Thyroid and Burn

Your thyroid produces hormones and one of their jobs is to help usher oxygen into your cells. The oxygen in turn burns calories. Another aspect is the thyroid maintains your body's temperature. Raising your body temperature, to appropriate levels, is important in the aspect of digesting foods and transporting energy into cells.

In short, how fast and well you transport energy taken into the body depends on the workings of your thyroid function. How does that affect your RMR?

Well being that RMR is the basic function of the body, from liver function to body temperature, I would say a decrease in that function is going to effect, to some degree, your level of caloric burn at rest. To throw out some numbers let’s give an assumed caloric daily burn of 2,000 calories a day. These calories are split between….

• 1,300 calories from assumed RMR
• 150 calories from assumed TEF
• 650 calories from assumed NEAT and TEA
• Total-2,000 calories in Caloric Expenditure

This is not a really crazy figure. The average female based on current calculations is assumed to easily burn 2,000 calories a day to maintain their current weight.

Now given you assume that you are burning 2,000 calories, you, in all effort to lose the fat, cut your caloric intake to 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day.

The initial reaction of this will be some quick loss of weight, usually, if new to dieting down. It usually takes a good 3-4 days for the body to adapt to this kind of eating pattern.

After that period of realization occurs, the body is going to naturally lower thyroid production, along with other body functions to compensate. Meaning, the first thing to be lowered, to some degree, is your RMR and TEF. There will also be a slight drop in NEAT and TEA from this, but nothing too extreme yet. The effects of decreasing in NEAT and TEA are not yet from an internal reaction so much as external output.

New Stats after 7 to 10 days…

• 1,180 calories current RMR
• 120 calories current TEF
• 550 calories from NEAT and TEA
• Total-1,850 calories in caloric Expenditure

I am going to jump ahead now by about 8 weeks. By this time you have lost an initial quick weight (again this is for a complete fresh dieting down, we are going to discuss constant dieting down soon). You have officially stalled in weight loss. You have had more of a drop in RMR, a slight drop in TEF (mostly because of lack of food), and both your NEAT and TEA have suffered, not only in external output but in internal function. What this means is, not only are you physically moving less than you used to, be it in tapping your feet or running on the treadmill or both, but the processes that function the output for this movement internally aren't working on the same levels either. This may seem like the same thing, but it isn't. There are different hormonal signals that occur. One is the effort you are purposefully trying to put forth, and the other is what you aren't controlling, at least not on a conscious level.

• 1,100 calories current RMR
• 100 calories current TEF
• 405 calories from NEAT and TEA
• Total-1,605 calories in Caloric Expenditure

If your intake is at 1,200 calories a day, and likely off by 100 calories, then that isn't a very large deficit, even just a meal slip up in excess and you are likely to wipe away any efforts you have achieved. Add the fact that your body is in a state of wanting you to stop this kind behavior, and nothing is really going to happen for you. You are just stuck, hungry, and frustrated.

You might be saying that these numbers aren't possible. I assure you that this is not aggressive dramatics. In fact, a lot of women and men without thyroid problems have such sedentary lifestyles that that their daily caloric burn, without dieting down, can be as low as 1,500 to 1,600 calories a day. I have seen even less with really petite women. A caloric burn of 1,485 means an average burn of 1 caloric per min in a 24 hour span of time. That is not even a severely damaged burn. Sit in an office all day on low-calorie and with suppressed thyroid function and you just hit the jackpot on low caloric burns.

Thyroid and the Will to Lose

Now the average woman will usually give in, have herself a nice binge and either call it a day or try again at a later point. Either way, the weight is usually put back on and the never-ending search for the perfect diet begins yet again.

Then there are those who are determined and driven to succeed at their challenge. What drives these women and men has yet to be determined. It could be a lack of sexual hormone balance, or it could be higher adrenal production and its effect of the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis (HPAA). I like to call this the “Axis of Stress.” Some studies suggest that the addictive nature of adrenal stress, in some, causes a euphoric feeling (an addiction to over training/under eating). Fear is certainly another driving point and something that is as involved as a stress emotion.

Whatever the cause of why it is in you to completely ignore the sane requests of your body, you keep doing so. In response, your Thyroid functions drops lower and lower and you start bringing in more stress response signals. Not that this doesn't involve the Thyroid, but you have really brought in some new players which you will read about in the Adrenal section.

The Professional Dieter

I mentioned before that the data I shared about this effect is from a fresh dieter. A fresh dieter basically means someone who has usually been eating at maintenance, or a surplus, and has done little to no dieting down. This is not likely to apply to the majority of you reading this.

The professional dieter spends the majority of his or her time in some sort of a cut or fat loss stage, and is constantly TRYING to live in a deficit. They eat too few calories, and usually have over-trained their bodies. These are the people who have to exercise on an obsessive level to "maintain" their loss. They spend years training and trying different carb intakes, lifting techniques, fat loss protocols, have read every book, every blog, followed along with everything that people on TV tell them to do, and usually end up stunted right where they started or heavier. Rarely do they achieve their goal.

The big problem comes in when we look at your caloric expenditure and burn. For the few of you that have been diligent enough to stick to this kind of training level, you have taken things to a new level of dysfunction. It’s an actual physical and mental addiction.

For now let's look at how this affects your rate of caloric burn if we kept you as the same person who on paper was supposed to burn 2,000 calories per day.

Your current caloric expenditure now is broken down like this…

• 925 calories current RMR.
• 65 calories current TEF.
• 275 calories from NEAT
• Total-1,330 calories in Caloric Expenditure.

This is about where you will ride that line of going into a medical condition zone. Meaning, you will have that much more of drop in caloric output and function which leads you to being in a zone of medical dysfunction. Now, I will say that I have helped those labeled as "damaged goods" to achieve a complete reversal of their problem. Like those with a "blown" thyroid, I have helped turn around their lives and have the ability to eat and train normally.

You can see if your caloric burn is only 1,330 now. The only people who lose weight on this kind of a level are those who truly starve. Those who starve will lower their production even more and are true anorexics. In these cases the results are far more extreme with caloric burns as low as 0.4 to 0.5 calories burned per minute with hair loss, rib cages showing, and true starvation.

The average man or woman has just enough of a binge day here or there, even just at 1,500 to 1,800 calories, to offset the burn to where they just aren't getting anywhere. This is important to note because these binge days are what save you, but it’s also what ultimately keeps you from moving in any direction and just living in a limbo.

The Fix?

It may seem obvious but taking re-feeds and breaks on a regular basis usually does the trick. The problem is that the majority that have a problem never really take that break from training, they never really take that re-feed to the level it needs to go out of fear of the gain that they will encounter doing so. The question is what kind of results are you going to get in this situation using the plan that you are using? The answer is at best case no results and feeling like crap. The worst case is a 1st class ticket to a vicious disease.

In closing I want to leave you with these tips:

1. Take frequent breaks from dieting down. Re-feed, in excess, of daily calories on a regular basis. If you are following a specific training program tweak it to do so or follow one that outlines breaks and re-feeds in it. In my OPT Remix program for example, I put re-feeds in multiple times in a month and it provides twice the results that the normal low everyday or cycling programs bring about.

2. Take frequent training breaks and deloads. You will see faster results doing so, period.

3. Don’t fear carbs. Even if you have diagnosed yourself with a intolerance or insulin resistance you still need to get a certain level of complex carbohydrates in the body to stimulate certain hormones to help raise their levels. Be in quinoa or a sweet potato, on re-feed days at least help yourself to the “evil” carbs.

4. If sensitive to the effects of dieting down very quickly, then moderate macro/caloric intakes are more for you and will help you maintain more balance. Your quick and easy Anabolic water shed diet, may not be for you, and will likely leave you with more problems. So will eliminating full food groups and blaming intolerances.

5. Go hard, but go home. Don’t spend more time in the gym than you need to. Knock it off, get in, lift a sane amount, and go home.

6. Sleep. Think it isn’t important all you want, but it is and it could be screwing you over. It will decrease hunger, stress, cortisol, and in short make you a happy and more muscle producing, fat losing person. It’s stupid how many people ignore the simplest fix.

This article was brought to you by the organization for better hormone function.

Leigh Peele received her certification from the National Academy of Sports Medicine in training. She also has a Nutritional Consultation Certification and in training Special Populations and Weight Management. A nationally published author in both magazine and online, Leigh Peele is continually raising the bar on her ability to achieve fat loss under any conditions. A leader in research and study in metabolic behavior and recovery she has been deemed the Fat Loss Troubleshooter. Her clients range from college athletes and professional fighters to housewives and obese seniors. She has led those to figure wins and been the champion to those with personal battles especially with eating disorders. Check out her NEW updated edition of the Fat Loss Troubleshoot and new release of The Metabolic Repair Manual by Clicking Here: www.FatLossTroubleShooter.com