THE BIG STARVATION MODE MYTH.

toutmonpossible

The "muscle burns more calories" almost needs its own page. It's not exactly a myth because that is true. The common myths are how much more it burns, how much muscle you are likely to add, that you can easily maintain the same diet and that it isn't that hard to keep it once you have it.

mzmartens

Not true, mine said to eat 2100 cals, but my nutritionis reduced it by another 250, so I am eating 1850 a day....

Ottinger13

Wear a fit bit, track your calories burned every day and eat less then you burn and you will lose weight. Burn more, eat less

yarwell

Pretty sure it says 1200 for everyone. Personalized service lol.

It's the smaller of BMR * activity factor - deficit of 500 cals/day per lb/week target

and 1200

so if you put sedentary the multiplier factor is 1.2 and if you put 2 lbs/week you'll get 1200 unless your BMR is more than 1833

mzmartens

The reason they lose weight is because they are not putting ANYTHING in there body, so their bodies have to relay on the fat/muscle that they have to keep there bodies going. The people who gain weight are the people that consume little bit of food for their bodies and the bodies hold onto it because they are "starving" and don't know when they will be fed again.

3foldchord

Please do everyone a favor and educate yourself. It was painful to read through very poor grammer and spelling to try to make sense of what you were trying to say.

neanderthin

The reason they lose weight is because they are not putting ANYTHING in there body, so their bodies have to relay on the fat/muscle that they have to keep there bodies going. The people who gain weight are the people that consume little bit of food for their bodies and the bodies hold onto it because they are "starving" and don't know when they will be fed again.

No, that's not what happens. People that consume too little put on weight because they binge and forget they did.

55in13

The reason they lose weight is because they are not putting ANYTHING in there body, so their bodies have to relay on the fat/muscle that they have to keep there bodies going. The people who gain weight are the people that consume little bit of food for their bodies and the bodies hold onto it because they are "starving" and don't know when they will be fed again.

No, that's not what happens. People that consume too little put on weight because they binge and forget they did.

It is interesting that you almost never see this directed at people who do it. I see those threads all the time. "I ate nothing but lemon peels and half a bean sprout and I gained 5 lbs" - yeah, right! I think a fair number of them don't forget. The reason I dislike this topic so much is that it gives those people some sort of perceived legitimacy. There is also the issue of people with some very obscure medical concerns that really can lose next to nothing on low calories and I do have some concern about slamming them by accident. I have had failed "attempts" at losing in the not too distant past and it was my fault, not some tweaky biological mumbo jumbo.

ironanimal

Too many people on this thread confuse losing weight and losing body fat. Not the same thing. Anyone can lose weight, make a smaller, just as fat version of you, just smaller.

There are optimum ways of dieting and maintaining muscle mass and there are suboptimal ways. Both ways will lose weight, some will burn fat more readily than others, over muscle.

But since you are losing WEIGHT at 1200 calories, who cares where that weight is coming from, huh?

Get out of here with your sensibiity and logic. The scale knows all.

Caseyjones78gbt

I’ve just discovered this thread so haven’t read through it yet but wanted to offer my experience on ‘Starvation Mode’.

I fully believe I am in starvation mode.

I started my journey in April 2011 at 484 lbs. By September 2012, I had lost approximately 220lbs. Since then, I have struggled to lose anything except when I did a keto diet in February and lost 25lbs in 2 weeks.

I need to lose another 50-60lbs to get towards a healthy weight but no matter what I do, I cannot shift a pound.

For the first year, I ate c. 800 cals and just walked for exercise. Once I hit a plateau, I joined a gym and bumped up the calories to 1,400. That took off another 60lbs or so but since then, with the exception of the weight lost on keto I just cannot lose a pound.

I’ve tried eating more for 12 weeks as per the road map but It didn’t help. I count every calorie so I know there is no creep there. I tried exercising more and exercising less but nothing works.

Last week I decided to try the 5:2 diet along with 90 minutes in the gym every day (a combination of cardio and weights). I did not lose an ounce. So frustrating.

So for the first time on my journey, I decided to have a cheat weekend (It was a long weekend where I live). I never ‘cheat’. I eat 99% clean with the only treat an occasional spoon of PB2. The only carbs I eat are a small bowl of oatmeal, a green apple and green vegetables. Apart from that, I eat eggs, meat, cheese, nuts etc.

In 4 days eating approximately 5,000 calories a day, I put on 18lbs! A lot of that is water weight from the carbs and I have lost 9lbs in the last 3 days (albeit 2 of those days were 500 calories on the 5:2 diet). I’m really hoping the shock to my system will help kick things off but after 9 months of practically no movement, I don’t believe it will.

Generally, if east a couple of hundred calories extra I put on a couple of pounds.

I’m just about at the point where I have to accept that I’m going to stay at c. 240lbs and for my own sanity, this mightn’t be a bad thing.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand, I strongly believe I am a prime example of someone suffering from starvation mode.

toutmonpossible

Too many people on this thread confuse losing weight and losing body fat. Not the same thing. Anyone can lose weight, make a smaller, just as fat version of you, just smaller.

There are optimum ways of dieting and maintaining muscle mass and there are suboptimal ways. Both ways will lose weight, some will burn fat more readily than others, over muscle.

But since you are losing WEIGHT at 1200 calories, who cares where that weight is coming from, huh?

Get out of here with your sensibiity and logic. The scale knows all.

There are also plenty of people who know their weight, body fat percentage, measurements and eat 1200 or less to lose.

Trekmum

Starvation is a myth. It's simple physics and you can't change that law. The body needs 10 to 11 calories per body weight to maintain that weight. You eat less, you lose weight. You exercise and don't eat the exercise calories - you lose more weight. It's not complicated. Read the scientific study and ignore the old wife's tales and rumors. The study is located here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

Think about this: if starvation mode kept you from losing weight, there would be no anorexic people in the world, and prisoners of war would not be starved to skin and bone. They would all be FAT or maintain their weight.

You have to be honest with yourself. If you eat your way through the grocery store on free samples, you have to count those calories; if you "just have a bite" of anything you have to count those calories; if you go to Starbucks - if you sneak food at night - if you drink protein drinks . . . You get the idea. If it goes in the mouth - you have to count it ** because your body counts it even if you try to ignore it!**

jwdieter

If it goes in the mouth - you have to count it ** because your body counts it even if you try to ignore it!**

If you don't put it in MFP, it didn't happen.

DatMurse

The reason they lose weight is because they are not putting ANYTHING in there body, so their bodies have to relay on the fat/muscle that they have to keep there bodies going. The people who gain weight are the people that consume little bit of food for their bodies and the bodies hold onto it because they are "starving" and don't know when they will be fed again.

No, that's not what happens. People that consume too little put on weight because they binge and forget they did.

It is interesting that you almost never see this directed at people who do it. I see those threads all the time. "I ate nothing but lemon peels and half a bean sprout and I gained 5 lbs" - yeah, right! I think a fair number of them don't forget. The reason I dislike this topic so much is that it gives those people some sort of perceived legitimacy. There is also the issue of people with some very obscure medical concerns that really can lose next to nothing on low calories and I do have some concern about slamming them by accident. I have had failed "attempts" at losing in the not too distant past and it was my fault, not some tweaky biological mumbo jumbo.

weight retention is not always fat or muscle retention.

There are many beliefs such as whooshes or squishy fat. Parts of your fat get super soft and fill up with water. Some people will stall out so long in weight and not see it budge. All of a sudden they drop 4-5 pounds.

Cortisol levels also increase water retention which is another factor. So... there are many reasons.

Weight loss=
fat loss
muscle loss
water loss

Hexahedra

When I started MFP the default calculator put me on a 1700 calories diet. It worked for a month, then I hit a plateau regardless of the amount of exercise that I did. Worse, I started feeling weak and was even losing strength. I started reading up about BMR and TDEE then experimented with resetting my metabolism by eating at maintenance (2100 cals) for a couple of weeks. During the maintenance phase I gained a couple of pounds, then promptly lost it. Since the most accurate BMR calculation for me is about 1600, I decided to eat at slightly below maintenance (at 1900) to keep losing fat while not affecting my cardio and lifting too much. I have been losing weight steadily ever since, despite eating 200 cals more than MFP's recommendation.

I think my body hit starvation mode when it was constantly fed at or below BMR. Starvation mode erased the deficit by slowing down my metabolism, which explained the generally lethargic and weak feeling that I experienced. Because there's no deficit there's no weight to lose, fat or otherwise.

What people fail to understand is that 'starvation mode' doesn't scale all the way to 0 calories, your body is not going to hold on to fat forever, as it can not slow down your metabolism infinitely. At a certain point (IIRC around 500-800 calories) it can't slow you down anymore and has to begin burning fat and muscle to keep you alive. I don't know about you but I refuse to lose weight by eating that little, it's a miserable existence that I can't sustain for the long term.

etoiles_argentees

i believe translation is = build lean muscle to assist with calorie burn...

...and if I recall the math correctly, a pound of fat burns somewhere around 2 calories per day; a pound of muscle burns 6. So a 20 lb. increase in muscle mass (which is a quite remarkable increase) would increase one's calorie burn by 80 whole calories per day.

yes. woohoo! 80 extra calories!

http://weightology.net/?p=192
http://www.ncsf.org/enew/articles/articles-poundofmuscle.aspx ?

ramonafrincu

i believe translation is = build lean muscle to assist with calorie burn...

...and if I recall the math correctly, a pound of fat burns somewhere around 2 calories per day; a pound of muscle burns 6. So a 20 lb. increase in muscle mass (which is a quite remarkable increase) would increase one's calorie burn by 80 whole calories per day.

yes. woohoo! 80 extra calories

http://www.ncsf.org/enew/articles/articles-poundofmuscle.aspx ?

:indifferent:

vkc1978

To keep your metab up on a low calorie intake is to get at least 8 hours of sleep and eat 6 times a day and i will stand by that but their is no reason why you cant do that. I don't people got obese from eating less no that's not the way it is never was never will be. And the starvation mode is when your metab slows down so go for a walk that should speed it up too. but Regardless you will lose all the weight you need because your in a Calorie Defiant. OMG i just ate lettuce today and that's it that's my new diet I lost weight hey you lose weight HOW from eating less. people you see who actually get success long term their eating less not more. less.

Translator? Anyone?

My dear fellow MFPers,

To keep your metabolism up while you are on a low caloric intake, the best way would be to get at least 8 hours of sleep, and consume at least 6 meals a day, and I will stand by that. However, there is no reason why you can't do so in another way. People in the world did not become obese from eating less calories than what perhaps you feel they should, as that is not the proper way, either now, or ever. The starvation mode is what people call it when your metabolism slows down, so what you should do instead is to partake in a walk, or other brisk exercise that will speed your metabolism back to it's proper speed. Regardless, you shall still lose weight because you are continuing to eat at a calorie deficit. My lord in heaven, I just ate a piece of greenery, in this instance a single leaf of lettuc, and that's my new diet, and I have happened to shed a few pounds. Forsooth, you lose weight from eating less, hence when you see people who have success in a long term standing, it is because of this.

*note - These are not my views, and are the views of the poster.

:laugh: Great job!!! Its all clear to me now

55in13

i believe translation is = build lean muscle to assist with calorie burn...

...and if I recall the math correctly, a pound of fat burns somewhere around 2 calories per day; a pound of muscle burns 6. So a 20 lb. increase in muscle mass (which is a quite remarkable increase) would increase one's calorie burn by 80 whole calories per day.

yes. woohoo! 80 extra calories!

http://www.ncsf.org/enew/articles/articles-poundofmuscle.aspx ?

The article has good news with the bad. The resting rate it comes up with is quite low; under 5/lb/day. The good news is how much more is burned while exercising. I think that is the source of confusion with the muscle numbers. If you are willing to do the work to gain muscle, it is probably a reasonable expectation that you would continue to do at least some exercise. Still, I think the idea of adding muscle just to increase burn is overblown. I don't want to significantly alter my physique; just add a little up top.

etoiles_argentees

i believe translation is = build lean muscle to assist with calorie burn...

...and if I recall the math correctly, a pound of fat burns somewhere around 2 calories per day; a pound of muscle burns 6. So a 20 lb. increase in muscle mass (which is a quite remarkable increase) would increase one's calorie burn by 80 whole calories per day.

yes. woohoo! 80 extra calories!

http://www.ncsf.org/enew/articles/articles-poundofmuscle.aspx ?

The article has good news with the bad. The resting rate it comes up with is quite low; under 5/lb/day. The good news is how much more is burned while exercising. I think that is the source of confusion with the muscle numbers. If you are willing to do the work to gain muscle, it is probably a reasonable expectation that you would continue to do at least some exercise. Still, I think the idea of adding muscle just to increase burn is overblown. I don't want to significantly alter my physique; just add a little up top.

etoiles_argentees

double post. I was trying to find something that wasn't bashing exercise. Overblown I agree with.

marieautumn

My kinesiology professor confirmed what I always believed. Eat less =weigh less. She said losing weight is simple math. Reduce your calories based on your current weight and exercise and you will lose weight and I believe that to be true based on my own weight loss journey. I don't believe the "Eat more weigh less" theory.

gogojodee

I eat 1200 and I'm 5'2" - I feel like this is the perfect amount for me. I eat a lot of veggies and fruit and foods that are naturally dense. I have a lot of energy and I wake up early most mornings. I used to wake up around 10 or 11 naturally and now my body likes breakfast and a quick walk or run in the am.

norcal_yogi

bump....to read with popcorn later.

toutmonpossible

Starvation is a myth. It's simple physics and you can't change that law. The body needs 10 to 11 calories per body weight to maintain that weight. You eat less, you lose weight. You exercise and don't eat the exercise calories - you lose more weight. It's not complicated. Read the scientific study and ignore the old wife's tales and rumors. The study is located here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

Think about this: if starvation mode kept you from losing weight, there would be no anorexic people in the world, and prisoners of war would not be starved to skin and bone. They would all be FAT or maintain their weight.

You have to be honest with yourself. If you eat your way through the grocery store on free samples, you have to count those calories; if you "just have a bite" of anything you have to count those calories; if you go to Starbucks - if you sneak food at night - if you drink protein drinks . . . You get the idea. If it goes in the mouth - you have to count it ** because your body counts it even if you try to ignore it!**

If you read this forum, it's clear that many people are not logging accurately. You see questions like, "Should I log fruit/vegetable/etc."? Then they report absurdly high calorie burns from exercise no matter how much they're told that devices are inaccurate. Finally, they compound the problem by eating back their exercise calories, a practice I'd never heard of before MFP. Then they blame the scale.

etoiles_argentees

There is a certain amount of calories your body needs for your basic organ function. That would be your BMR. This is the amount of calories the hospital would feed you if you were in a coma. It is truly important not to eat less than that, and yes that may include eating back some exercise calories. It's not a myth.

Not really accurate. Free fatty acids that are liberated during a deficit supply energy and calories. It's the nutrient deficiency when consuming too little that is the problem.

Yes. exactly why there are still so many that are overweight yet malnourished.

ChanceTakr2131

Sorry, but I have experienced "Starvation Mode" during my years of yo-yo dieting, and from my experience (as well as many, many others), this is not a myth. It is true that 1200 calories doesn't work for everyone, and that each person has to find his/her own amount of calories to lose weight. Personally, I prefer to eat close to 2000 and maintain my weight loss than eat 1200 and yo-yo around for the rest of my life.

red_road

I eat like a typical student..usually unhealthy and have right now been focusing on just eating smaller portions than healthier food. Does this mean its pointless? Since im not eating a healthy diet just a smaller diet does it mean that all im losing is muscle mass? I live at home and everything there is just frozen food for the most part and my entire weekends are fast food. My weight loss generally averages about a pound a week. Is losing weight while eating junk food as unhealthy as staying overweight?

TheDoctorDana

Well, now I am just confused :huh:

etoiles_argentees

Ohhhhh...

Cliffs:
When your body cannot store any more fat in it's existing cells, it creates new fat cells.
You cannot get rid of fat cells once your body has created them.
Thin people don't have as many fat cells in your body, therefore it is harder for thin people to gain weight.


You might find this interesting. :

just copying an old post.

While I'm not keen on the entire set - point theory, I do think genetic inheritance plays a very important part in the body returning to a "comfortable" weight. I really think weight is due to a combination of both genes and environment. After reading articles like the following I can't help but wonder if dieting is just too hard for some. My thinking (at the moment ) leans towards the possibility that people who relapse are just tired of the struggle to maintain the constant vigilance. Maybe it's due to a shifting of values where remaining thin is no longer a top priority in life, or counting calories and thinking about food becomes too time consuming and starts taking away from someone's life instead of adding to it. It's nice to be free from analyzing your options every time you eat something, to be able to eat something because that's what you "want", and not what you "should" have.


I'm sure there are many reasons, just throwing some possibilities out there.


QUOTE:
May 8, 2007
Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside

By GINA KOLATA
Correction Appended

It was 1959. Jules Hirsch, a research physician at Rockefeller University, had gotten curious about weight loss in the obese. He was about to start a simple experiment that would change forever the way scientists think about fat.

Obese people, he knew, had huge fat cells, stuffed with glistening yellow fat. What happened to those cells when people lost weight, he wondered. Did they shrink or did they go away? He decided to find out.

It seemed straightforward. Dr. Hirsch found eight people who had been fat since childhood or adolescence and who agreed to live at the Rockefeller University Hospital for eight months while scientists would control their diets, make them lose weight and then examine their fat cells.

The study was rigorous and demanding. It began with an agonizing four weeks of a maintenance diet that assessed the subjects’ metabolism and caloric needs. Then the diet began. The only food permitted was a liquid formula providing 600 calories a day, a regimen that guaranteed they would lose weight. Finally, the subjects spent another four weeks on a diet that maintained them at their new weights, 100 pounds lower than their initial weights, on average.

Dr. Hirsch answered his original question — the subjects’ fat cells had shrunk and were now normal in size. And everyone, including Dr. Hirsch, assumed that the subjects would leave the hospital permanently thinner.

That did not happen. Instead, Dr. Hirsch says, “they all regained.” He was horrified. The study subjects certainly wanted to be thin, so what went wrong? Maybe, he thought, they had some deep-seated psychological need to be fat.

So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.

The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.

The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: “It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals.”

Eventually, more than 50 people lived at the hospital and lost weight, and every one had physical and psychological signs of starvation. There were a very few who did not get fat again, but they made staying thin their life’s work, becoming Weight Watchers lecturers, for example, and, always, counting calories and maintaining themselves in a permanent state of starvation.

“Did those who stayed thin simply have more willpower?” Dr. Hirsch asked. “In a funny way, they did.”

One way to interpret Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel’s studies would be to propose that once a person got fat, the body would adjust, making it hopeless to lose weight and keep it off. The issue was important, because if getting fat was the problem, there might be a solution to the obesity epidemic: convince people that any weight gain was a step toward an irreversible condition that they most definitely did not want to have.

But another group of studies showed that that hypothesis, too, was wrong.

It began with studies that were the inspiration of Dr. Ethan Sims at the University of Vermont, who asked what would happen if thin people who had never had a weight problem deliberately got fat.

His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.

That, of course, was contrary to what every scientist had thought, and Dr. Sims knew it, as did Dr. Hirsch.

The message never really got out to the nation’s dieters, but a few research scientists were intrigued and asked the next question about body weight: Is body weight inherited, or is obesity more of an inadvertent, almost unconscious response to a society where food is cheap, abundant and tempting? An extra 100 calories a day will pile on 10 pounds in a year, public health messages often say. In five years, that is 50 pounds.

The assumption was that environment determined weight, but Dr. Albert Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania wondered if that was true and, if so, to what extent. It was the early 1980s, long before obesity became what one social scientist called a moral panic, but a time when those questions of nature versus nurture were very much on Dr. Stunkard’s mind.

He found the perfect tool for investigating the nature-nurture question — a Danish registry of adoptees developed to understand whether schizophrenia was inherited. It included meticulous medical records of every Danish adoption between 1927 and 1947, including the names of the adoptees’ biological parents, and the heights and weights of the adoptees, their biological parents and their adoptive parents.

Dr. Stunkard ended up with 540 adults whose average age was 40. They had been adopted when they were very young — 55 percent had been adopted in the first month of life and 90 percent were adopted in the first year of life. His conclusions, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986, were unequivocal. The adoptees were as fat as their biological parents, and how fat they were had no relation to how fat their adoptive parents were.

The scientists summarized it in their paper: “The two major findings of this study were that there was a clear relation between the body-mass index of biologic parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that genetic influences are important determinants of body fatness; and that there was no relation between the body-mass index of adoptive parents and the weight class of adoptees, suggesting that childhood family environment alone has little or no effect.”

In other words, being fat was an inherited condition.

Dr. Stunkard also pointed out the implications: “Current efforts to prevent obesity are directed toward all children (and their parents) almost indiscriminately. Yet if family environment alone has no role in obesity, efforts now directed toward persons with little genetic risk of the disorder could be refocused on the smaller number who are more vulnerable. Such persons can already be identified with some assurance: 80 percent of the offspring of two obese parents become obese, as compared with no more than 14 percent of the offspring of two parents of normal weight.”

A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.

The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

The results did not mean that people are completely helpless to control their weight, Dr. Stunkard said. But, he said, it did mean that those who tend to be fat will have to constantly battle their genetic inheritance if they want to reach and maintain a significantly lower weight.

The findings also provided evidence for a phenomenon that scientists like Dr. Hirsch and Dr. Leibel were certain was true — each person has a comfortable weight range to which the body gravitates. The range might span 10 or 20 pounds: someone might be able to weigh 120 to 140 pounds without too much effort. Going much above or much below the natural weight range is difficult, however; the body resists by increasing or decreasing the appetite and changing the metabolism to push the weight back to the range it seeks.

The message is so at odds with the popular conception of weight loss — the mantra that all a person has to do is eat less and exercise more — that Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the Rockefeller University, tried to come up with an analogy that would convey what science has found about the powerful biological controls over body weight.

He published it in the journal Science in 2003 and still cites it:

“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe,” Dr. Friedman wrote. “The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.”

This is an excerpt from Gina Kolata’s new book, “Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss — and the Myths and Realities of Dieting” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Correction: May 12, 2007
An article in Science Times on Tuesday about the role of genes in weight gain misstated the publication date for an article in the journal Science describing the biological controls over body weight. The article was published in 2003, not 2000.


*Lots of comments after this article at the New York Times if you're interested - most not as depressing as this article and a few by readers that are maintaining a large loss of weight.

*To be honest though, I think in certain cases obesity might be related to viruses, microbes, bacterium, and such. adenovirus -36? Methyl markers aren't the only way genes are turned on or off. Promoters and repressors that regulate how much a gene expresses itself into mRNA? and then translating into a protein?