use them as a ballpark

3. For accurate measurements, measure yourself only after you've eaten at your normal calorie count

If I'd kept measuring myself after overeating, I would've been convinced that I was gaining weight when I wasn't. Similarly, if I'd stopped tracking altogether, I also would've been convinced I was gaining weight when I wasn't.

In either of these scenarios, I might have continued down that path because I'd convinced myself I'd undone all my progress, and then later on maybe I would have undone all my progress.

The PSYCHOLOGY of it all!

Here's a radical idea: what if food guilt didn't exist and we allowed ourselves to overeat or eat "bad" foods because it is enjoyable?

One of the biggest reasons people stop "dieting" is because it's too strict and unenjoyable.

When you want to call your eating habits a "lifestyle change" instead of a "diet" (I find this distinction hilarious but perhaps it's applicable here), you need to incorporate concessions for yourself. You are not a glutton for wanting to eat certain foods and/or a lot of them. You do not lack will power because you ate a lot of junk food one particular day. You are not weak for wanting to drink a few beers with your friends on a Friday night.

The key is deciding to incorporate these events into your eating habits, and holy guacamole, enjoying the fuck out of it when you do!

It takes time and consistency to gain any significant amount of fat.

Go enjoy your beers.

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*However, do be aware that unless your doctor says so, it's currently accepted that the minimum amount of energy needed to get proper nutrition is 1200 calories per day, no matter your weight, height, sex at birth, etc. Don't eat less than 1200 calories.