CICO is not the whole equation

Gallowmere1984

VintageFeline wrote: »

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Gallowmere1984 wrote: »

GottaBurnEmAll wrote: »

VintageFeline wrote: »

Theo166 wrote: »

After watching a Biggest Loser episode, I googled 'how are they doing now'. Reading a follow up research article in Scientific American was very depressing, and puzzling. They are blaming a slow metabolism for people regaining weight.

6 Years after The Biggest Loser, Metabolism Is Slower and Weight Is Back Up

Six years after dramatic weight loss on the TV show "The Biggest Loser," most contestants in a recent study had regained the pounds - and on top of that, their metabolism had slowed and they were burning fewer calories every day than they did before their stint on the show.
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The group as a whole on average burned 2,607 calories per day at rest before the competition, which dropped to about 2,000 calories per day at the end.

Six years later, calorie burning had slowed further to 1,900 per day, as reported in the journal Obesity, May 2.

If I'm reading this right, they are saying that for about the same weight, their BMR dropped 27%, because of their weight loss journey.

Anyone familiar with this, it sounds like bad science.

As a side, it was yet another missed opportunity to educate people on the need to understand their CO, and control CI accordingly (whatever their CO).

This was discussed here. I believe the study was done on those maybe a year or two down the line. The issue was severe caloric restriction with extreme exercise causing a large down regulation of their BMR (adaptive thermogenesis) that the body at the point they were studied hadn't recovered from. Whether it would over the long term with reverse dieting I think is unknown but we have had examples of people on the forum having low BMRs (tested) and reverse dieting to the normal range (again tested).

It's interesting, I've been listening to some podcasts lately that had some talk regarding metabolic adaptation. One of the podcasts quoted the work of Leibel et al and others, and they are the ones usually cited when discussing these matters. Whenever I've looked at their studies, their subjects invariably dieted hard (on the order of 800 calorie diets) and IIRC, did not have much in the way of physical activity. The number usual quoted by Leibel for adaptation in terms of deviation from what's expected to be maintenance calories is somewhere on the order of 250-300 calories.

Contrast that to the insights shared by Lyle McDonald, who likely looked at a different group of dieters who were getting more activity and perhaps not dieting quite as hard. He quoted a metabolic adaptation of approximately 100 calories.

It should be noted that neither of these findings is anywhere near as drastic as the findings in The Biggest Loser Study.

The takeaway? Don't diet like a fool.

As I have said before, extreme cutting diets are only for people with two things in common: they know what the *kitten* they are doing, and have exceptional self-control. Anyone else is just asking for disaster.

Yes to both of these. There are ways to cut in the extreme but it has to be very carefully managed.

The Biggest Loser is about ratings so they are dieting like fools with extreme restriction and extreme exercise.

Yeap. When I am rapid cutting, my lifting goes from 4x per week to three, all high rep sets are dropped, bar weight goes up on compounds, reps reduced, and I go from walking 12-18 miles per day to more like five. I pushed myself hard on it once, and paid for it for a week. Never again.

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