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

purpleipod

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?

Oh yeah, definitely. Food is one constant in my life that always makes me happy. When I eat food I love I get a high from it, then a withdrawal just like a drug. I have to fight every day to eat a controlled amount of food and not eat however much I feel like.

peterdt

wow. simple wow. wishing you all the best in keeping it off. quite amazing. great attitude.

It is my understanding that most of the 5% continue to log their food in some way and have changed their eating style/ way of life on a permanent basis. This is why I am continuing on MFP. I have kept my weight off for 3 months and have no intention "of going back there" again.I don't give up even if a have a bad day or two.

albayin

I have always been in the health range of weight but heavier than I wish I was...So I have been trying to lose weight all my life. The thing is every time I manage to lose a few pounds, they just come back later no matter what I do. I almost believe that my body remembers how much I weight and decides that for me. This's frustrating, really.

neverstray

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

True story

Deipneus

But in a lot of cases I think it's because they've almost been a little too strict?

I think you're on to something there. I don't bother to make a change I'm not prepared to stick with for life. If I make a change I can't stick with, when I stop the weight will come back on.

ChunkiChica

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

Honestly true. Luckily, you can still eat nachos on a diet. It's all about moderation - a very un-consumerism concept!

californiagirl2012

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:

I like this! But it does help to have some skills for navigating a society with an over abundance of food because basically we are fish swimming against the stream.. every where we turn society now is against the fit person in many ways. Women especially, whether they mean to or not tend to tear us fit women down every chance they get. They either say we are too skinny or we work ridiculously hard, when really all we did was change our lifestyle.

Women, ever notice when you were/are fat/obese that other women say Oh you look fine or whatever, but the moment you become fit Oh you are too skinny or too many muscles, or you will wither away to nothing or something negative. Where when you were fat men basically ignored you and now when you are fit they give you attention and praise. It is rather interesting, and it is something your mind needs to be ready for when you are close to reaching your goal and do reach your goal.

albayin

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

Honestly true. Luckily, you can still eat nachos on a diet. It's all about moderation - a very un-consumerism concept!

LOL Dr. Gary Null said "there's no moderation on bad foods. Eliminate them" I can't stand watching him throwing away those yummy chips.

californiagirl2012

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

Honestly true. Luckily, you can still eat nachos on a diet. It's all about moderation - a very un-consumerism concept!

It is all about a calorie budget. You can eat whatever you want. However if you really get into fitness you will find that fueling your body matters more. You learn to enjoy healthy foods that taste good, because every calorie is precious and needs to count for something. And you learn to fit nachos, cookies, chicken wings, or whatever into your calorie budget on occasion because the value is "you enjoy them", but mostly a fit person wants to feel good and strong for their given sport and to sleep well at night, more healthy foods than not will do just that. You can still have whatever you want. Calories are all that matter. Trying to plan macros makes life far to complicated. Eat what you enjoy, mostly healthy, enough carbs, protein, and fat for energy.

svelt123

I think one reason may include using the actual word "diet"
Many people often will go on a "diet" but never really change their eating habits. They will lose the weight but; then will regain the weight plus more due to not really changing their life style. I think it should be a change of how you are living your life. It's just that simple.

albayin

I think one reason may include using the actual word "diet"
Many people often will go on a "diet" but never really change their eating habits. They will lose the weight but; then will regain the weight plus more due to not really changing their life style. I think it should be a change of how you are living your life. It's just that simple.

It's just that simple to say it, but change lift style or habits isn't really...that simple for many of us. It's not just about will power; there's much more involved. If it was like a switch turning on and off, I bet there wouldn't be many fat people left.

anemoneprose

Your body upregulates and downregulates certain hormones that will drive you back to eating more even if you don't want to. For serious life changing commitments as well- any change has to be sustained long-term.

This. A body that's been overweight or obese doesn't function in the same way as one that's always been lean.

And even after losing weight, we're geared to maximize calories, always. (We underestimate portion sizes, etc etc. Even if you know them, if you're not actively counting, it's easy enough to slip, especially given how food is made and served.)

Solution: count calories and exercise for life.

TheMommyWifeLife

Because once they hit their goal weight, they think that they can quit trying so hard to be healthy!

peterdt

Your quote from the old post is very interesting.. yet depressing. Still thank you... I learned something tonight. Those studies do seem to point to genetics being very important in what weight is.

I do find it interesting though that almost everyone in this post discounts the possibility of emotional eating as even a possibility that is why they gain it back or why they gained it in the first place. I notice that men in particular responses to the question of emotional eating is to "suck it up" or "take accountability for you life". That does not surprise me though as I think most men are out of touch with their emotions, especially overweight men. I guess that is how men survived for all these years. If us men were really in touch with our emotions we would not have been able to survive 100's or 1000's of years ago. But I think now those survival instincts of suppressing emotions do not serve us men very well anymore, especially us overweight men.

I hope that research will continue on this topic. Humans are so interesting and complex. I am sure as the weight gain epidemic is studied more in depth more and more answers will come forth and we will get closer to the truth.

I think one of the reasons humans have survived as a species is that we are overly optimistic. In a study I ready about we consistently underestimate the likelihood of the average human getting life threatening diseases or serious medical conditions like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, stroke etc. I think it is one of the factors that has allowed us to rise to the top of the food chain- hope, and often unrealistic hope. Yes, we can against all odds really move that rubber tree plant. And by denying our emotional eating habits we are actually able to lose the weight against all odds, especially us men through sheer force of will. Be are we mentally well after losing the weight? not so sure about that.

And again, I do not think emotional eating is the ONLY factor. There are so many factors to weight regain. I do think though that the importance of emotional eating is way underestimated. Even the responses in this post discount the importance of emotional eating which leads me to believe that many overweight people are out of touch with their emotions. They "blame" it on other factors. And to be sure there are other important factors.

I know I make a lot of assumptions in what I wrote and probably a lot of my thoughts on the subject are wrong or inaccurate. I am looking forward to learning more about this topic as I am sure that it will be something that will continue to be studied.

Anyway, no one really knows and we all have our opinions. I really hope the best for every one of us and that we all can achieve our goals and dreams and enjoy our lives. After all... life is short. enjoy it!

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.

CJisinShape

Here's my 2 cents. Losing weight can be very hard. Some people make it like a second job, with the food tracking, weighing, health club visits. People burnout, and once the weight is off, what's the motivation to keep up the intense pace? So, as soon as you let up a little, the weight creeps back up.

My husband asked me why I didn't do an intense few months and lose the weight, like they do on biggest loser. I'm not at that place in my life. I want to really change my habits, so being a healthy weight is effortless, like driving a car. It makes losing weight sooooooo slow (fought five pounds for a few months), but I don't feel deprived at all, or overworked.

Besides healthy habits, I hope to maintain weight loss once I get to goal by weighing myself regularly, and I read here not allowing yourself to go up a clothing size, plus regular small fitness challenges is what I'm planning on. Essentially, what I'm doing right now.

PetulantOne

I know exactly why I got fat. I'm an addict. I've been addicted to all sorts of things. When I quit doing drugs, I moved onto food. It's always something, now it's changing myself. Hopefully this time it will stick. I've made it over 5 years off drugs. I hope someday to be able to say the same thing for my unhealthy food habits. One of my main goals in life is to be addiction free. No matter what that addiction might be.

peterdt

ah yes. nachos. pizza too.

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

mfpcopine

In other words, by dealing with the underlying issues that fueled their emotional hunger, they were able to turn off their hunger switch, which resulted in less emotional eating.

I don't think that statement follows at all, although the people who weren't recidivists obviously did something that helped. I assume they kept weighing themselves, exercising, and cutting back when they saw they were gaining.

peterdt

That is an interesting response. what stories or posts have been most helpful for you? I don't have a ton of time and I see you have been on this site for many years and have made a 1000's of posts.

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.

fishgutzy

Why? Because it is super easy to fall off the wagon. Ask any alcoholic or drug user how many times they relapsed before quitting completely.

Absolutely. Been sober over 29 years. Spent time "changing seats on the Titanic" when I stopped drinking. Food was a replacement.
I've lost the same 30 pounds several times.
Finally had to accept that there are certain food types I can't tolerate in the same way I can't tolerate alcohol. Hopefully this leads to a more permanent loss when I get to my goal weight.