My Fitness Pal made me gain weight...

Flamenquera

I just read on Yahoo Health an article on naturally thin people and it said:

"Psychosomatic Medicine showed that tracking your diet in a food journal can actually boost your stress levels, which in turn increases your level of a hormone called cortisol, and cortisol is linked to—you guessed it—weight gain."

Of course this is not for everyone...I just had to share!

MissingMyOldSelf

Personally, I think I'm more relaxed when I plan out my meals for the day. That way, I don't have to worry about "Well, how much of this can I eat, and what else can I eat" at the time of making my list.

Shoot... the next study will say that "logging your diet in a food journal will lead to cancer." Everything nowadays leads to cancer.

ocdwriter

I can relate. hahaha. I think I've had problems with this.

BeautifulScarsWECHANGED

Oooooooo, be careful about sharing these sort of articles on here. People aren't kind..... :huh:

Iheartsushi

Yep guess this doesn't apply to me because I have never been naturally thin..lol

StaceyL76

I don't think this applies to me. I feel more relaxed in logging my intake..

Kimdbro

I can relate as well... I was becoming way too obsessed with calories. I like to think I have a handle on it, now and am not quite so anal.

Tjkramer95

Your "be kinder than necessary" quote is from Mother Teresa.

BeautifulScarsWECHANGED

Your "be kinder than necessary" quote is from Mother Teresa.

Actually, according to Google....

"actually this is attributed to both T.H. Thompson and John Watson"

:laugh:

Runner_mick

Yeah tracking mine make me feel more relaxed and then I actually think about what I stuff in my face, portion control and have become more accountable for bad choices.

Missylydia

I think it depends on the person and where they're at. The first time I tried my fitness pal it totally stressed me out, making me want to eat more. Then I came back to it when I was ready and meant business!

shellythehippie

Of course! lol Rules were made to be broken, and anytime you give yourself limitations you are going to be tempted to cheat, or break the "rules". It's just how we are, we're human. It's even easier to blame a website like MFP instead of yourself! I've done it many times

anneke123456

Cortisol is a stress hormone released in babies when left in distress this effects brain growth. It depends on how stressed the person is over dieting. I was much worse without this I would give up and start a diet every week only to fail. I have lost weight here and feel calmer and happier. I eat right now. This does depend on how you handle stress or what makes you stressed. I am more aware of what I eat now and cant believe how many cals was in things I used to eat.

infamousmk

And yet many people who log their food and exercise every. single. day. still manage to lose weight.

Qarol

If I read it on the internetz, it must be true...

shawnscott5

This actually made me realize how much crap I was eating. I actually look forward to planning my day, and not starting a diet every Monday. Now I think, "wow, I still can have some popcorn, or I can have 1 cookie" It has made me more accountable for my actions, be accountable to others and has made my family closer. I love MFP!!

kgraham101

A friend of mine and I started our weight lose journey together. I kept a home journal of everything I ate, she refused to keep one saying it would be to much work and stress. she lost 30 lbs from water retention the first month and has lost nothing else. I am down to 140 lbs and now can wear size 8 pants. :happy:

kennethmgreen

If you look long enough, you can find someone or something responsible for anything you disagree with or find displeasing - often with scientific studies to back it up.

Links are always good, by the way. Did you mean this article?

The 7 Laws of Leanness
http://health.yahoo.net/experts/eatthis/7-laws-leanness

Acg67

1) be skeptical of health and nutrition advice that you get from the MSM (includes yahoo health, msnbc etc)

here's Lyle Mcdonald talking about cortisol

What’s Going On: Let’s Talk About Cortisol
Cortisol is one of those hormones that I imagine everyone reading this has heard about and about which a lot of misinformation exists. Simply cortisol is a stress hormone, released by the body in response to nearly all kinds of stress. In the fitness/bodybuilding world, cortisol has gotten an almost exclusively negative reputation (cortisol is ‘bad’ in the way that testosterone and thyroid are ‘good’) although this is simplistically incorrect.
Rather, whether cortisol does good things or bad things in the body depends on how it’s released. Simply (and I’d simply, ha ha, refer folks to Robert Sapolsky’s amazing book Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers for a detailed look at this; I also talk about cortisol in The Stubborn Fat Solution), acute pulses of cortisol tend to do good things and be adaptive and chronic elevations in cortisol tend to be bad and be maladaptive.
For example, the morning cortisol pulse helps to promote fat mobilization. In contrast, a chronic elevation of cortisol (especially in the face of high insulin levels) tend to promote visceral fat accumulation. As a non-fitness related topic, acute pulses of cortisol tend to be good for memory (why we often remember stressful situations in such detail) while chronic elevations (as often seen in depression) make memory go down the toilet. And there are endless other examples of where acute cortisol pulses are good and chronic elevations are bad; again see Sapolsky’s book for details.
In any case, dieting in general is a stress. And of course training is a stress. And the more extreme you do of each, the more of a stress occurs. And I suspect that a lot of what is going on when folks try to combine excessive caloric deficits with massive amounts of activity is that cortisol just goes through the roof (there’s another issue I’ll come back to at the end that relates to this). Simply, you get these massive chronic elevations in cortisol levels.
Tangentially, this is also one reason I suspect that various types of cyclical dieting help with some of this issue. For at least brief periods, when calories are raised to maintenance or above, you break the diet/training induced elevations in cortisol. This of course assumes that the person isn’t mentally stressed to the nines by raising calories like that but I’m getting ahead of myself.
.
So Why is This Bad?
As noted above, chronic elevations in cortisol can cause a lot of bad things to happen. One of them is simply water retention and I’ve mentioned in previous articles that water retention can mask fat loss, sometimes for extremely extended periods. I talked about this in some detail in The LTDFLE and suspect that some of the ‘fat loss’ is actually just water loss when calories are raised and cortisol mediated water retention dissipates. Reducing total training (volume, frequency, intensity or some combination) does the same thing.
But that’s probably not all of what’s going on. Another effect of chronically elevated cortisol levels is leptin resistance in the brain. I’m not going to talk about leptin endlessly here again, you can read the Bodyweight Regulation Series for more information. When the normal leptin signal to the brain is blocked, a lot of things can go wrong metabolically and I suspect that this is part of the problem.
In this vein, although not necessarily related to cortisol per se, at least one study found that the addition of 6 hours per week of aerobic activity to a very low calorie diet (in this case a protein sparing modified fast) caused a larger decrement in metabolic rate than the diet alone. The body appears to monitor caloric availability (simplistically caloric intake minus output) and if it gets too low, bad things can happen.
This is why I so strongly suggested AGAINST the inclusion of much cardio in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook; it causes more harm than good. Invariably, the biggest source of failure on that plan is when people ignore my advice and try to do a bunch of cardio. And fat loss stops.
In any case, there are several different plausible mechanisms by which the combination of excessive caloric deficits an large amounts of activity can cause problems. Whether it’s simply cortisol related water retention, a drop in metabolic rate due to leptin resistance or something else, something is going on. From a more practical standpoint, for a lot of people, the combination simply doesn’t work. Mind you, some seem to get away with it but not all.
.
An Additional Variable
There is another variable that I have noticed over the years in looking at this issue. As odd as it sounds, it has to do with personality. In discussing this, for example, I’ve often noted that the people who seem to have the biggest issues with the whole lots of cardio/big caloric deficit tend to be a little bit ‘tightly wound’ (to put it politely). A bit less politely they are stress cases.
You can almost ‘hear’ the stress in their typing. Every post has lots of exclamation points and there is this undercurrent of “I MUST LOSE FAT NOW!!!!!!” in their posts. When fat loss stalls for a day, they freak out and want to cut calories or go add another hour of cardio. You can almost ‘see’ the tension in them as they sit hammering at the keyboard looking for solutions.
And this is an issue because these types of folks already over-secrete cortisol. As a true oddity, there is the issue of amenorrhea (loss of menstrual cycle). Typically it’s been thought to be related to body fat levels or caloric intake and this is a general cause. But there is often a type of amenorrhea seen in women without any of the normal predisposing factors. In this case, it’s all due to mental stress.
Basically, there is a subset of folks who are already high-level stress cases. They tend to be drawn to harder is better in the first place, tend to be resistant to change (like my client from my early 20′s) and their already high level of cortisol production is simply amplified by the combination of too much activity and too few calories. And suggestions to raise calories and/or reduce activity are invariably met by resistance (again, like my client from ages ago). What they really need is to just chill the hell out.

http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/why-big-caloric-deficits-and-lots-of-activity-can-hurt-fat-loss.html

megz85g

it does stress me out when i've planned all my food for the day and realise i have gone over my allowance and how many calories i need to burn at the gym that night to make it up, but at least i know and i'm doing something about it

audram420

wow, if logging calories stresses someone out THAT bad, then they don't have much else to stress about. Just my opinion.

anubis609

If I read it on the internetz, it must be true...

Yes. And reading this statement on the interwebz makes it absolute, now that there's a second opinion.

saintspoon

That could be true...

But you know what's really stressful?

- being a big fat *kitten*,
- feeling like a big fat *kitten*,
- trying to find clothes while a fat *kitten*,
- crying yourself to sleep cause you're a fat *kitten*,
- listening to other comment on how fat your fat *kitten* is,
- heart failure... that's stressful
- not fitting into the booth or theater chair...... also a lil stressful...

Yeah.. that's fricken stress. MFP logging?... not so much.

infamousmk

All joking aside, I will say that once upon a time I was on WW with my husband. I didn't want to do the program, I didn't enjoy working out with him, but he was forcing me in to it and well, it was just all around a bad deal. (the relationship was really bad anyway, so that made this whole thing worse) ... and I stressed the eff out every single day about every single thing I put in my mouth. I lost a ton of weight, but I gained every ounce of it back not long after he went off his WW kick. So I mean, I can see how if someone isn't enjoying their fitness journey, or they aren't doing it for the right reasons, they'll probably stress like whoa and make themselves all cortisol-y. But, really, for those of us doing this for the right reasons, for reals, we're not going to have to worry about this.

BigDaddyBRC

If I read it on the internetz, it must be true...

Yes. And reading this statement on the interwebz makes it absolute, now that there's a second opinion.

But but but but Google has it....that means it's TRUE. Please all mighty magic 8-ball google....give me the winning lotto numbers: search

fromaquasar

Wow imagine how many more that this 18 pounds I could have lost if I WASN'T using MFP :P

KazziaLlewellynn

I'm new to this, logging hasn't stressed me it. It makes me feel great to know I'm improving. Yes I take a second look at many of the things I eat. But I'm not limited. Any kind of work can stress you out. My job is at a daycare, it is stressful, and like was said about many other things are more stressful. I don't want the parents of "my kids" wondering if I'm capable of watching their children properly because of my weight. I'm a great child care provider, I love the kids I work with, I deserve to be healthy, and so far this is the best way I've found to do it, that is practical.

Neliel

Logging food is only stressful if you're making bad food choices. It is not a chore to write down what you are eating. Therefore, weight gain is due to bad food choices STILL.

shawnscott5

If you look long enough, you can find someone or something responsible for anything you disagree with or find displeasing - often with scientific studies to back it up.

Links are always good, by the way. Did you mean this article?

The 7 Laws of Leanness
http://health.yahoo.net/experts/eatthis/7-laws-leanness

Thanks for that link! I looked up the top 40 super foods and most of them we like!

sheenades0804

This actually made me realize how much crap I was eating. I actually look forward to planning my day, and not starting a diet every Monday. Now I think, "wow, I still can have some popcorn, or I can have 1 cookie" It has made me more accountable for my actions, be accountable to others and has made my family closer. I love MFP!!
[/quote

I agree with you on this...

Awake_Alive

That could be true...

But you know what's really stressful?

- being a big fat *kitten*,
- feeling like a big fat *kitten*,
- trying to find clothes while a fat *kitten*,
- crying yourself to sleep cause you're a fat *kitten*,
- listening to other comment on how fat your fat *kitten* is,
- heart failure... that's stressful
- not fitting into the booth or theater chair...... also a lil stressful...

Yeah.. that's fricken stress. MFP logging?... not so much.

^^^^^^^^^^ THIS!!!