Adaptations are changes your body undergoes to improve its function and efficiency in response to dietary habits or physical activity. They are the body’s natural ability to respond to and adjust to new demands or environments.
Our Caveman Legacy and Metabolism
Back in the day—let’s call it eleventy billion years ago—cavemen rocked animal skins and spent their time hurling spears at woolly mammoths. Life was a big feast or a waiting game for the next meal. Our bodies learned to hit the metabolic brakes when calories were scarce to survive. So, your metabolism slows down when you cut calories—exciting, right? Um, yay!
The Myth of Linear Weight Loss Adaptations
While preserving energy was terrific when you needed to save energy for a few days before chasing down your next Brontosaurus burger, it’s disappointing news today if you are trying to lose weight.
While every calorie app ever created would suggest that weight loss is linear (eat this number of calories, and you will lose 2 lbs per week), it rarely, if ever, meets that expectation, and cutting back too drastically can backfire.
It’s one of the biggest mistakes I see. Women tend to be so frustrated with where they currently are that they cut back too far or too fast and then don’t understand when they are so hungry they are ready to knaw their arm off or fall face first into a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.
Instead of being strategic and making sure they are setting themselves up to have the most efficient metabolism (i.e., building up lean muscle to increase metabolism and cutting calories back only enough to keep the scale moving in the right direction), they just cut back calories until they plateau and stop losing weight altogether.
This is when they either throw up their hands and curse the diet gods, or they go hard and cut calories even more until they are eating at unsustainable calorie levels. They eat in a constant state of low energy availability, further slowing down their metabolisms and generally making it harder to lose weight.
The Uber Eats Era and Physical Adaptations
In a time when we can have someone literally Uber a meal to our house after spending the whole day sitting behind a laptop, it’s no wonder we don’t fit into our animal skin togas in quite the same way we used to.
Ahem, if only nutrition was the only adaptation we needed to worry about. Just like nutrition, our bodies have also adapted to movement. If you spent your days wrestling saber-toothed tigers, your body would hold on to lean muscle because it knew you needed to retain your strength for the next wrestling match.
However, if your job were to chase the woolly mammoth for an hour until he died of blood loss or exhaustion, then your body would have a different adaptation using your body for cardiovascular exercises (or endurance style workouts vs. strength workouts). So, it pairs down the muscles on your frame to accommodate this movement style. You become more efficient at cardio but lose physical strength since you are not trying to get stronger.
The Cardio Adaptions Conundrum
Translating that to modern times, if you thought you needed to do bad 80’s step aerobic videos daily to remain thin (bonus points if you wore legwarmers or a headband), your body adapted to that movement. One day, you just noticed that doing 8 hours of straight-step aerobics no longer worked as it did 4 months ago.
While you are frustrated AF, your body is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Your body sees that you only use it for cardiovascular exercises (or endurance-style workouts). So, it pairs down the metabolically expensive muscle on your frame to accommodate this movement style. You become more efficient at cardio but lose physical strength and lean body mass since you are effectively not trying to get stronger. Lean muscle is metabolically expensive tissue (raising your caloric needs).
The good news is that your lighter, less muscular body weighs less, but you also have to eat less to retain your figure and stay in that hot pink aerobic leotard. This doesn’t mean you have less body fat; in fact, your body fat % probably went up, but hey…you weigh less, and that’s all that matters, right? Or is it?
Beyond the Scale: Building Lasting Strength Adaptations
When you lose weight too quickly, you lose as much muscle as body fat, which wreaks havoc on your body composition and increases your overall body fat percentage. So yeah…congratulations—you now weigh less.
This is a problem since the more muscle you have, the higher your metabolism is. That means you don’t have to eat all dry salads or rice cakes that taste like cardboard and TV static (footnote: credit to Jordan Syatt, one of my mentors, for that description; it still cracks me up.)
Focusing too much on only scale weight is the main reason why women focus on eating less and being as thin as possible and then spend most of their adult lives yo-yo dieting and are left scratching their heads when their metabolism is in the toilet.
While we are talking about adaptations, metabolic adaptations can also occur if you lose weight quickly and then regain it back (which science has shown happens to 95% of people on “diets”), that regained weight often consists of a higher portion of fat to lean tissue, also increasing the body fat percentage.
So, friends, Instead of focusing on how thin or light you can get, focus on how strong you can get. I promise you will not accidentally turn into a bodybuilder. Building muscle is damn hard, and in middle age, it’s even more problematic due to a decline in our hormones. As you age, focus on strength to improve muscle and bone density to maintain independence, health, and an excellent quality of life.
Adaptions: Strength Over Scale
Wrapping it all up, let’s be honest: if our ancestors could see us now, they’d probably wonder why we’re not all built like superheroes with all this modern technology and knowledge at our disposal. But instead, here we are battling both the bulge and the urge to indulge in a Ben & Jerry’s binge while mastering the remote from the couch.
Remember, shedding pounds isn’t just about squeezing into that outfit from last year or impressing your reflection. It’s about understanding that your body is like a finely tuned machine that needs the right fuel and exercise to run efficiently. So, next time you’re contemplating a Spartan diet or running a marathon to nowhere, remember: getting strong can provide more benefits than a fleeting moment of scale triumph.
And hey, while you may not be chasing woolly mammoths, chasing strength and health is a pretty epic quest all on its own. So put on your (figurative) animal skin toga, pick up that (literal) dumbbell, and remember to laugh along the way—it burns calories too!
Interested in losing some weight and better controlling your adaptations, grab our FREE Ultimate Guide to Fat Loss in Menopause. If you’re interested in personal online coaching for nutrition and training, check us out here.
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