The notion that trying to lose weight is pointless and harmful

seafusion

Ive been doing the keto diet for nearly 4 years and was down to 52kg from 58kg. I started working out 6 weeks ago doing hiit and weights and now im a fat 63kgs. I even have a fat jelly belly gut. Its so disheartening and makes me lose motivation. Thinking about giving up on working out altogether.

lgfrie

Supposedly, it's 15 % that lose the weight and maintain it, not 3 %. If it were 3 %, well, that'd be a very challenging notion for anyone launching a weight loss effort. But at the more commonly accepted 15 %, you have a 1 in 6 chance of losing the weight and keeping it off. In any new venture, weight loss or otherwise, not everyone's going to end up in the winner's circle. One in six is actually pretty good odds compared to some other things in life, like starting a business. There are many successful business owners, even though the failure rate is 90+ %. We'd be living in caves if everyone was afraid to start a business due to most of them failing. The odds of getting a novel published are one in thousands, but there are plenty of novelists. And so on. You can't just hide from things because they might not work out. That isn't living.

A lot of diets are predestined for failure and kinda -- hate to be judgmental about it but I'll just say it -- stupid. As in: Starve yourself on 1000 calories. Give up a lifetime of gorging on hamburgers and pizza overnight to nibble on bland salads and such. Lose weight as fast as you possibly can. Punish yourself for past eating sins by eating foods you don't like that'll supposedly make you thin, and supplement them with unpleasant things like cider vinegar and chalky diet shakes. Eliminate pasta and bread because they have carbs. Eliminate treats because they're "fattening". Eliminate healthy fats because they're fat. Keep track of anything except the one thing that matters - calories; count points, or macros, or stars in the sky, but never calories, because counting calories is bad. And so on and so forth.

Figure 3/4 of all dieters are stuck on those stupid diets that can't possibly be maintained over time, because they're unpleasant and constitute little more than self-punishment for getting obese. So do the math. 75 of 100 dieters are the Walking Diet Dead; they just don't know it, or they know and do it anyway. Of the remaining 25, who do it right, gradually and gently losing weight, counting calories strictly, eating familiar foods they like in reasonable portions, plodding along and taking a break now and then, 15 dieters - the magic 15 % out of the original hundred, who lose the weight and keep it off - constitute 60 %.

So, do it right and you have a 60 % chance of losing the weight and keeping it off.

Yes, these numbers are completely ridiculous and absurd. They are as absurd as "only 3 % / 15 % / x % lose the weight and keep it off".

Of course it does not matter what the other 97 or 85 people in your cohort of 100 did, whether they starved themselves on kale and gained all the weight back, or not. It only matters what YOU do. And any person can adopt a mild, gradual, sensible diet, lose weight, and learn new habits to give themselves the best possible chance of not gaining it back. There are people from all walks of life, all shapes and sizes, all backgrounds, who lose weight and maintain. Anyone can be part of that group, with some determination and discipline and a willingness to keep fine-tuning to get it right. 10 months into my diet, I am still fine-tuning my relaxed days and off meals to get the right balance of things to make it all work; it's a work in progress, and probably always will be.

So buck up, get on the horse, eat a reasonable, non-punitive number of calories consisting of foods you love, and watch the scale go down. Keep things moderate so that you don't rebel by ending up face down in an extra-cheese pizza, and plod along, learning new habits and leaving the old obese ones behind. It can be done, of course, and has been done by many millions. You are not a statistic, you are one person and any one person can do this.