The "whoosh" effect + organ/muscle loss
Hello everyone, welcome back to the one day at a time podcast. So today's topic is very very important. Community talks about it a lot, maybe I haven't done the best job of explaining it thoroughly and I want this podcast to be the place that explains it all for you. So whilst I've been building new tools for you guys to use, potentially separate apps, it'd be free for all members obviously, I'm looking at building something and I've already built it. It's called LeanShield.
Speaker 1:And really, LeanShield is about what do you do that is gonna protect your lean tissue? Because ultimately, we're looking to lose fat and not lean tissue. If we lose lean tissue, which is your organ tissue and your muscle mass and your connective tissue, if we're losing those as well as fat, we're we're we're not doing the right thing, we're we're failing at our job. Because when we talk about weight loss, we're not asking, we're not really wanting weight loss, we want fat loss. So the first thing is our goal is to lose fat.
Speaker 1:The next question is, is it possible just to lose fat and not muscle or organ tissue along with the fat? So the answer in short is you kind of will lose a bit of muscle most of the time but there are some outlier studies that show you actually you can maintain lean body mass and maintain lean tissue even in very aggressive calorie deficits. However, your protein intake has to be very very high and you have to be doing a lot of resistance training to stimulate your muscles to retain because your muscle will stay there if it's getting the stimulus that it's going to get used and the protein is sparing it so even though you're losing a lot of fat mass that you're retaining it but in most cases that's a very optimal schedule of like super high protein, workout schedule has been smashed and you do it now week in week out. So we don't want to risk it by saying we need an optimal week after week after week so we don't lose it. So what's the answer?
Speaker 1:What are we going to do from this? Okay so the first thing to note is if you lose traditionally in the research it is seen as in most diets not optimized for protein and weightlifting just in most kind of weight loss programs, weight loss studies, 25% of the weight loss is going to be what we call lean body mass and 75% of the weight is going be what we call fat mass. Now lean body mass is split into three distinct categories. So the first category is lean body mass is split into muscle tissue, which is about 60% of the lean body mass. Then you've got what is called high metabolic rate organs, which is the liver, kidneys, and heart.
Speaker 1:That's about 25 to 30% of the lean body mass. And then the remaining 10 to 15% is water, glycogen, of connective tissue. So obviously, we wanna protect our connective tissue, but mainly we're looking at retaining our muscle mass and retaining our organ tissue. Collectively, we want our lean body mass percentage loss from a weight loss program not to be the standard 25 but ideally to be zero but looking at sub 5%. So if we say 95% of the weight we've lost is fat mass and 5% is lean body mass we've done a tremendous job compared to the what the studies show.
Speaker 1:So what do the studies actually show? There was a study done 2015, Muller et al, three weeks, a massive deficit and the share of muscle of the lean body mass loss was 65. So you know the sixtyforty rule holds there. 13% of the mass was liver, 8% was kidneys, around 25% was organs. Then there was another study thirteen weeks long, 800 calories a day.
Speaker 1:2009, Aussie Westfall 2009. Fifty five percent of the Chevrolene body mass loss was muscle. Heart was 5%, liver 4%, kidney 6%, organs total 30%. And then another study, organs 6%, other organs 16%, muscle retention is a bit higher than this one. Then there's the real interesting study, the outlier to this, which is Longland's 40% deficit study.
Speaker 1:So that means if your calories, if your maintenance is 2,000, they were eating 1,200. So 800 calorie deficit, right? In that sense, but it could be different deficit. If your maintenance is higher, the actual number would be higher. 40% deficit but they have 2.4 grams of protein per kilogram.
Speaker 1:So if you were to weigh if you weigh eighty kilograms that is 192 grams of protein a day. Most of you are not going to be beaten that level. I know that is a fact. Most of you are not at this level. You're at 1.6 grams per kilogram.
Speaker 1:2.4 is hard to maintain. So yeah, your flexibility and your nutrition, it goes down. And they were also doing six days a week weightlifting. So in that study, lean body mass actually slightly rose. So muscle and organs were essentially spared.
Speaker 1:So what we can learn from these studies is that if you go low calories, yes, about 40 or 25 to 40% of the weight you lose is gonna come from muscle and organ tissue. But we can mitigate this by increasing our protein intake, increasing some resistance training to tell the body, hey, keep hold of this, we're using it. And also one of the easiest ways to maintain muscle and organ is to make sure our deficit actually isn't that huge. Because if the deficit is smaller, the risk of losing lean body mass goes down as well. And this is all built into the LeanShield score you're gonna be able to get soon.
Speaker 1:So what do we do from this information? It means that guys, if you are given your target in the app, it includes a 500 calorie deficit. Now I know some of you want to speed up results, but by going lower on the calories and you can go lower day to day, maybe Mondays and Wednesdays you week lower calories than the target but overall over the week you're on average because the weekends are heavier, that's fine. But if you are chronically 400 calories below what the app is giving you, you're basically consuming 900 calories in a deficit. And that is gonna give you potentially catastrophic results unless your protein intake is smashed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Unless you you're moving and using muscles such as walking, know, because you're using muscle when you're walking and you're doing some resistance training, then you're going to be at the higher risk of losing lean body mass which is broken down into what we don't want lose which is mainly muscle and organ tissue. So organ tissue burns 30 times more calories than fat tissue you know gram for gram. Huge amount of muscle is also more metabolically active. So when you add these things together and you lose muscle, you lose organ tissue, you lose function, you get more fatigued.
Speaker 1:Of course it's going to make it harder in the long run to maintain because you're having less lean body mass and then you're gonna rebound and gain more fat mass. Right? So you don't really want to be doing these crash diets or low calories. And if you do do them, you better be smashing your protein and your resistance training program because that's the only way you're gonna give it a chance to spare. Right?
Speaker 1:So we're gonna we've built this score, Lean Sheet score. You can put on the stuff you're doing and it's gonna give you a score. Of course, you can still spare muscle. You can spare lean tissue. So in one study, it showed if you were to eat sufficient amount of protein, which is what the app gives you okay, lean body mass reduced lean body mass loss is reduced by 80%.
Speaker 1:So if you lost one pound of lean body mass for every 10 pounds of weight that drops down to 0.2 pounds of lean body mass lost which is tremendous. That's just an example numbers you won't be bang on that. So we know protein is a huge thing when it comes to retaining lean body mass and we know walking and doing some resistance training as well. And we know a smaller deficit is a vital part as well. The right deficit is one of the main factors.
Speaker 1:The right deficit with the right protein, with the right movement and resistance are the key core things. You can do other stuff like you make sure their sleep is good. Sometimes the study shows some collagen supplementation can help with the connective tissue stuff. So you can do some of those things, but those are the big boys. Those are the big boys.
Speaker 1:And you might be thinking like, why do I care about organ matter? I know I understand muscle improves my function, it makes me make sure I can move my body. And as I get older, muscle tissue is proven that the more we maintain, the higher the likelihood is we're going to just live for longer and have a better life basically. But like I mentioned, first one is the metabolic rate. The liver, heart and kidneys burn 200 to four forty calories a day, 30 times more than fat.
Speaker 1:So if you shrink that you shrink your maintenance too essentially. Functional. Obviously temporary liver and kidney downsizing comes at shortened drops and stuff such as thior t three leaving you tired and sluggish. This can happen. Rebound risk.
Speaker 1:Organ rebuilding is slower than fat regain. So during refeeding, body often overshoot on fat while organ plays catch up driving the yo yo, softness, many crash diets to see. They lose a lot of weight and gain it back. And when they're back to the same weight, they feel because they are worse. They've lost lean body mass.
Speaker 1:We don't want to do this. This is really important. We are focusing on this stuff and I want to share it with you because a lot of people are too fixated a bit on the weight loss and all the fat loss but what our limitation is, is that it's hard to measure lean body mass on a person without expensive machinery. So we try and mitigate this by saying if we look into the research we can reverse engineer. So we can reverse engineer.
Speaker 1:What does that mean? Alright. We know if your protein is up what the app is saying. We know if you're hitting the calorie target what the app is saying. We know if hitting your step targets with what the app is saying and we know if you hit the workouts like I mentioned one or two a week.
Speaker 1:Right. But remove the workouts for now because it's not in the app. If you just do what the app tells you to do, you are mitigating massively losing lean body mass tissue. And the chances are that when you do lose weight over time, the trends will show you're losing fat mainly and not muscle and organ tissue. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:I hope that does make sense because that's what we're after. Now the second thing is why is it then that if you are in a deficit and you're not losing weight for a while and then you have what is called the whoosh effect or maybe your weight has gone up but you have 100% and you put your hand on your heart and say, Scott, I've been in a deficit. I'm not having nibbles. I'm not eating stuff. I'm not tracking.
Speaker 1:I am genuinely been in a deficit for five, six, seven, eight plus weeks, and my total weight is staying the same. And then someone will say, but what you could do is you just do this, do that, or, you know, overnight I dropped four pounds. I don't know what I did the day before, but I dropped four pounds overnight. Maybe it was, you know the secret food I ate the day before. No.
Speaker 1:No. The whoosh effect works this way. When you're in the calorie deficit, your body starts using fat as energy, stored fat. Your fat cells either grow in size or they shrink. They don't typically duplicate.
Speaker 1:That they do when you get to real obese levels and they do duplicate and then that's a really bad thing. But fat cells will shrink or gain size. When your fat cells shrink in size, when the fat is removed, they retain the water. They pull in water to replace the fat that is removed. So you look and feel a bit bloated and the scale doesn't budge.
Speaker 1:This is the stall a lot of you experience, but this is part of the process of the fat loss. You have utilized the fat in the cells. It has gone in the bloodstream. You have utilized the free energy and you breathe out. Now you're in this position where you start feeling squishy maybe.
Speaker 1:A lot of you say, oh yeah, feel a bit better. Feels a bit more squishy. Yeah, because the fat cells have got no more water in them than fat and it's hole in the water there. So hormonally, happens when cortisol drops, insulin improvement or stress reduction, your body lets go of the water in the cells. And then you see a sudden overnight drop on the scale.
Speaker 1:Not fat, but water previously held in the fat cells. But the water previously held in the fat cells comes from your day to day progress, your day to day turning up. It's not that one day things changed and whatever you did that day was special. That's not what happened. Your accumulation of your work day in day out is the reason that happened eventually.
Speaker 1:You have to understand that because don't be fooled by a big drop overnight or a big gain overnight because water weight is up and down. But we've seen it time time. The scale doesn't move, scale doesn't move, boom. It drops three or four pounds. Then it maintains and maintains and maintains and the same process happens again.
Speaker 1:We've seen this thousands of times. This is not broad science. This is what happens. It's often called the woosh effect. Right?
Speaker 1:It's observed in animal and human studies, right? It's been observed and, you know, it's something that probably should be looked at a bit more in my opinion because it's one of those things, it's a psychological thing as well. If don't understand this happens, then you just give up. But you've done the work. You've you've you've you've replaced the fat with water.
Speaker 1:You've done the work. The weight hasn't come down yet. You've done the work, and it's annoying you give up. Or what tends to happen sometimes is you go, you know, I'm gonna relax all weekend. I can't be bothered with this.
Speaker 1:And then you go on skills on Monday, you go, oh my god, my weight's dropped. Oh, maybe that wasn't working after all and what I did on the weekend did. No. Right? The scale is essentially a lagging indicator of fat loss, but over long periods of time, it becomes a reliable trend.
Speaker 1:If you're in a deficit and it's consistent fat loss is happening 100%. Please remember this. This is is one of the most important factors. So in the study that looked at this you can you can look it up if you want. In 2003 by D.
Speaker 1:E. Laughman et al, changes in abdominal subcutaneous fat water content with rapid weight loss and long term weight maintenance. Right, this happens. This happens. So when we look at the picture overall again, and we look another whole picture of what the hell we are doing.
Speaker 1:Right? What are we doing? What are we actually up to with pow pow? If you're on Turtle, what are you up to? Well, Scott, I wanna lose fat.
Speaker 1:Great. Will you please sign an agreement that says, I will not panic if I am hitting my calories, hitting my step count, and hitting my protein target? I will not panic and press the button like a five year old child. Nothing's happening. I will not panic.
Speaker 1:I will understand that if I'm doing those three things consistently, my fat cells are shrinking, but they might not be dropping the weight when I want to because nature doesn't work that way. But one day I'll have a drop and it will reveal the work I've done but I don't need the revelation really. Maybe psychologically sometimes but I'm strong enough to understand I'm hitting those three targets and I'm happy with that and the results will come in time or the results are happening. Reward is day to day. The reward is you turning up every day.
Speaker 1:When exactly your skill tells you the bloody number that you're happy with, who cares? Who cares? If you actually look at what you're doing, you are eating better, you're getting your steps and you're losing fat mass, all gonna improve your health and things will happen. Day to day, we turn up, we show up. Now I want you I wanna leave you guys with with something.
Speaker 1:And also, by the way, the stress management stuff is important. Like if you if you feel like you're stressed and stuff and you're gonna hold on to more water retention is true. So finding ways to de stress and not worry so much about your weight and stuff is important. I'm going leave you this awesome quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It's really like about one day at a time.
Speaker 1:I'm leave you with this. He said, Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He who he is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with a fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You've done what you could.
Speaker 1:Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. Begin it well and serenely with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear with its hopes and invitations to waste the moment on the yesterdays.
Speaker 1:And that's your prompt to go and track your food, get your steps, hit your protein, and then let the gods decide when the woosh effect kicks in. I can't guarantee when but let us leave it up to nature, leave it up outside of our control, let's focus no actions, get on with our life, put a crack a smile on your face and stop worrying yourself to death over when the bloody scale is going to drop when you know you're doing the things that actually matter. Happy days. Happy days. Speak to you tomorrow.
