Legitimate Research or A Cop Out?

enterdanger

Interesting article in the LA Times today about how CICO has a very low success rate over long times. Viewing the full article was free, but I had to register as a user. Here is the Times take on it. A link to the full study is also in there.

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-eat-less-more-obesity-20150212-story.html

While I agree that the prevailing attitude of "You just need to move more" is not terribly helpful to obese individuals I think the attitude expressed, especially in the Times summary, is dangerous. To me it sounds like, "Hey, now that you've been a fattie for some time, it's impossible to lose weight, so go eat that twinkie."

You decide.

cwolfman13

All diets have a low success rate long term. People generally fail to actually establish a new lifestyle...people talk a good talk about it, but most of the time they don't even understand what it really means.

There are *kitten* tons of people right here on MFP who think logging and keeping a diary is the "lifestyle"...it's not...it's just a tool to help train you to live a healthier lifestyle...but that is lost on most...and thus, as with any diet, there's only about a 5% long term success rate. For most people, keeping a diary and counting calories is not sustainable into perpetuity...it isn't a lifestyle, it's just a tool. Adopting healthy habits and living a healthful life is a lifestyle.

Jolinia

I look at it this way: If I fail long term, at least I bought myself a few more years of health and life. Because if I hadn't reversed course on the scale, I'd probably be bed-bound by now.

Jolinia

herrspoons wrote: »

CICO is sound. People fail, not valid equations.

Which doesn't make this untrue:

"They are constantly at war with their bodies' efforts to return to their highest sustained weight."

TavistockToad

cwolfman13 wrote: »

All diets have a low success rate long term. People generally fail to actually establish a new lifestyle...people talk a good talk about it, but most of the time they don't even understand what it really means.

There are *kitten* tons of people right here on MFP who think logging and keeping a diary is the "lifestyle"...it's not...it's just a tool to help train you to live a healthier lifestyle...but that is lost on most...and thus, as with any diet, there's only about a 5% long term success rate. For most people, keeping a diary and counting calories is not sustainable into perpetuity...it isn't a lifestyle, it's just a tool. Adopting healthy habits and living a healthful life is a lifestyle.

Oh you're good! :flowerforyou:

jennifershoo

People fail because they think a "diet" is temporary and then go back to their old habits. They fail because they don't make a lifestyle change.

Crispy_Critter

Set weight is actually very real! There's a reason that doctors tend to recommend you only lose a small percentage of your body weight over a certain period of time- your body needs to adjust to the change. It needs to reset, sort of. Just because you've made the decision to lose weight doesn't mean you body automatically jumps on the bandwagon with you. Your body needs time to adapt, just like you need time to get your head around the concept of a life style change. (Biology and genes also play a part, but that's a much longer discussion, and slightly off topic)

Now, that said- there's another reason why diets fail in the long term. Cwolfman13 touched on it- it's because they are diets and not life style changes. Diets are doomed to fail because they don't teach you anything. They are a short-term fix for what is, essentially, a life-long problem. To make any sort of fitness/weightloss change stick permanently, you need to begin as you mean to continue, or at the very least you need to at some point implement a plan that you can more or less stick to your whole life. Crash diets aren't made to work in the long term, and the companies that market them make them like that on purpose for two reasons: 1) People love instant gratification. 2) If they worked permanently, you wouldn't come back and spend more money on their shakes or their videos or their points or their premade meals. There's a multi-billion dollar industry surrounding weight loss. Never forget that when you consider fad diets.