“Eating less and exercising more” is shown, just like hundreds of studies before it, to be an utterly ineffective way to reverse obesity in any long-term or consistent manner.
It’s nothing new. The only thing that’s shocking is how resiliant people are in their desperate desire to believe otherwise.
(Via Teqjack.)
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Let’s be fair here. You are linking to one person’s spin on a medical study, a person who already has a preconcieved notion about all this. While that doesn’t necessarily prove that this position is wrong, it also doesn’t give a whole lot of evidence. The scientists who performed the study described the results rather differently.Â
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Uh, no, what she did was point out the actual data in the study and what it actually said.
What she noted, furthermore, is 100% consistent with every study that’s been done in the last 100 years on the same topic, so it shouldn’t be in any way surprising. What’s surprising is that people refuse to look clearly at the data presented and draw the obvious conclusion: these programs are of marginal utility if the goal is long-term sustained and substantial weight loss. The average person in this study is eating less than should normally be required for good health and is still gaining weight. That’s what normally happens in these diet & exercise programs.
Hah! I have to part ways with my dear friend, Dean on this one.
As Bob Dylan once said, you don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.
You don’t need a scientific study to tell you that eating less and exercising more is much healthier than the converse.
HB
Just because something is "intuitively obvious" doesn’t mean it’s true.
Unless the first law of thermodynamics has been repealed, eating less and exercising more *has* to make me lose weight. The energy balance demands it. If I burn more than I eat, my body has to burn *something* to make up the difference, just as surely as if I spend more than I make my bank account will get smaller.
Ryan
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Are the calories being consumed self-reported, or are the researchers actually weighing out all the portions? If the former is the case, then this study may just show that it’s very hard to stay sufficiently motivated to stick to a diet-and-exercise program over the long term.
The linked article only excerpts a chart of average weight maintainance. While it does look like the participants are regaining weight, it looks like the regain levels off below the initial weight. Only keeping 5-10 pounds of a 20 pound weight loss off long-term is discouraging, but there’s a meaningful distinction between 5-10 lbs and 0 lbs.
I’d also be interested in seeing not just an average weight trajectory, but a distribution of trajectories. If 50% of participants regained all or almost all the weight, 30% regained some of it, and 20% regained little or no weight, that would be constitant with both the graph from this study and my personal observations of friends who have lost significant amounts of weight. It would also indicate that long-term weight loss through diet and exercise, while difficult, is easier than quitting smoking.
….And then there’s this.
“Now it turns out that subcutaneous fat — fat found just under the skin — may be actively protecting people from metabolic disease.”
Eating less and exercising a little more has always worked for me. When my kids were little, I stayed home, baked a lot and got fat. I didn’t lose the weight until I got out of the house and got out of the habit of eating when i was bored. That meant that I had to put up with being hungry for a while.
When I’m home and within reach of snacks, I get fat. When I go out and when I’m too busy to overeat, I lose the weight. Since I haven’t regained the weight I lost many years ago, empirically I’d guess the study is bogus.
Fssssht. It’s really quite amazing how often I say the same things only to have people ignore them completely; people continue with their absolute conviction that a treatment program that has been shown by thousands of studies over multiple generations not to work, has to work in their opinion because hey, the laws of thermodynamics say it has to work. Provide links, provide references, explain the reasoning, and it just bounces off people.
If I had a treatment for malaria that everybody said would fix malaria, and I could show you that the long-term success rate is less than 1%, you would probably question whether the treatment for malaria was really effective. What it is about obesity that makes people throw out this reasoning I have no idea.
I have said all of this many times before, and I’ll no doubt have to say it many more times in the future, but here it is:
1) Thermodynamics is about as important to this discussion as it is to the discussion of what it takes to move a vehicle. It matters, but it’s secondary at best.
2) Almost any human being who is relatively young and healthy can be trained to run at 15 miles per hour. The laws of thermodynamics suggest that it should be possible for them to run at that speed indefinitely so long as they are fed and watered constantly while doing so. Right? So long as you’ve got fuel and fluid, is there any reason you should not be able to run at 15 miles per hour 16 hours per day, 7 days per week? Why not? The laws of themodynamics prove that this is completely possible, don’t they?
3) Diet and exercise have been shown through thousands of studies to be very effective for improving health, for slowing down weight gain, and for removing moderate amounts of overweight, with a range of 5 to 20 pounds or so being entirely reasonable. Beyond that, no study–not one, not ever, in over a century of research–has been shown to be effective for anything more than that, and most studies strongly suggest that efforts to remove more weight than that will tend to cause long-term weight gain.
Those are the facts. You do with those facts what you want, I guess. But you might want to ask yourself why Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and your local gym all absolutely refuse to provide any figures on what the long-term success rate is for their clients, and instead, if they provide anything at all, give you weasel-worded statistics like “a majority (i.e at least 50.1%) of our clients who stuck with the program (i.e. weren’t so miserable or frustrated they dropped out) kept a significant amount of weight off (“significant” defined as at least a pound or two buried in the fine print).”
You might wonder why people automatically assume that the real problem is lack of discipline on the part of those seeking treatment, rather than asking whether the treatment regimen itself is really the problem.
Dean, only a thoroughly modern person could ever make such an argument. We’ve lived for long without plagues or famine, we’ve kind of forgotten how these things work. When you don’t get enough to eat, you get thinner, and thinner, and thinner. That’s just the way it works.
If eating less isn’t causing one to lose weight, one needs to eat even less. The reason diets don’t work is, no one likes to inflict discomfort on oneself. No one wants to feel dizzy when they stand up, no one wants to sit through a meeting with their stomach constantly growling, so we (and our doctors, and Jenny Craig) try to make the process as painless as possible. But you can’t lose weight without putting up with being hungry, and you can’t keep it off without passing up a lot of tempting food.
Mary, you’re correct that modernity is part of the problem with people’s inability to see the problem; we see people being fatter today, and we therefore assume that it’s something to do with laziness, lack of discipline, etc, because hey any moron can see that if you eat less you lose weight.
The real problem is that this is childishly simple reasoning. Your fat cells are not gas tanks that fill up when you eat and get emptied as you move. Even if they did work that simply, it would be hazardous to assume you could control your weight by simple calories in/calories out measuring, because there are multiple complicating factors.
The fact of the matter is that underfeeding causes bad health. It causes negative physical and mental symptoms consistent with starvation. You get these symptoms whether you’re overweight or not. There is substantial evidence, indeed, that fat people can actually pretty much starve, with all the same symptoms that a famine victim or a prisoner in a concentration camp goes through, all while swimming in their own fat.
Once again, these are facts. You can do with those what you want, but it appears to me that what most people want to do with them is ignore them, despite the overwhelming evidence of the threat it offers to the health and well-being of people with weight problems.
Ok… So let me get this straight.
In Dean’s World HIV doesn’t cause AIDS and good diet doesn’t cause weight loss. Hmm. Is Dean’s World also Bizzaro World?
Look, I am obese. I’ve been following a diet and exercise plan for the past few weeks, and it is working. However, the reason I’m obese is simple: I ate too much and I did too little.
Is there a hereditary factor in there? Sure. But it’s also a lot about personal responsibility. Once I lose the weight, will I gain some of it back? Probably. But, Dean, it is impossible for my body to "want" to weigh 340 lbs.
Instead — with my frame and height — my ideal weight is probably more around 200 lbs. I recognized that I’ll never be considered thin, and trying to get below 200 lbs would be fruitless and probably unhealthy.
But I am not supposed to be this heavy. Thank God I’m still pretty young and haven’t done too much damage yet.
It sounds more like you want a good excuse, Dean. Personally, I’m done with excuses. But it’s your life.
Dean didn’t say HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, although he has reasons to suspect it doesn’t work as advertised. In any case, it’s totally irrelevant to this discussion, especially since the doubts about HIV are based on questioning the establishment research, whereas the doubts about weight loss diets are based entirely on what the mainstream research clearly and unambiguously shows.
Also, Dean will give Jesse $100 in cash if Jesse will show where Dean ever said that diets don’t cause weight loss. Indeed, Dean has repeatedly and without fail stated that dietary changes can result in weight loss. So Dean would appreciate a retraction and apology if Jesse can’t collect that cash.
As for the rest: if the mainstream dietary research is accurate, Jesse, you will of course lose weight on your current program. But the odds that you will ever reduce down to non-obese status and stay there long term are less than 1%. You may, if you wish, continue to tell yourself that it’s purely a matter of personal responsibility. In which case, 5 years from now you’ll probably respect yourself even less than you do now, and will probably be even fatter than you are now. My telling you this will probably also cause you to believe that I’m insulting you, even though I am merely telling you what the vast bulk of all the scientific literature on the subject has shown for generations. [shrug]
This is interesting. I partially agree, but I’m currently trying to lose weight and have lost about 50 pounds in the last year by "eating less and exercising more". I’m not sure whether I’ll keep the weight off, but I do know that I’ll have to keep this up forever; it isn’t a one-off program that ends when I get to a magic goal.
For me, I frankly don’t want to go the route of my mom, who’s suffering from complications from diabetes and weighing 300+ pounds.
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Losing 50 pounds with a year of effort is quite good. It’s also probably the most responsible way to do it, as a weight loss of a pound a week will avoid most of the worst negative health effects and risks of severe rebound.
Since I don’t know how much of your overweight the 50 pounds amounts to–whether you only have 10 more pounds to lose or have 200 more pounds to lose–it’s hard to predict the exact result. But, most likely, if after losing 50 pounds in a year you are still obese, then, odds are good that you will soon hit a pleateu below which you cannot consistently fall, and if you try too hard you will not only damage your health but you may find that you "fall off the wagon" and gain all that weight and more back at a frightening clip.
Something like this, indeed, may have been what happened to your mother. It’s sadly common with very overweight people, and women seem to be especially vulnerable to it (although these days men are catching up fast).
In short: be careful, and make your goals realistic, and look carefully at what the research actually shows.
Also, don’t be afraid to seek medical help, but make sure any physician you see is someone who specializes, or at least does heavy business in, chronically obese people. Better yet, see an endocrinologist who regularly treats the obese. Don’t be afraid to accept medication or even surgery if (like a majority of fat people) you find you can’t get to a healthy weight and stay there without constant discomfort.
Obesity can and will kill most who have it. It’s really not funny.
I don’t understand the graph. It seems to indcate the weight loss, with 8.8 lbs over 6 months being the baseline for the study. I’m not sure why 8 lbs is used; I typically gain and lose 8 lbs over a years time at least once — slightly overweight, definitely not obese — and I could be one of the illustrated failures. I also note the weight gains seem to be plateauing below the starting wieghts. That’s a good thing.
I do understand the how the conclusion relates to the data — not the conclusion drawn by Dean — that outside coacing doesn’t seem to make any more difference than self-motivation, not sure about the methods.
IMHO: Most (not all) obesity has an organism specific biological component, genetics or metabolism. Similar to a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. Since abstinence from food is not an option, obesity has to be managed.Â
     I have high blood pressure & high chloresterol (genetic), and I try to manage it by diet, exercise, and medication. I did the diet & exercise first for years; when that was no longer adequate, I stepped it up to meds. If I don’t manage it, I will probably miss something important, like grandchildren.Â
     If support or counseling helps someone manage long term weight issues, then they ought to have the option and not be pressured by someone who "knows" that it don’t work (what fraction of 12 steppers fall down?).
OK, let’s look at the graph’s numbers. Subjects who stayed with the program for 30 months (2.5 years) initially lost about 9 kilos (about 20 pounds). At the end of 30 months, those who were still in the program had gained back over half of it, so were down only about 3 kilos (about 6 pounds) from where they started.
So. A calorie-restricted diet and exercise program combined with regular coaching and counseling will, with about two years effort, produce an average weight loss of about 6 pounds, for those who stick with the program.
Tell me: do you know any fat people who would be thrilled to keep off 6 pounds as a reward for two and a half years of diligent effort?
By the way, an average maintenance weight loss of 6 pounds looks an awful lot like that 5 to 20 pounds figure that I’ve repeatedly said that diet and exercise programs generally produce, doesn’t it?
(I really wonder why it is that people keep suggesting I’ve said things I didn’t say, and arguing with assertions I didn’t make.)
Its possible that the participants in the study who rebounded in weight yet reported that they were maintaining the regimen of excercize and diet, were cheating. How can the study be scientific if it has no measurement, only relying on subject anecdote?
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This is a good question, however, it points to the problem with all research on diet, not just obesity but ANYTHING involving human diet over the long haul: unless you have simply ridiculous amounts of money, there is no way to conduct the research in a fully controlled environment. The most elaborate experiments I’ve read about involve locking people up in wards where their intake is rigorously controlled and even those can only last a few weeks. I read about one experiment where they managed to keep subjects cooped up for a month of careful observation, and then actually paid someone to stay with them and observe them 24/7 for a full year, but you can imagine just how expensive that would be, and even still wouldn’t be fully controllable because now you have to trust the subject and the observer.
However, Dr. Poonawalla, I put it to you that, given that there have literally been hundreds and hundreds of studies on caloric restriction+exercise+regular counseling+coaching+peer support groups, and that all of them come to the same conclusion (that these are useful for moderate amounts of weight loss and for preventing weight gain, but not of any real use in eliminating obesity) that it’s rather quixotic to suggest that there must be some way to prove what none of these studies has ever succeeding in doing, because after all thermodynamics "must" prove that calories in + calories out are the most important determining factor and obese people could lose all that weight if they really wanted to.
I mean, wouldn’t you think at least one of the studies, or at least one of the companies offering weight loss products, would have come up with something that worked consistently by now, and in a reproducible fashion? Even if it only worked on the minority, if they could show even a 10% success rate they’d be doing better than most (if “success” is defined as an obese subject becoming non-obese and maintaining that for years without massive rebound.)
I put it to you that, based on the evidence, we have no choice but to conclude either that 99% of chronically fat people are weak-willed and self-indulgent, or, these programs are of only marginal utility, producing small amounts of weight loss long-term, and that other things need to be tried.
And you know what? That’s actually the consensus opinion of obesity researchers. That’s the funny part: I’m not actually trying to buck the scientific establishment on this one. What I’m telling you is the mainline, consensus view of professional obesity researchers, and is what the peer reviewed literature overwhelmingly shows to be true.
Diet and exercise will help you lose a little weight. It will help prevent you from getting fatter. That’s all these things will do for most people.
(Note: There is an exception for people who, during unusual periods of high stress, balloon up quickly. Those folks usually lose the weight pretty quickly, although even there the results are confounding, since they tend to take it off as soon as the stress is reduced and they go back to their normal eating and activity patterns.)
I’ve read a fair amount on the subject, and am doing this as a sort of personal experiment as much as anything. For me, the emphasis is more on exercise than diet; my impression is that exercise is probably more important than diet, and the harder one to maintain, since it requires an active change in one’s life organization versus dieting, which is largely about _not_ doing something.
Also, I won’t ever presume to be a model for anything; I’m richer than most (I bought a $4000 crosstrainer for use at home), I work from home 60% of the time, and my wife is also involved with the "program".
(Note on home gym equipment: if you’re heavy, you’ll need $3K+ machines that occasionally need expensive maintenance. Don’t bother with cheap home junk from Sears, etc. If you can’t afford one, emphasize long walks…)
All of the above are helping hugely; when I hit a lazy bit, my wife kicks me onto the machine, and I do the same for her. Working from home means I can do my workout in the middle of the day, and having the x-trainer at home means the workout can be far more flexibly timed than if I was going to a gym (which I was for several years). (We also walk a lot in addition to the x-trainer…)
My guess is the risk for my strategy is getting injured and "falling off the cart" that way. I’ve pretty much gotten past the point where I want to eat fast food or junk food, but I still need to keep up the exercise.
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Dean,
I think I have to object to the distance-runner analogy. Sure, Thermo 1 says that it should be possible to run at 15 mph forever—but that doesn’t mean no other law of nature says it shouldn’t.
There’s nothing in the law of gravity that says a piece of paper dropped from the top of the Empire State Building shouldn’t just keep accelerating until it hits the sidewalk with a concrete-cracking thud. But it doesn’t, because of other laws of nature that do get in the way. Similarly, although thermodynamics doesn’t inhibit our running at 15 mph forever, biology does, and that’s an unrelated matter.
What I’m getting at is that one law of physics that says something shouldn’t be possible is enough to disprove a theory that depends on it. But one law of physics that says something should be possible is not sufficient to prove that theory. (It’s the “one bad apple spoils the bunch” model, rather than the “diamond in the rough” model.) And it’s not thermodynamically possible to take in fewer calories than you burn and not lose weight. Saying that thermodynamics doesn’t interfere with your ability to run at 15 mph forever is a red herring and irrelevant, unless your goal is to discredit Thermo 1 altogether as a going theory.
(For the record: I lost about 65 pounds in one year, dropping from 235 to 170-ish, as a result of eating less and exercising more. As you can see from my graph, it’s been creeping up lately, largely because I moved across country right at the low point of the graph—the fluctuations there are due to many rapid periods of several days of erratic sleeping and eating schedules as I flew back and forth from coast to coast—and since then I’ve been, er, eating more and exercising less. But I’m confident I can keep it together as long as I develop a good routine.)
Point of Parliamentary Procedure!!!!
I am a simple man. I like Occam’s Razor. I still say most fat people are fat because they eat a lot of double-cheesburgers, pepperoni pizzas and chocolate pies.
And, moreover, I do not exclude myself from this dilemma of modern living. I could stand to lose 10-15 pounds.
So there. Those my principles. As Groucho once said, if you don’t like, I have others:)
HB
Here’s the problem with losing weight by eating less and exercising more: if, the minute your attention wanders, you start gaining it back, in what sense can that advice be said to work?
Your attention will wander. You will get tired of eating so little. You will get tired of doing the elliptical for two hours a day. You will gain a few pounds back and you will say, oh well, it’s only five pounds, I’ll just lose it again. But then you will be in the habit of not paying attention to your weight again, because it’s not natural to have to do so any more than it’s natural to think about every breath you take, and before you know it you’ll have a lot more than five pounds to worry about.
That’s how it goes. If it doesn’t go that way for you, that’s great, but it means I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about people with actual weight problems, people for whom losing weight is actually hard.
Your body should regulate its own weight, not need to be beaten into submission by "willpower." Naturally-thin people don’t need to think about what or how much to eat; that’s why they’re naturally thin! ("Eat when you’re hungry, and stop when you’re not," one helpfully told me, as if that wasn’t exactly how I got a hundred extra pounds loaded onto me.) So why are fat people expected to be able to exert constant conscious control over their diet?
The real, fundamental question is, why isn’t a morbidly obese person’s body regulating its weight like it’s supposed to? And how do we fix it without requiring unsustainable diet and lifestyle changes? (If 90+% of people who try them can’t sustain them, they are by definition unsustainable, no matter how sustainable they may seem in theory.)
Answer that question, and you will be able to make yourself rich beyond your wildest dreams. If that’s what you’re into.
Actually, there are plenty of factors other than exercise and calories that contribute to overweight/obesity.
Age is one in that the older one gets, lower caloric requirements may set itself at a lower level to the degree than even reducing calories but not at the level the body thinks it requires causes increased weight.
Stress is another. 7-11 is another with the plethora of candy, soda and all the other high cal junk food they sell. It is a known fact that people that drink a plentitude of phosphate sodas–coke-pepsi etc. tend to much greater obesity not to mention doritos, tortillas , and potato chips. I think I forgot couch potatoes and actually eating non processed foods like fruit and vegetables and life style.
Then there are environmental concerns that factor into the weight-gain-loss equation.
1. Sleep deprivation. Studies show that not getting enough sleep increases hunger and appetite and may cause hormonal changes that lead to weight gain.
2. Pollution. Environmental toxins like PCBs can disrupt the normal activity of hormones that regulate fat metabolism.
3. Air conditioning and central heating. We spend more and more of our lives in temperature-controlled environments, which means we need to burn fewer calories to regulate our body’s thermostat.
4. Decreased smoking. Studies show that smokers weight less than nonsmokers and that those who quit typically gain weight. This is of course not to say that smoking is a good weight-loss strategy.
5. Drug side effects. A whole raft of commonly used prescription drugs – antidepressents, contraceptives, blood pressure and diabetes medicines, antihistamines, protease inhibitors, mood stabilizers – cause people to gain weight and in some cases, a lot of weight.
6. Later-in-life pregnancies. Older mothers are more likely than young mothers to have overweight or obese children.
7. Societal changes. As our population ages and our ethnic mix gets shuffled, groups with a higher prevalence of obesity are becoming larger segments of our population.
8. Birds of a feather. Humans with similar body types tend to mate, thus passing along genes that contribute to obesity.
9. Genetic causes. Environmentally caused weight gain in earlier generations can become embedded in genes that then get passed to future generations.
10. Fertility factors. Reubenesque women tend to be more fertile than their Twiggy counterparts, meaning that future generations stand a better chance of inheriting zaftig genes.
In my view it is rather simplistic to presume one can do a long term med. research on exercise vs diet and come to a conclusion that—blah-blah-blah—I’ve studied a lot of ink and now my ego is fully satisfied that most of ya’all are wrong on "caloric restriction
+exercise+regular counseling+coaching+peer support groups" —blah-blah-blah.
The question really is: if you want to lose weight to improve your health, how do you begin, not whether–well studies show its all a failure so why begin ?
Once upon a time, I was getting to be a fat slob. That time was the winter of 1995-1996. It was a result to little or no physical exercise over the 40 years since I had returned from active duty in the US Army at age 21.
Talking all this over with my wife, we both joined the Market Square Fitness Center on Madison’s west side. A few years on, it was bought out by the Princeton Club. When I started exercizing, my weight hovered around 220 lbs. But I had a memory of a time some 11 years earlier when IÂ had weighed 190Â lbs. So my first goal was to get rid of the intervening 30 lbs.
I did just that. Since then, I always have been less than 200 lbs, and hovering between 176 and 185 most of the time. Right now I weigh about 182-184. I expect to drop below 180 some time this summer.
How do I do this? A combination of physical exercise and food intake control.
Anyway, all this works for me. Doesn’t work for you? Then that’s your tough luck. Stay fat.
Â
As for all these fancy studies cited here — which fat slobs buy into because rationalizing is less strenuous than physical exercize and less difficult than dieting — and park them somewhere where the sun never shines.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WIÂ
God, for once I agree with Arnold.
Maybe I am wrong. :-\
Does calling people "fat slobs" result in them losing weight? Not in my experience, though I admit there have been few clinical trials.
Brian: What is your objection? Everything you said there is support for what I’m saying.
Everyone else: I’m amused to see that Arnold thinks that his losing 30 pounds proves something, when in fact that’s the sort of moderate weight loss that can reasonably be expected from moderate dietary change and regular exercise.
I’m also amused that, as per usual, he chooses to judge the character of the medical problem and the supposed motivations of those who are struggling, rather than looking at the actual evidence. Hey, he dropped 20-30 pounds, so anyone with 10o pounds to lose should be able to do it as easy as him!
It’s amusing how often I say you can lose moderate amounts of weight this way, only to have people keep pointing to moderate weight losses like that as "proof" of something.
As for the thermodynamic argument that if you burn more calories than you consume you will lose weight: no one said otherwise, but it’s childishly naive reasoning. The body is a complex system; it can opt to burn your carb stores before cracking into your fat cells; it can opt to burn muscle tissue and other things before cracking into your fat cells, it can lower your metabolism, drop your body temperature, and many other things to avoid burning your fat stores.
Indeed, you can basically starve a fat person with dangerously low amounts of food, and all that’ll
happen is that the body will cling fiercely to the fat and burn other body tissues instead.
The body is a complex system, and everyone’s is different. It’s ridiculous that people think of fat cells as little gas tanks that fill up when you eat and empty out when you move.
Aw what the hell, I must be wrong. Evidence be damned!
My objection was just that your intentionally facetious "So long as you’ve got fuel and fluid, is there any reason you should not be able to run at 15 miles per hour 16 hours per day, 7 days per week? Why not? The laws of themodynamics prove that this is completely possible, don’t they?" seems to indicate that you’re downplaying the role of thermodynamics in this argument. All I’m saying is that while the sarcasm may well be warranted in the case you cite, it’s not warranted to dismiss thermodynamic arguments that make unrelated claims, such as that it’s not possible to not lose weight by sustaining a calorie deficit.
I’m not saying I disagree with you in your broader argument. I also agree with Jerry’s point—if I don’t keep up this routine and concentrate 24/7, I do gain weight, and that’s clearly support for your thesis. All I’m saying is that the distance-runner argument you make kinda detracts from the strength of the rhetorical position you take, in my opinion.
The role of thermodynamics in obesity treatment is grossly overstated. That’s the entire frickin’ point, Brian. It is an almost completely worthless statement to assert that "if you eat less and exercise more, you WILL lose weight," especially when I have already said so many times that this is true but irrelevant. Because it is true and it is irrelevant.
Thermodynamics is the LEAST important factor here, and the whole point of the "run 15 miles per hour all day every day" example is to point out how absurd the whole "all you need to do is eat less and exercise more" theory of how to cure obesity. Because it is a line of bullshit. Proven to be bullshit by decades of hard science and endless examples in clinical practice.
In the list of all the factors that lead to obesity and how to cure it, thermodynamics would rate somewhere around 10th, right around the same place it would be in calculating how far and fast a runner could run.
I played collegiate football at 300lbs (offensive tackle and I’m 6′ 3"). After college, shot up to 400lbs in a 3 year period. I’ve never been a big soda drinker or big "sweets" eater. Nevertheless, I noticed that my lifestyle just became more sedentary. I didn’t change my diet, I just changed my activity level. I lost the 100lbs plus and kept it off by maintaining my activity level. Not eating less. I’ve now loss another 20 so I’m at a comfortable 280 at 6′ 3" and I feel damn good. So in my case, eating less wasn’t the trick. Moving myself more did the trick.
Dean,
I don’t get your point. The best and safest way for obese people to lose weight and keep it off is through dieting and exercise.
The fact that the vast majority of people cannot stick to a diet and exercise regime does not mean that they aren’t effective. It merely shows human nature, and more specifically human behavior in a wealthy, developed western country with abundant food.
Losing weight is hard, and keeping it off is harder, especially if you have 100 or more pounds to lose. That is why so few people can do it. It’s miserable and takes a very long time.
Yes, that huge numbers of people lack the discipline to do it. It’s harder than kicking heroin. But it’s nobody’s fault but their own. The kind of people who gain tremendous amounts of weight have weak self-discipline to begin with.
Also, the notion that a hypocaloric diet (of, say, 1500 calories) for obese people is somehow harmful to their health is preposterous. If you eat healthy (i.e. mostly vegetables, fruit and lean meat or fish) you can easily fulfill your nutritional requirements.
As for metabolic slowing, burning muscle instead of fat, and so on, there are plenty of ways to deal with those problems. Enough protein and strength training will preserve muscle even on very low calorie diets. And the metabolic slowdown can be managed by eating at or above maintenance for a couple meals a week.
The percentage of people who truly cannot keep the weight off is very, very small. There is a tiny group of very unlucky people who will gain weight on 1200 calories a day, or whatever. But the vast majority of people who are fat just don’t have the tenacity to stick with diets in the long term.
Virtually all of this "99%" group can keep the weight off. But they two very important things 1) strong willpower and 2) the ability to know what real dieting is.
Real dieting is counting calories, eating very healthy, doing cardio and strength training regularly, and giving yourself a break once in awhile.
Yeah, life sucks.
Edgar: Basically, you’re making a bunch of assertions without any scientific basis or fact, just personal conviction. I’m familiar with every one of those assertions, all of which used to come out of my mouth too when I was ignorant on the subject.
The evidence is overwhelming that fat people do not get that way voluntarily, and that attempts to lose the weight actually cause weight gain if they’re more than moderate and realistic–and moderate and realistic for the overwhelming number of people with the problem is that they can lose some weight responsibly, they can keep from getting enormously fatter, but it is generally going to be impossible to get down to the so-called perfect body fat percentage and they will never get there or stay there, and if they try too hard they’ll probably wind up fatter than before. Indeed, there’s substantial evidence that the most frequent cause of morbid obesity is chronic dieting.
The only real exceptions appear to be people who’ve only recently gained a lot of weight due to some stress factor, and even there the evidence suggests that they’ll tend to go back to their normal weight better without any strenuous diet or unusual increase in activity levels (much like Tyrone experienced, above). There’s more to this than willpower and thermodynamics–indeed, virtually all the evidence suggests that thermodynamics and willpower are among the least important things in this entire discussion. Ditto so-called “healthy habits.”
Basically, you’re making a bunch of assertions without any scientific basis or fact, just personal conviction.
Wrong. There are a great number of studies that show when calories are strictly controlled (i.e. not self-reported) people lose weight. If they had calories strictly controlled for the rest of their lives, they would stay lean.
The evidence is overwhelming that fat people do not get that way voluntarily
Well, of course. Nobody wants to get fat.
attempts to lose the weight actually cause weight gain…they can keep from getting enormously fatter, but it is generally going to be impossible to get down to the so-called perfect body fat percentage
The reason people regain the weight (and then some) is because dieting is so miserable and they’re tired of feeling deprived. Like I said, the trick is to eat at maintenance occasionally and not go overboard. Lose the weight gradually.
As for you second point: it is possible for almost anyone to get a "perfect" body fat percentage, but it can be very hard for certain people (and virtually impossible in an extremely small subset of the obese population).
All the evidence suggests that thermodynamics and willpower are among the least important things in this entire discussion. Ditto so-called “healthy habits.â€
To answer this one, I’ll quote someone far more knowlegable than I – Lyle McDonald:
"…the fundamental rules of thermodynamics which apply to everybody and everything. Given 100 calories, the most you can store is 100 calories. Sure, one person may only store 75, while another stores all 100, but 100 is still the maximum. It’s a physiological impossibility because you can’t make something out of nothing. There’s lots of things like this, that you simply can’t do. You can’t make gold out of lead, you can’t get a stripper to work on credit, and you can’t store 500 calories if you only ate 300.
"So when a 300 pound individual, who probably has a maintenance intake of 4000+ calories, says that they gained weight on 1400 calories I have to be very leery of how true that is. Either they are that 1 in 100,000 person with a metabolic rate below 1400 at that bodyweight (who has never been found to exist in any study on the topic over a span of about 5+ decades), or they aren’t being accurate in how much food they are eating or how many calories they are burning each day. I’m not saying that they are deliberately lying, either, I want to make that very clear. They are just as bad as everybody else at estimating their caloric intake and expenditure. Which is apparently pretty bad."
Now of course hunger has a lot to do with it. Obese people have much harsher cravings than their leaner counterparts. That’s why eating healthy is so crucial. When I diet I cut out starches. I fill the void with vegetables, of which you can eat tons.
Let’s say I had to eat 1500 calories a day for the rest of my life. Well, that ain’t so bad. A 500 calorie meal could be a) a huge bowl of oatmeal b) half a pound of seasoned fish with a huge plate of broccoli and cauliflower or c) a massive sandwich with a grilled 6 oz chicken breast, lettuce, tomato and mayo.
Could you survive on that until you got down to a normal weight? Sure. You’ll crave junk food, but you won’t starve.
Plus a good combination of strength training and cardio will let you eat more. There’s ample research that proves that weight training, cardio and a good diet will keep the weight off if followed consistently.
The trick is to one thing at a time. People get too extreme and fuck everything up.
Dean,
(1) if you burn more calories than you injest, you will lose weight
(2) if you increase your physical activity and keep the caloric intake the same, you will lose weight.
So says the Center for Disease Control (http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/recommendations.htm) and the Surgeon General (http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/topics/obesity/calltoaction/fact_whatcanyoudo.htm), and the National Institute of Health (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/obesity.html).Â
In plain English, NIH via Medline: "Obesity occurs over time when you eat more calories than you use."
I don’t have a vested interest one way or the other, I don’t do research in obesity, and I don’t fund research in obesity.Â
I suppose the government could be lying to us…
Dean,
The Center for Disease Control , http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity/index.htm
The National Institutes of Health, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/obesity.html and the Surgeon General http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/topics/obesity/index.htm claim that "Obesity occurs over time when you eat more calories than you use."
They all "claim" that if you consume fewer calories than you use, you will lose weight. They all claim exercise burns more calories.
I do not study obesity, I do not fund studies in obesity, I am not obese, I frankly have no vested interest in the cause and cure for obesity. I have a hard time dismissing the conclusions of the various organizations that study and fund studies of obesity.Â
However, I am now prepared to believe there is a massive conspiracy of the government organizations responsible for the health of the nation based on recent experience in global warming. And I am watching for the black helicopters.
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