95% of people who lose weight put it back on. Why?

desiv2

I can't tell you anything other than my experience, I didn't gain it all back, but I did gain a chunk back again before. I was practicing a diet that wasn't realistic for everyday life, and on top of that I never bothered to really learn about my body and how it works. I just ate the calories some book a crack doctor wrote to make money told me to. I fell off because it wasn't something most people can sustain for life.

I read that a good way to help yourself from gaining is to make sure you throw away all your fat clothes, and if you find your clothing getting tight, reeling yourself back in and refusing to go up a size. Have no idea if it's good advice, but I plan on doing that. XD

crazyvermont

Very simple, people choose fad diets vs a lifestyle

o2bADyer

You can't just "diet"...you have to make changes permanently. (my 2 cents)

VelociMama

Congrats to you on all your efforts and sounds like you worked hard on the mental aspect also. Wishing you continued success.

One thing that have helped me is meditation. When I "feel" like eating something I try to stop a moment, breathe, and ask myself what is this feeling? I don't try to suppress that feeling but try to understand it instead. Breathe into it. It does not always work, and often I don't feel like doing that either, but at least now I know that the feelings are there and it is good to get to know those feelings, and it does sometimes "work".

I lost 42 lbs before I got pregnant, and I fell off the wagon big-time twice along the way. It took me a year and a half to get there.

It was ALL in my head for me. It was all mental. I had to control my eating even when I felt upset and wanted to pig out to make myself feel better.

That's the great thing about eating well and eating sufficiently for weight loss. You don't lose the weight as fast, but by taking your time, you learn how to maintain it for life where people who are starving themselves don't. Once they drop all the weight, they go back to eating like they did before, and then it all comes back. The people I know who are most successful are those who are the most patient and willing to really dig into why they are doing what they're doing.

To address your commented point, I agree that there are other factors, but for a lot of us, it really is emotional eating at some point or another. I ate knowing I was already full. I could finish a whopper with cheese, large fries, and large coke (about 1800 calories) in less than 10 minutes no problem then go on to eat an entire bag of tostitos with cheese sauce (another 1500-2000 calories) before bed. I knew I was full early on, but I would just keep going. Laziness had a lot to do with it, and I could easily blame just the laziness alone, but the truth is that I was totally miserable and food was my method of self-sabotage.

Thanks. It is still a struggle sometimes, and the pregnancy has been a really big challenge for me, but I'm still trying to do better.

I have really poor impulse control when it comes to junk food, so often what I did was a post-pigout assessment, and I would ask myself, "why did I do that? What can I do to makeup for that caloriefest?"

Everyone has their own personal reasons for why they end up the way they do and why they succeed.

peterdt

I think the vast majority of people do you "choose" to gain it back.

I agree that not wanting to accept responsibility for our bodies and lives can make us obese.

But I think for most obese people (say 75%) there is an emotional aspect to it that needs to be dealt with for lifetime change. Maybe you are part of the 25% that don't have a problem with emotional eating and your problems lie elsewhere.

Or are you in denial?

Because they choose to gain it back. Period. :yawn:

All the excuses in the world (and believe me, I've used 'em all) don't change the fact that overeating (taking in FAR more calories than we burn off) makes....us....OBESE.

Without accepting full, absolute and total (redundancy intentional!) responsibility, for every bite, every mile walked and every pound gained and lost.....we are doomed.


I have chosen to be aware of what I'm doing today, ..... I'll take the credit, or the blame...I own my body and my mind.

Lowell :drinker:

elisa123gal

I believe a lot of people have eating problems due to the abundance and availability of food.


This guy is 100% right. It isn't emotional eating..it is the easy to get and tasty food that makes us rack up the calories in modern society. Treats are everyday offerings...and we move less..and build our social lives around food. It is so hard to break that cycle.

purpleipod

I start to detest the amount of effort that it takes. That's why I've gained it back every time.

peterdt

yes, that is one of the things I love about MFP. One simple thing is that it is FREE. So, with that you can look at MFP as a lifestyle change. Many of the major diets offer monthly subscriptions similar to MFP but you gotta pay. This I think will tend to put you more into a "diet" mindset. This is one of the reason why I think MFP is groundbreaking in the "diet" field. It promotes lifestyle change, not just fad diets.

I also like the accountability of the friends I have made.

Logging my food and exercise has also helped tremendously.

I have also learned a lot from fellow members and it has allowed me to tweak my lifestyle changes.

I've been thru a few diets. This is different. I look at this program as a lifechanging Experience. You are learning over time what you can eat and lose weight . You don't have to necessarily cut anything out, just limit it. Thats why overtime, keeping a good tracking on your food you learn how to manage it.

I don't think of this as a diet, like I said it is a lifechanging way to manage what we eat. And we have a lot of help here, it's not like going it alone

Basil

Amberonamission

I have lost and regained 100 lbs. I was stabbed in the eye and lost focus on my food. And I want allowed to exert myself at all for 8 months because of the glaucoma that wasn't being controlled by medication. The meds were so messed up too. couldn't feel my hands or feet or lips. The only thing that brought the pressure down in my eye made me very hungry.

peterdt

Well, it looks like you are on your way to some positive change again. Hopefully this time will be different. Do you think you have an emotional aspect to your eating that also causes the gain?

I start to detest the amount of effort that it takes. That's why I've gained it back every time.

peterdt

sorry to hear about that. that for sure does not sound like emotional eating. I hope that your weight and eyes get better going forward.

I have lost and regained 100 lbs. I was stabbed in the eye and lost focus on my food. And I want allowed to exert myself at all for 8 months because of the glaucoma that wasn't being controlled by medication. The meds were so messed up too. couldn't feel my hands or feet or lips. The only thing that brought the pressure down in my eye made me very hungry.

77tes

95% of kids don't learn to read the first time. .... Learning is like that. All of the 5% probably were part of the 95% at one time.

LorinaLynn

The "why" is simple. It stops becoming a priority. The reasons it stops can vary.

I gained weight when my mom was sick and in the hospital, then more after she died, and more still after my father died about a year later. If I had to go through that hell again, I wouldn't do things differently. I wouldn't take time away from sitting by her hospital bed to go for a run. I'd still have visited my Dad as much as I could... more if I'd known how little time we had. I wouldn't make "me" a priority until I could do that without taking time away from those who needed me more.

That said, I also gained because the last time I lost, I didn't do it in a sustainable way. It wasn't a lifestyle I could maintain long term. This time, I never starved myself to lose, and never cut out foods I loved. I added more healthier foods, and a lot more exercise, and it's something I've been able to stick with for almost two years now.

Yanicka1

People just do not understand how dieting can make them fatter. They eat VLCD, lose weight and big part of that is lean mass. Stop the diet than gain it all plus 20 more. The diet industry is in part responsible of people getting fatter and fatter. The ironic thing is that people think they failed while it is the diet that failed.

kesstral

Becuase you can only go so long before you realize the awesomeness of nachos.

This. Food tastes good

Amberonamission

sorry to hear about that. that for sure does not sound like emotional eating. I hope that your weight and eyes get better going forward.

I have lost and regained 100 lbs. I was stabbed in the eye and lost focus on my food. And I want allowed to exert myself at all for 8 months because of the glaucoma that wasn't being controlled by medication. The meds were so messed up too. couldn't feel my hands or feet or lips. The only thing that brought the pressure down in my eye made me very hungry.

Eye is done. I got to keep it. But it doesn't work. I am waiting for my ieye..lol. It is amazing what I am finding I can do with no vision on the left and limited vision on the right. Swimming has been a savior.

Truthfully part of it was emotional eating. It is depressing to go through such a drastic life change.

peterdt

I agree those are also factors.

Obesity is certainly rising in the USA and worldwide.

But we are also rational creatures. Those pounds don't just "creep" on due to bad habits. Most people become aware of those bad habit 5-10 pounds into weight gain. Your argument is that people keep eating out of habit in spite of realizing they have gained weight just because it is convenient? This argument seems flawed. I think for most people there is more going on, and there could be a lot of factors. I think the biggest factor for most though is emotional eating.

Let me clarify too. Emotional eating is not just eating when you are sad or down. It can happen when you want to relax. when you want to celebrate. when you are bored. these are all emotional eating also.

I believe a lot of people have eating problems due to the abundance and availability of food.


This guy is 100% right. It isn't emotional eating..it is the easy to get and tasty food that makes us rack up the calories in modern society. Treats are everyday offerings...and we move less..and build our social lives around food. It is so hard to break that cycle.

morningstarluv

bump

TheVimFuego

The majority deprive themselves and eat specifically for weight loss and not health.

By concentrating on something as broad as a calorie deficit they learn nothing about what the body is doing with what food it is getting in the process.

Then they go back to their old ways and, hey, surprise ...

Understand what that pop tart will do to you, eat for health first and long-term decent body composition is just a handy by-product. Not much exercise required either, I mean who wants to keep all that up ad-infinitum?

Alternatively, just keep focussing on that calorie number and be sure to restrict those fats ...

nannabannana

It takes a lot of hard work

Yes it does.

Having the discipline to control eating habits is hard.
Exercising is hard.
Dealing with emotional eating is hard.
Making a complete lifestyle change is hard.

5% are willing to do the hard work.
95% not so much.

Ditto...Ditto Thank you. Its doing the hard work that I have found to be the most useful. Getting my body moving.....I will stay in the 5% with this lifestyle change I have made. Tks for sharing.

ikrissyt

How right you are!!!!

cmriverside

peterdt,

Good post. I hope people actually read it. It is so simple, yet so elusive for so many. I've managed to sort through my issues, and alot of it has been done here, by reading other peoples' stories.

I've kept my weight off, but it took a lot of introspection, and some major life changes - not just dietary, but in my relationships with others.

makeoverpm

Because "diets are unsustainable". They don't address the true issue, calories in, calories out. Diets are too restrictive and not sustainable. Typically they are so restrictive that you don't realize how crazy you have become about food and then you rebound. I did it for 15 years.

I found reading a few books helped me change my lifestyle:

Naturally Thin by Bethany Frankel
Anything Goes Diet by John Barban (not a diet, just a way of eating for weight loss and sustaining for maintaince)
Eat Stop Eat by Brad Pilon
The Venus Index (for the two books in the bunch that talk about calories and goal setting, the beginner workout is awesome too but can be just a side note compared to the other manuals).
this
I won't tell you what to do. Do what you want and so will I. I'm living my dream and too happy to care what you do or argue with anyone about it. Either you get something out of this or you don't, does not matter to me. How those book ended up helping me --> http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/740340-i-lost-60-lbs-at-age-51-anyone-can-any-workout

ikrissyt

You go girl!!!

peterdt

for sure diets don't work. but everyone still goes on them since it is easier to do that to deal with the real underlying problems.

People just do not understand how dieting can make them fatter. They eat VLCD, lose weight and big part of that is lean mass. Stop the diet than gain it all plus 20 more. The diet industry is in part responsible of people getting fatter and fatter. The ironic thing is that people think they failed while it is the diet that failed.

myfitnessval

Because 95% of people don't understand the lifestyle change that goes with it.

Diet is a perma for life thing. If you understand this, then you know that you balance macros and track calories and understand that you maintain or lose by adjusting the calories in vs calories out. It's not about feelings, it's about logic and math.

Vast majority of people don't get this, and just starve themselves on very high carb low calorie diets, shed a crapton of muscle mass, feel lethargic, lose a ton of weight, still look like crap, feel depressed about it, and start binging because of it causing more ballooning than when they started.

this. pretty much.

JenniBaby85

Because 95% of people are on diets, and diets don't work for the long haul. They are not on to change their life for the better. They want a quick fix which = quick fail.

etoiles_argentees

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.

class="quote_top">QUOTE:
class="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.

msiamjan

Because the true underlying nature of obesity is not well enough understood. The standard for weight loss is decrease caloric intake, increase exercise. Eat less, exercise more. It's what every medical professional will prescribe. Yet, it only works long term in a small percentage of cases. If a drug had such poor efficacy, it wouldn't be approved. "Take this drug, it will give you a 5% chance of a cure, if it doesn't make things worse." I still plug away, because there is no real alternative, but if it were just a matter of what people "choose" I don't think we would see so much obesity. There are so many negatives associated with being overweight that most people would not "choose" it. People spend outrageous amounts of hard earned money in attempts to battle it. Good for any of you that have achieved long term success, but don't assume failure is the same as fault. IMHO.

Jocosase

Here is my two cents.

I love food. I love food. I love food. And because I do, I have learned and understood that it must be a change in lifestyle. Not a temporary diet when you loose all kinds of weight, but after you reach your goal, you stop the diet, binge and then gain all the weight back and some extra. Been there done that.

Its about finding a balance of food and enjoying good and life with a proper balance.