Why What Used to Work…Doesn’t Anymore

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as many of my clients come to sessions with frustrations around this very concept.

Why is it that something can work SO well for us for a period of time…and then suddenly it doesn’t seem to work the same way anymore?

Maybe you changed the way you eat and for months (or years) you felt great. You were satisfied, your energy was good, maybe your body changed in ways you wanted it to.

Maybe you started exercising and initially saw all kinds of changes in your strength, endurance or body composition.

Maybe you started a medication like a GLP-1 and at first thought, holy crap, is this what it feels like to not think about food all the time? And then a year or two later, hunger is back to being loud again, food sounds good again, and you can eat more than you could in the beginning.

And naturally everyone thinks, whatever I was doing has suddenly stopped working.

But did it? Maybe. Sometimes things do, in fact, need to “be fixed.” But, I think there’s another piece of this that we don’t talk about enough. Which is, our bodies adapt.

We sometimes treat our bodies like they are a math equation. If I do X and get Y, then continuing to do X should continue to give me Y.  The problem is, humans don’t really work that way.  Our bodies are constantly adjusting to what we ask of them.

Think about exercise for a minute. If you’ve never strength trained before and start lifting weights, you’ll probably get stronger pretty quickly. But you can’t do the exact same workout with the exact same weights forever and expect your strength to keep increasing at the same rate.

Your body gets better at it. It adapts to what you are asking it to do. This is a GOOD thing.

The same thing can happen with food, appetite and our weight.  Let’s say you start eating more protein and fiber, cooking more meals at home, eating more consistently throughout the day and paying attention to hunger and fullness.  At first the difference might feel huge.

Maybe you aren’t starving at 4pm anymore. It feels like cravings have settled down. Maybe you stop feeling like you need something sweet every night before bed. Maybe you even lose some weight.  Eventually though, that way of eating just becomes…how you eat.

You don’t necessarily continue to see dramatic results every month from continuing to eat vegetables and protein.  That doesn’t mean vegetables and protein “stopped working.”  It’s just that they’re just part of your baseline now.

About weight loss

This is where things get especially interesting (and frustrating) for so many of us.

When we lose weight, our body changes. A smaller body generally needs less energy (calories) than a larger one. Our hunger hormones change, energy expenditure can change and the body usually becomes more efficient.  Basically, the environment in which your original strategy worked is no longer exactly the same environment.  You changed the system.

So, it makes sense that the same input might not keep producing the exact same output forever.  This is one reason I really dislike the idea that if someone stops losing weight, the obvious answer is always to eat less and exercise more.  Sometimes that may be appropriate, but often it absolutely isn’t.

GLP-1s are another really interesting example

I hear clients describe the beginning of these medications as almost shocking.  They get full very quickly. Their hunger feels dramatically different. Everyone is talking about “food noise” getting quieter. Sometimes foods they used to love are no longer appealing.  Then months or years later they start noticing hunger again.

This always scares the bejeezus out of people. Is the medication not working anymore?  Not necessarily.  There’s a difference between a medication no longer having an effect and not experiencing the dramatic effect you experienced when you first started it.

Normal hunger coming back isn't automatically a bad thing.

Our appetite isn’t controlled by just one hormone or one medication. It’s actually an incredibly complicated conversation happening between our brain, gut, hormones, nervous system, environment, sleep, stress, activity and probably a bunch of other things we’re still figuring out.

The body is resilient. It’s always responding and adjusting.  It’s always trying to find some version of balance.

And then, of course, life changes too

This is something I think is especially important in midlife.  The body you have today isn't exactly the body you had five or ten years ago. If it feels like your body has changed, it’s because it has. It’s supposed to.

Our hormones are constantly changing (much like a roller coaster ride). Our muscle mass can change, for better or worse. Sleep patterns change. Stress comes and goes. Our schedules change. Our responsibilities change. Sometimes medications change. Our activity changes.

So when someone tells me, “But this always worked for me before.” Trust me, I believe them.  It probably DID, but that doesn't necessarily mean doing more of it is the answer now. I think this is where we can get ourselves into trouble and start to spiral.

When something stops producing the result it once did, we immediately panic and think we need to double down. We try to eat less, exercise harder, cut something else out, add another supplement, increase the dose, make more rules, try harder.  But maybe instead of immediately asking, “How do I make this work again?”we could ask,“What changed?”:

What does my body need now? Could I need more food?  Is it time to change how I’m moving my body? Maybe you need to build muscle, or need more sleep.  Maybe your medication needs to be reassessed with your provider. Maybe your expectations need to change.

Maybe nothing needs to change and your body is simply settling into a new place.

I think sometimes we forget that health isn't something we finally figure out and then execute perfectly for the rest of our lives.  It’s a practice.

When we pay attention to our body, we learn, we can adjust. We can return to the basics when things seem crazy and then we keep on going.  Because our goal was never to find the perfect thing that works forever.  The goal is learning how to take care of ourselves as our bodies (and our lives) continue to change.

Practice Health | Practice Life