How Over-Dieting Can Damage Your Health

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Dieting—typically seen as “less food, more gym”—seems to be our default when it comes to weight loss. We may acknowledge that strength training is important, and we might have some grasp on our hormones’ roles and functions, but we are conditioned to go back to this “solution” in desperate times.

With or without results, many of us have been at this for a while. Personally, I started dieting in high school. I know some women who started even younger.

Years of serial dieting and managing everything (from stress, to guilt after eating something we deem “bad”) with food restriction and another punishing mile on the treadmill have put us in a bad spot. This cycle makes it too easy to feel like we’re racking up one more “failure” and leaves us wondering, “What’s wrong with me?”

The psychological toll of dieting is huge, but that’s a subject for another blog.

Today I want to focus on the toll it takes on your hormones and metabolic rate. The problem starts with something you’ve heard a hundred times: we’re hard-wired for stress and survival. Our body’s natural inclination is to store up for tough times. We have to fight that daily given our the unrelenting stress and readily-available food of our modern world. We know that, yet years of diet marketing still lure us toward just getting in a few more workouts or cutting back calories to drop those excess pounds. Our hormones have other plans.

It is true that calories matter. Of course they do! No doubt that you have to create a caloric deficit in order to lose some weight. That much we know. But hormones matter too, and they matter a whole lot if you’re like the women who fill my practice, who are all wondering, “Why aren’t my diet and exercise plan working? What’s wrong with my metabolism?”

We’ve been told to think of our metabolism as a simple math equation: calories in – calories out = weight loss. It makes more sense to acknowledge that our metabolism and hormones are fluid, dynamic, adaptive. More like a rubberband. You can pull or push, but only to a point, then it snaps back (or it breaks altogether).

Calories matter, and so do hormones like insulin when it comes to losing weight. But let those ideas go for a moment and just think of the rubberband analogy. In order to get a result, weight loss in this case, you have to put just enough stress on it to get movement without it snapping back. The key is just enough. Not enough stress and you stay stuck. Too much stress, and like the rubberband, the metabolism springs back.

The spring-back happens in two stages, in my experience. One happens quickly, and you can remedy it by lessening the stress. The other happens as we yo-yo diet (or what I call the “digging your own grave diet”). This is when we just keep digging ourselves in deeper with more restriction and more exercise. I went through this big-time while writing my book Ultimate You. I know many of you have been there too.

Initially, when there is the wrong kind—or too much—stress on the metabolism, the body simply adapts to the new stress by down-regulating the metabolic rate. You see this time and time again when you start a new diet or increase your exercise and get results for a like a week, then nada. We get totally lost in the idea that we should be at a caloric deficit. The math adds up! You’ve checked and double-checked My Fitness Pal. But with this down-regulation (that can happen in as quickly as a week) you simply aren’t burning as much as you think you are.

Most research shows us that this adaptation is to the tune of 300-500 calories – meaning if you think your BMR is 2200 and you shave off 500 calories, you may only be shaving off 300 calories. Of course, you throw in other hormone imbalances like insulin resistance, adrenal stress or low thyroid and you could be burning even less than that.

How do you know when this is happening? I always say you can tell when your hormones hate your plan. Appetite and cravings go up, energy goes down and success go out the window. (I use the acronym ACES with my patients to remind them of this). During this initial slow-down the hormones that jump in to thwart your efforts are primarily leptin, thyroid and cortisol.

You cut those calories or try to burn more off at the gym, and that triggers lower leptin levels and higher cortisol levels, which bring on the cravings for the carbs and sometimes fatty/starchy foods. This makes it extra hard to stick with your plan.

What this looks like for many of us is “clean eating” Monday to Friday and then binging on the weekend. For others it’s 1-2 weeks of dieting only to give into the cravings and get off track for weeks to months thinking, “Why bother, nothing works!”

If this sounds like you, just listen to those hormones talking by way of appetite, cravings and energy. Make adjustments to ease up on the exercise or increase the calories a bit to create less stress on the metabolic rubberband.

It sounds simple enough. But I know there are many women who will fight it and do what I’ve done: dig our own grave. We frustratingly look at the lack of progress and think, “I need to work harder.” So we keep going with a plan that our hormones hate, and white-knuckle it through the sugar cravings, fatigue and depression of it all thinking, “If I can just keep trying…”

When we do this we enter the second stage of dieting damage: hormone and immune system trouble. This is where women start to wonder if their metabolism is damaged or broken. Here are the big hormonal shifts that happen when we put too much stress on the metabolic rubberband:

Cortisol

This stress hormone gets in the mix when the stress of your diet gets to be too much. Initially stress hormones are often high, but in time they can become deregulated—high at the wrong times of day, low at the wrong times of day, or even low overall. Cortisol gets tangled up with insulin quickly as your blood sugar bounces from high to low and you wage a battle with your appetite, cravings and energy. Sleep often takes a hit due to cortisol irregularities as well, making it difficult to fall asleep or stay asleep. (More on that here.)

Thyroid

Cutting calories too low—and for some, cutting carbs specifically—can really impact active thyroid hormone (T3) levels and can increase inactive hormone levels. Reverse T3 can rise in part due to cortisol/stress of dieting, as well as issues with the appetite controlling hormone, leptin. (See one such study here.) Thyroid gets involved right from the start as leptin starts to take a dive. In time, low thyroid can linger as a result of dietary restriction. See this study here.

Estrogen & Progesterone

With long-term stress of any kind, in this case dieting, progesterone takes the fall first. You’ll see breakouts, worsening PMS and for many women, longer cycles or disappearing cycles. Estrogen quickly becomes the dominant of the two and creates a bigger fat loss battle, especially in the hips and thighs. However in time, estrogen falls too and your cycle goes bye-bye entirely. You start having a very difficult time with fat loss, particularly around the middle.

What to do next?

Everything I’ve mentioned above can be corrected when you find the right amount of stress to put on the metabolism to get results but not push her to snap back at you.

Start by dialing back exercise. First, metabolic conditioning and long-duration cardio. Keep doing some strength training, as it will help maintain your muscle mass through all this stress. Next, play with your macros. Often, increasing carbs just a touch is enough. Finally, you may need more calories altogether, which I know goes counter to everything you’ve been taught. Just try it. What have you got to lose?

If you’ve entered the second stage of these metabolic shifts, I’ll be honest, you’ve got a little more work to do. At this point, a targeted supplement plan can help those hormones get back into balance.

For starters, consider some adrenal adaptogens like ashwaganda and rhodiola. And replace the vitamins that get depleted during all this: magnesium, B vitamins, essential fatty acids and antioxidants. Often other nutritional issues arise as well, such as anemia or digestive issues like hyper-permeability of the intestines and food sensitivities arise. Those must be fixed in order to get out of these shifts.

In some cases, there is a third stage, where more permanent issues take hold. For example, if the stresses mentioned above are significant enough, they can trigger an autoimmunity such as Hashimoto’s. We can manage this, but we can’t go back and unflip the switch.

Or, the hormonal shifts above can be significant enough to trigger some vicious cycles of hormone resistance that can be very difficult to undo. For example, with cortisol activation from the stress of dieting, insulin resistance is often quick to follow. Some women will be more sensitive to this and develop elevated testosterone leading to breakouts, erratic cycles, etc. The insulin resistance adds to the leptin resistance, keeping appetite and cravings high.

The up and down blood sugar stress adds to inflammation, which creates more stress, and on and on that cycle goes. Meanwhile, in the background, more problems arise with digestion and intestinal permeability, which adds to inflammation, making insulin resistance worse.

As you can see, making things better may take some time, and the more advanced the shifts have become, the harder it can be to calm things down.

But don’t stress. Try some of the strategies and nutrients mentioned above. Make some changes to your exercise plan, take another pass at nutrition and get help if you think you’ve shifted in a way you’re struggling to undo. You can always contact me (drbrooke@betterbydrbrooke.com) or find a functional medicine doc in your area.

Filed under: Fitness