Gaining it back; NYT article

I take the article as a warning against crash dieting, which study after study after study has shown is a bad idea. This is nothing new.

@laur357, my maintenance calories are higher than I expected them to be with exercise. I've been maintaining eating 1,700 - 2,000 calories exercising 6 hours a week at the gym plus walking. I have a Fitbit and make sure to hit 25,000 steps per day, every day. I'm short, 5'2.5" and old (66) so I think that's pretty good.

If sedentary then my maintenance drops to around 1,370ish calories per day. Normal activity without going to the gym would probably put me at around 1,500 - 1,600 calories per day.

Nausicca55 wrote: »

I don't know, but reading this article just depressed me. Weight loss already seems like an uphill battle, and reading this makes it seem just hopeless.

It's not hopeless. Biggest Loser is a TV show meant to entertain and not change people's lives so it takes the shortest and most entertaining route.
...honestly I don't know if it's entertaining, I've never watched it.

Chiming in with those who found the TDEE calculators accurate. I have maintained for 2 years except for a period I over ate. Guess I felt a need to test those on-line calculators.

I lost 63 pounds in 53 weeks. Female, now 62 years old. Sedentary TDEE is about 1450 and only a couple hundred calories above my BMR per the calculators (averaged). Lightly active is about 1650 (averaged).

tk2222 wrote: »

Theoretically, using the calories in-calories out method that is the basis of MFP, at some point one does reach goal weight, and then RAISE their calories to maintenance. Since you're now smaller than you were before you lost weight, that maintenance number is lower than it was, but it's still higher than the number you were eating to LOSE weight.

What's disheartening about the article is it suggests your body permenantly resets itself after a weightloss to function on significantly less calories than it would have, at the same weight, had you never been overweight to start with. The evidence they present does seem fairly compelling - yes, the biggest loser group is an extreme and unhealthy diet that anyone with any experience trying to keep of weight could probably guess was going to gain it all back, but they also site other studies carried out on larger groups and less extreme weight losses.

What really bothers me there is the question, if we assume that, say, a 180 LB man who has lost 100 pounds burns 600 less calories per day than a similar man who has never weighed more than 180 LB...what is the body giving up on?

The always-thin man's body is doing something with those calories, presumably something necessary - making his immune system function, making his brain work, sending blood around his body, maintaining his bone density, you know, the usual and crucial. If we accept the article's premise that the body re-wires itself to covert those 600 calories immediately into fat in the post-weight-loss man instead of using them for the basic maintenance of his body...something must be suffering. Does the body essentially send anyone who has lost weight into a lifelong state of a kind of malnutrition by privileging our fat cells and depriving the rest of our body of energy unless we feed the fat cells first?

This is an interesting question. There's a good thread on thermogenic adaptation here that gives a very condensed answer to what is known from some research about this:

This study could benefit lawyers. The lawyers of the Biggest Losers.

Thanks all who answered my question! The study is interesting, as is Dr. Hall's earlier study that compared BL contestants to those who underwent Roux en Y gastric bypass surgery. BUT people on the Biggest Loser represent a unique (and convenient) cohort, and I don't think it's a great idea to extrapolate the results to the majority of people losing weight at a moderate pace with reasonable calorie deficit.

While this obviously doesn't validate or invalidate the study, it does appear that we have at least a few people who were able to lose a substantial amount of weight without destroying their metabolisms and drastically deviating from the number of expected calories required to maintain their losses.

For anyone interested in the research article that the NYT article is based on here is the abstract and reference:



Fothergill E1, Guo J1, Howard L1, Kerns JC2, Knuth ND3, Brychta R1, Chen KY1, Skarulis MC1, Walter M1, Walter PJ1, Hall KD1. Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after "The Biggest Loser" competition. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2016 May 2. doi: 10.1002/oby.21538. [Epub ahead of print]

OBJECTIVE:
To measure long-term changes in resting metabolic rate (RMR) and body composition in participants of "The Biggest Loser" competition.

METHODS:
Body composition was measured by dual energy X-ray absorptiometry, and RMR was determined by indirect calorimetry at baseline, at the end of the 30-week competition and 6 years later. Metabolic adaptation was defined as the residual RMR after adjusting for changes in body composition and age.

RESULTS:
Of the 16 "Biggest Loser" competitors originally investigated, 14 participated in this follow-up study. Weight loss at the end of the competition was (mean ± SD) 58.3 ± 24.9 kg (P < 0.0001), and RMR decreased by 610 ± 483 kcal/day (P = 0.0004). After 6 years, 41.0 ± 31.3 kg of the lost weight was regained (P = 0.0002), while RMR was 704 ± 427 kcal/day below baseline (P < 0.0001) and metabolic adaptation was -499 ± 207 kcal/day (P < 0.0001). Weight regain was not significantly correlated with metabolic adaptation at the competition's end (r = -0.1, P = 0.75), but those subjects maintaining greater weight loss at 6 years also experienced greater concurrent metabolic slowing (r = 0.59, P = 0.025).

CONCLUSIONS:
Metabolic adaptation persists over time and is likely a proportional, but incomplete, response to contemporaneous efforts to reduce body weight.

Kevin Hall, the senior author has also written a couple of earlier articles about the Biggest Loser contestants, two of which are available for free:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=(Hall, Kevin[Author]) AND Biggest Loser[Title/Abstract]

laur357 wrote: »

So my very basic question in response to the article is for those here who are successfully maintaining a largish weight loss after a reasonable calorie deficit to lose weight. .5-2 pounds per week. Total loss of, say 40 or more pounds.

Are your maintenance calories what you expect them to be? Can you eat the maintenance calories a standard TDEE calculator gives you for your age/weight/height/sex and maintain your weight?
Or, do you find that you need to eat substantially fewer calories than expected to maintain your weight loss?

Yes, it's 'generally' correct. I'm not 100% as I've slipped counting reliably (still do 90% of the time, but weekends are often slips)... because if I strictly track I keep losing, faster than calculators say I should. Faster than when I was still 'dieting'. No idea why. Anyway, calculators put me 1600-1800 calories, and if I average 'about' 1800 I'm good. Been maintaining for almost a year now, and so far have dipped as far as 5lbs below my '5lb range' strictly following to the top of my TDEE, and gone up to 1lb above not tracking at all and having a bunch of big eating days. Have stayed within the 5lb rage for close to six months with 'generally' following TDEE and loosely tracking. Lost close to 100 lbs in about a year and the math worked perfect for that, too.

Now that said -- my husband has had a more difficult time, but not *that* much more. He lost about as much as me in about the same amount of time. His TDEE says he should eat 1800-2000 to maintain, and he has to strictly track to 1800. Over he gains, under he loses - but not as quickly as me.

Both of us were right about the same amount overweight. Difference between us: I was overweight for a bit over 10 years and was very skinny prior to that, while he'd been overweight most of his life. Not sure that's significant though: we're both within the expected margin when working out the math... he's just at the bottom and I'm at the top.

Ali_cat01 wrote: »

My friend sent me this link--with the statement that this is the struggle I have to look forward to. So glad I have the greatest support from my best friend.... -_- Don't need his support if it's going to be negative bull like that.

The NYTimes article is needlessly alarmist, and it's sad to see so many people misunderstanding what's being reported on (seriously, google "Biggest Loser study" and be amazed at some of the ridiculous headlines from large, mainstream media sites).

The study only looked at an extreme edge case: People who were extremely obese and who tortured the weight off quickly under very extreme circumstances. If that applies to you, you're doing it wrong (and are not a smart person). Also, it's not even a random sampling of Biggest Loser contestants; it's a small sampling of volunteers. Do you think it's more likely that those who gained all their weight back are also more likely to volunteer for this "study"? Of course you do, because it's common sense.

Ignore the study and all the articles about it. If it's duplicated using a reasonable sample under reasonable conditions some day, it might be worth thinking about. For now, it's clickbait.

xmichaelyx wrote: »

Ali_cat01 wrote: »

My friend sent me this link--with the statement that this is the struggle I have to look forward to. So glad I have the greatest support from my best friend.... -_- Don't need his support if it's going to be negative bull like that.

The NYTimes article is needlessly alarmist, and it's sad to see so many people misunderstanding what's being reported on (seriously, google "Biggest Loser study" and be amazed at some of the ridiculous headlines from large, mainstream media sites).

The study only looked at an extreme edge case: People who were extremely obese and who tortured the weight off quickly under very extreme circumstances. If that applies to you, you're doing it wrong (and are not a smart person). Also, it's not even a random sampling of Biggest Loser contestants; it's a small sampling of volunteers. Do you think it's more likely that those who gained all their weight back are also more likely to volunteer for this "study"? Of course you do, because it's common sense.

Ignore the study and all the articles about it. If it's duplicated using a reasonable sample under reasonable conditions some day, it might be worth thinking about. For now, it's clickbait.

Yes!