Neuroscientist Explains Why Weight Maintenence Is So Hard

Erm that's depressing.

Please can some people who have lost weight and successfully kept it off please reassure me!

I lost ~35kg about 5 years ago and have maintained that loss with no problems :-). Am back now to lose those last few kgs to get to my ideal racing weight :-), it can be done. I do think you have to be as mindful about how you eat/exercise when maintaining as you were when losing though (or I did anyway).

struggle with exercise? That's an interesting observation...

I didn't have an obesity problem when I regularly did judo or ice hockey. It was only after I quit ice hockey that I became obese for the first time.

Humans are not meant to be sedentary... so it can't really be any surprise that many people who are not physically active are going to be in a lifelong struggle against obesity. We live in an environment that makes it very easy to become obese, in that we can get food without exerting ourselves at all and get it in near enough unlimited supplies.

If you give apes in zoos an unlimited amount of food and don't make them exert themselves to get it, they become obese too. So yes it will be a lifelong struggle for many people in our society against obesity, because we've basically done the equivalent to ourselves of what zookeepers are advised not to do for apes, and made it too easy for ourselves to get food. There are many ways to get around this, such as taking up recreational activities that we can get sufficiently involved in to be able to burn the equivalent amount of calories our palaeolithic ancestors burned in acquiring food while viewing it as fun and recreation, not as a chore. We can organise our shopping, food storage and eating schedules so we don't end up mindlessly consuming way too many calories. There are all kinds of things we can do, one crazy idea that would probably work is for all office computers to be run on a dynamo whereby it takes 30 mins of exercise machine effort to power each worker's computer for the day. I'm sure there are many other ways around this. But the fact is that we've made for ourselves a civilisation where life is basically too cushy for the wealthier classes within it (looking at it on a worldwide level where wealthy = having readily obtainable food - even most poor people in the west can get enough food to regularly overeat) and so we get fat. Surprise surprise!

So this thing of long term maintenance being hard.... well avoiding becoming fat is hard in our society... it's not a problem of maintenance.... it's a problem of avoiding obesity altogether, i.e. avoiding becoming obese for the first time and avoiding becoming obese again after losing the fat from the previous time(s) you became obese.... the environment, habits and lifestyle that got people obese the first time will get them obese again if they don't change it..... you can't rely on willpower to see someone through for their whole entire life.... we have to change our environment, lifestyle and habits. We need to do the same thing that zookeepers do when they put more things in the apes enclosure for them to climb on and hide their food.... only the human equivalent, i.e. find ways to make ourselves want (or even better, need) to be physically active and find ways to make ourselves limit food intake to the amount of food we need to be healthy (physically and mentally healthy) that are going to be able to easily stick for life. Sometimes it can take a while and some trial and error to find how to do this in a way that works for you, but it is pretty much the only way to do this while also keeping mental health intact.