Researchers claiming it's impossible to keep weight off

I should probably mention I had to take the "nearly" out of my thread title because of the character limit, not because I misread the article.

That said, I've never been actually overweight so maybe I just don't get it, but I really don't understand how maintaining the habits developed while losing weight (eating as many or fewer calories as you burn...) could possibly result in regaining weight for people, you know? It doesn't just magically reappear, haha.

In my opinion, most people don't lose weight by counting calories, they do it on some other form of diet that is also not fun. When you get to your goal weight, you can loosen your restricted eating but figuring out how much is hard. We're hardwired as a species to want to hoard calories for possible future famines. So all of environment and biology is pretty much working against you.

We're born able to intuitively eat the right amounts and then most of us lose that skill. We want it back so we keep trying it. And eating freely feels good and natural so we often do it past the point of knowing it's not working. But dieting is hard, including counting calories, so we hesitate to go back to it once we stop. I don't know, just my thoughts.

I should probably mention I had to take the "nearly" out of my thread title because of the character limit, not because I misread the article.

That said, I've never been actually overweight so maybe I just don't get it, but I really don't understand how maintaining the habits developed while losing weight (eating as many or fewer calories as you burn...) could possibly result in regaining weight for people, you know? It doesn't just magically reappear, haha.

Where did the article suggest those the regained maintained their habits developed while losing weight? It says:

"Researchers are divided about why weight gain seems to be irreversible, probably a combination of biological and social forces."

This seems to me to suggest that people slowly go back to old habits. Eating out a little more often, having that extra treat a little more often, shortening or skipping the workouts a little more often, etc.

I'm bookmarking this for later.

This is a topic that mystifies me. It seems not to matter how much or how long people had to work to lose weight, not to matter how fast or how slow, nor how many times they've done it in the past, the same thing happens most of the time. I don't get it, but I'm not about to declare that it can't happen to me.

Forgive me if this has already been mentioned, but I recall a recent thread where this argument was used by suger fearmongers to prove that counting calories doesn't work, but cutting out sugar does somehow. That didn't go over well, but it was entertaining.

Two potential* responses to reading this article.

1. Get outraged, insist that of course you are among the 5% and you will maintain your goal weight forever, thereby making exactly the mistake described in the article.
2. Have some hubris, read the posts from all the people that have already posted in this thread about how they kept the weight off for 2 or 5 or 9 years before gaining it back, or how they have done that several times in their life, bookmark the article, read it regularly to remind yourself that keeping weight off can be harder than losing it, recognize that none of us really knows what our life is going to look like in 10 or 40 years, and re-double your commitment to living the life you want.

I am choosing option # 2.

I think it's a great article. It is based on very sound science. (No one scientific study is perfect - they all have limitations.) It accurately describes how difficult it is for most people to maintain weight over the long term. It points out that we have a serious national problem with obesity that defies easy answers.

*Not the only two.

A lot of people are trying to poo on this article because they don't like what it's saying. Unfortunately there is very solid research to support exactly what it's saying. The mass majority of people who attempt to lose weight will indeed fail. Of those who succeed, the vast majority of them will eventually regain the weight. It's not meant to be motivating or demotivating. It's simply reporting factual data. I feel like those numbers are correct too. We all know plenty of people who lost a dramatic amount of weight and regained all of it (or more in some cases). Outside of the internet how many people do you know that lost dramatic weight and kept it off 5+ years, 10 years, 15? You probably don't no that many.

Now think about people you know from the internet. The number is a lot bigger because many of the success stories like to congregate around diet and fitness related websites/forums. Between MFP and the bodybuilding.com forums losing fat section, I know countless people who have lost and kept off massive amounts of weight. What researchers need to do is study these statistical anomalies. What separates this group from the much larger group of people who lost weight but gained it back? While the following is all pure anecdotal, observational evidence, I have noticed the following traits exist in the a great deal of the people I know, myself included, who have lost and kept off large quantities of weight:

1. They did not do a "fad" diet or did so only for a portion of their weight loss.
2. They ultimately ended up doing some kind of calorie counting or calorie and macro nutrient tracking
3. They continued to count calories even after weight was lost. Many never stopped and don't have any plans to at any point.
4. They still regularly monitor their weight as well as other markers of body composition (measurements, progress pictures, etc.)
5. They do some kind of resistance training.
6. Possibly most importantly, once achieving goal weight, they did not attempt to simply maintain weight. They continued to want to improve body composition by doing rotating periods of muscle gain and fat loss (also known as bulk/cut cycles).

I feel like number 6 is really the key here. It is why they continue to do numbers 1-5. When people no longer have a goal and simply want to focus on maintaining the can become relaxed. The work is done, now it's just smooth sailing. This is unfortunately not true at all. The only thing "easier" about maintenance vs. fat loss is that calories can be slightly higher. Not even a ton higher, we're talking around 500 calories a day higher. Not really a ton of wiggle room. If instead of just maintaining you decide to focus on body re-composition, you have no room to be relaxed. A muscle gaining phase involves more precise control then a fat loss phase does. It's much harder work. It's slower, results are less dramatic. You can lose 100 lbs in a year if you try hard. You can only hope to gain a fraction of that over a lifetime of attempting muscle gain. It probably takes most people 5-10 years worth of bulk/cut cycling to reach their muscular genetic potential. Spending that long tracking calories, working out, weighing in, seems like adequate time to have fully integrated those habits into your life. 10 years in you probably have little worry of falling off the wagon. Also since you spent a decade improving body composition you have much more wiggle room then someone who simply lost fat. I would really love someone do research the group of individuals who manage to keep weight off long term. I feel like that is where the money needs to be spent. Not on stating the obvious like this article. We all know that most people fail at long term weight loss. That isn't helpful information. Let's look at why the minority manages to keep it off!

truth.

also i've never heard a more convincing approach to bulk/cut cycles, i was contemplating doing an official "bulk" after i lose more fat but i think you just persuaded me

This is why I don't care if it takes me 2 years or 10 years to reach my goal. This is what I plan on doing for the rest of my life and as long as my trending is going down I am good with that!

For me the main limitation in the study is wanting to know where they get the people who participate in the trials. It seems to me that many people just decide that they are going to lose weight, quietly get on with it, and don't ever get on the radar of any health professionals at all. When I decided to lose some weight 5 years ago, I was overweight but not obese, I hadn't spoken to a doctor about my weight, and I lost 45lb which I didn't put back on (and am not likely to now). Whereas if you are doing studies mainly with people who are at an eating clinic, the chances are that a higher proportion of the people already have difficulties with food and eating and may be more likely to relapse.

The other problem is the language used: 'nearly impossible' is not the same thing as 'not many people manage to do it'. And saying that sustainable weight loss 'doesn't happen to' many people as the woman quoted does already implies that it's nothing to do with individual effort at all!

Otherwise, there's probably a certain amount of truth in it and I can see the value in re-branding it as 'weight management', which focuses on the importance of a healthy lifestyle and maintaining, which I think we can all get behind.

It is indeed a lifestyle change, and something that if you stop paying attention to, may get out of hand.

I think plenty of researchers will say false things due to the industry that is obesity. We have GMO's that make people eat more and never feel full, we have the trillions of fad diets and exercises, ("Achieve this body in 30 days!" or "take these supplements and change nothing about how you eat! the weight will MELT off") and face it, the food industry makes more money when you buy more food. Fitness is a science.... and if you want fitness, you can have it. It just takes work, like you all are saying. Constant work. Most people who struggle don't seem to find the acheivement in that (I never did before now, believe me: I've yo-yo'd like a *****.)

These are all great points, the main issue for me is, "what will *I* do after I get down to my GW??" I appreciate general statistical research, but there are always outliers -- and I will have to work to be one of those!

I also had to laugh, because (at least a few second ago), the post immediately below this one was "4 Year Anniversary Maintaining!" So see not every research study's results applies to everyone. Now that I know the trend I will have to fight really hard to not be part of it. Likely I will have to do a LOT of muscle building after my wrist strain heals and I move out of my Zumba-every-night phase....

I personally enjoy being a statistical anomaly. The article makes some good points, but the inflammatory rhetoric (1 in 20 is hardly "nearly impossible") makes it hard to get past the initial outrage.

As someone who has yo-yo'ed I know what my downfall is. If you go back to your old ways of course you will gain the weight back. I do fine until I stop weighing myself and stop logging. I know that as hard as it is going to be I have to change my lifestyle for the rest of my life. I cannot ever go back to eating like I did before and I must commit to weighing myself as the weight seems to creep back on without me noticing. Diets dont work, changing your lifestyle habits does. This doesnt stop after we reach our goal weight, its a life long committment of hard work and determination

This video of Doug Lisle gives an idea of the psychological and physiological aspects of trying to lose weight. Just because some fad diet "feels" right doesn't mean it is good for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX2btaDOBK8

http://www.weightymatters.ca/2014/06/is-it-really-scientifically-impossible.html?m=1

A rebutal to the OP's article

LOL

"An appropriate rebalancing of the primal needs of humans with food availability is essential," University of Oxford epidemiologist Klim McPherson wrote in a Lancet commentary following last week's study. But to do that, he suggested, "would entail curtailing many aspects of production and marketing for food industries."

Hysterical. They're stating that an economy of abundance (here, anyway) and technological convenience has produced people who are eating more than they need. So their solution is apparently to ration out the food, or something similar? In any event, they want to make the food less available. Alternatively, we could just eat less.

Yes, that's exactly what they are saying in the article in the Lancet - that we all need to eat less, and doing so (in order to get the collective BMI back down to the level it was in 1980) will cost the food industry several billion dollars in lost revenue, which they aren't going to like. I agree with everyone saying it is about individual responsibility, however we live in an environment based on a cheap food model. It would also be interesting to revisit this thread in 10 years to follow up on everyone (myself included) who pledged not to regain the weight. It's complex and bigger than us, at the same time as being down to just us as individuals.

June 10, 2013 11:48 AM
Ohhhhh...


Cliffs:
When your body cannot store any more fat in it's existing cells, it creates new fat cells.
You cannot get rid of fat cells once your body has created them.
Thin people don't have as many fat cells in your body, therefore it is harder for thin people to gain weight.


You might find this interesting. :

just copying an old post reply.

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.


QUOTE:
May 8, 2007
Genes Take Charge, and Diets Fall by the Wayside
By GINA KOLATA

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.





*To be honest though, I think in certain cases obesity might be related to viruses, microbes, bacterium, and such. adenovirus -36? Methyl markers aren't the only way genes are turned on or off. Promoters and repressors that regulate how much a gene expresses itself into mRNA? and then translating into a protein?