Regardless of what the gurus want you to think, the key to fat loss is regulating your caloric intake. If you can't manage that, you can forget about getting any results. But it would be dumb to forget the other half of the equation, which is caloric expenditure. And to understand this, we have to understand the thyroid.

Thyroid and Caloric 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 temperature. Raising your body temperature to appropriate levels is important in the aspect of digesting foods and transporting energy into cells.

An important thyroid function is raising body temperature to appropriate levels.

In other words, how well your thyroid functions will determine how fast and how well you transport the energy you take into your body.

Thyroid's Effect on Your Resting Metabolic Rate

Your resting metabolic rate (RMR) accounts for the basic functions of the body, from liver function to maintenance of body temperature. Any decrease in these functions will obviously affect caloric expenditure.

To demonstrate how this works, let's assume your caloric daily burn is 2,000 calories a day, which is pretty typical for the average woman. This is split among:

• 1,300 calories from assumed resting metabolic rate (RMR)

• 150 calories from assumed thermal effect of food (TEF)

• 650 calories from assumed non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) and thermal effect of activity (TEA)

• Total: 2,000 calories expended

Let's say that you decide one day that you want to lose fat, so you cut your daily caloric intake to around 1,200 calories.

What happens first is some pretty rapid weight loss, especially if you're new to dieting. However, your body adapts to the new eating pattern in three or four days. As soon as this happens, your thyroid production slows, along with other bodily functions to compensate.

This leads to a drop in both your resting metabolism and the TEF. There will also be a slight drop in NEAT and TEA from this, but nothing too extreme yet. The effects of decreasing NEAT and TEA are not yet from an internal reaction so much as external output.

This is what your caloric expenditure looks like after 7 to 10 days:

• 1,180 calories current RMR

• 120 calories current TEF

• 550 calories from NEAT and TEA

• Total: 1,850 calories expended

Now let's jump ahead by about 8 weeks. Aside from those quick initial losses, you haven't made much progress. Your fat loss has officially stalled. You've had a further drop in RMR, a slight drop in TEF (due mostly to lack of food), and both your NEAT and TEA have suffered, not only in external output, but also in internal function.

What this means is, not only are you moving less than you used to (both in and out of the gym), but the movement that you do isn't having the same effect on your energy expenditure. This may seem like the same thing, but it isn't: There are different hormonal signals that occur. One is intentional, voluntary effort, and the other is unconscious, involuntary action.

Your current caloric expenditure now is broken down like this:

• 1,100 calories current RMR

• 100 calories current TEF

• 405 calories from NEAT and TEA

• Total: 1,605 calories expended

Remember that you're only taking in 1,200 calories a day (and likely off by 100 calories or so). This isn't such a big deficit. If you slip up in only one meal, all of your efforts will likely be wiped away.

Add to that the fact that your body is constantly wishing that you'd just stop this kind of behavior. You're just stuck, hungry, and frustrated.

Stuck, hungry and frustrated.

You might be scoffing at these numbers but I assure you I see it all the time. In fact, a lot of women and men, even without thyroid problems, have such sedentary lifestyles that their daily caloric burn, without dieting down, can be as low as 1,500 to 1,600 calories a day. I've seen even less with really petite women.

A caloric burn of 1,485 means an average burn of only one calorie per minute over a twenty-four hour period. That's not even a severely damaged burn. Sit in an office cubicle all day, with suppressed thyroid function, and you too can hit all-time caloric burn lows.

Thyroid and the Will to Lose

The average woman will usually give up, have herself a nice binge, and either call it a day, or try again at a later point. Either way, the weight usually comes 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. 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), otherwise known as the "Axis of Stress."

Some studies suggest that in some people, the addictive nature of adrenal stress causes a euphoric feeling (an addiction to overtraining and under eating). Fear is certainly another driving point, and something that's as involved as a stress emotion.

For whatever reason, these people continually ignore the sane requests of their bodies. In response, thyroid function drops lower and lower, and they start bringing in more stress response signals. Not that this doesn't involve the thyroid, but you have really brought in some new hormonal 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 cutting or fat loss phase, 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 feel a compulsive need to exercise to "maintain" their fat loss.

They spend years training, and trying different carb intakes, lifting techniques, and fat loss protocols. They've 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 goals.

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 expended

In this case, we've dropped so much function and caloric output that this is just on the verge of having a medical condition. I must 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.

As you can see, though, total caloric burn is now only 1,330. Sure, you can lose weight on this kind of diet — just ask the millions of anorexics and famine victims around the globe. Anorexics and other starving people have even lower thyroid function, caloric expenditure on the order of 0.4 or 0.5 calories per minute, and plenty of hair loss and exposed ribs. It ain't pretty.

Sure, it's possible to lose weight burning only 1,330 calories a day, but you wouldn't want to.

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, the people who need to take a break from training most, never do. They never really take the re-feed to the proper level, because they're afraid of the weight they might gain.

The question they need to be asking themselves is, "what kind of results can I expect doing what I've been doing?" The answer: best case scenario, no results, and you'll look like crap. Worst-case? A one-way express ticket to Sick-as-Hellsville.

In closing, I want to leave you with these tips:

• Take frequent breaks from dieting. Re-feed, in excess of daily calories, on a regular basis. If you're 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.

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

• Don't be afraid of the big bad carbs. Even if you have diagnosed yourself with an 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 it quinoa or a sweet potato, on re-feed days at least help yourself to the "evil" carbs.

• If you're sensitive to the effects of dieting down very quickly, then moderate macronutrient and caloric intakes are more important for you and will help you maintain more balance. That "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.

• Go hard, but then go home. Don't spend more time in the gym than you need to. Get in, lift a sane amount, then knock it off and get out.

• 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. Ignoring this simple fix is one of the dumbest things of all.

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

About the Author

Leigh Peele is high-level composition trainer. Her clients range from college athletes and professional fighters to housewives and television actors. Find out more about Leigh's work at Avidity Fitness and The Fat Loss Troubleshoot.

Resources

Some sections were taken from The Metabolic Repair Manual.