This was very interesting to me and I think some of you may think so too.

Thanks. Very interesting to me.

1. I continue to believe that a slower rate of weight loss means you are less likely to regain despite the conclusion in this article. The 400-500 calorie deficit per day of the "slow" group in the highlighted study is not, imo, low enough to be considered a slow loss.
2. Building muscle may or may not increase metabolism as much as is commonly thought (I didn't try to verify any of the "facts") but they didn't factor in the harm that losing muscle while in a deficit would do to your metabolism. Strength training is important imo.
3. "He tells his patients to try one weight-loss program after another in hopes of finding something that works for them". If this is limited to low-carb, IF, and other reasonable approaches, that's fine but the statement looks scary.

goldthistime wrote: »

1. I continue to believe that a slower rate of weight loss means you are less likely to regain despite the conclusion in this article. The 400-500 calorie deficit per day of the "slow" group in the highlighted study is not, imo, low enough to be considered a slow loss.
2. Building muscle may or may not increase metabolism as much as is commonly thought (I didn't try to verify any of the "facts") but they didn't factor in the harm that losing muscle while in a deficit would do to your metabolism. Strength training is important imo.
3. "He tells his patients to try one weight-loss program after another in hopes of finding something that works for them". If this is limited to low-carb, IF, and other reasonable approaches, that's fine but the statement looks scary.

If you're morbidly obese, losing 1 lb per week or less (since a 500 calorie deficit is too much in your opinion), is most likely much less than 1% of your body weight. Imagine losing 200 pounds at 1/2 lb per week. 26 pounds per year. After nearly 4 years, you'd still be morbidly obese. I know a study that shows that low-calorie diets (not VLCDs) predict greater weight loss and adherence a year or so later when compared to slow losses in those who are obese. I don't have the link handy atm.

To maintain weight loss, should you avoid snacks?

Although it seems to make sense that snacks can pack on the pounds, studies that randomly assigned people to snack or not have failed to confirm this, and even observational studies have not found evidence that snacks undermine weight loss.

True, observing total calories eaten is more important. However snacking may result in eating high cal food or impacting satiety. It's a personal preference that no research will show.

If you build muscle with exercise, including weight lifting, will you be able to maintain a higher metabolism?

Muscle burns more calories than fat, so it might stand to reason that the more muscle you have the faster you will burn calories. But it turns out that building muscles has almost no effect on resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. The reason is that any muscle you add is small compared with the total amount of skeletal muscle on your body. And most of the time that muscle is at rest. (You can’t go around flexing your biceps nonstop.) Muscles have a very low metabolic rate at rest. One researcher calculated that if a man weighing about 175 pounds lifts weights and puts on about 4½ pounds of muscle — a typical amount for men who lift weights for 12 weeks — he will burn an extra 24 calories a day, the amount in a couple of Life Saver candies.

Incorrect - while the calculated resting metabolism of a lb of muscle is considered to be around a measly 10-12 cals (and not 5.5 as the article says - that would be the difference between a lb of muscle and lb of fat) (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3139779/). The actual amount of calories burned per lb of muscle for a normally active individual are more in the order of 15-21 cals per lb.
So, that 4½ lbs actually correspond to a free meal a month.

This calculations also fails to take into consideration EPOC and metabolic changes that exercise produces that are outside of the actual "lb of muscle" calculations. Your current muscles and liver will change and burn calories more effectively if you are active - mitochondria and hormonal uplifts occur that aren't part of that calculation.

Can you defeat your body’s slowed metabolism after weight loss by doing vigorous cardiovascular exercises?

You can as long as you do not eat more calories to make up for the ones you burned. It sounds simple enough, but “this is not as easy a proposition as it sounds,” says Dr. Michael Rosenbaum, a doctor and obesity researcher at Columbia University. The brain controls your hunger and your cravings for food, and it is all too easy to accidentally consume more calories than you burned exercising. That is a major reason studies that use exercise alone to help people lose weight have generally failed to find an effect.

True, doesn't mean that exercise can't help create the necessary headspace of a calorie deficit. It has other metabolic positive effects.

Exercise also has an unexpected effect, documented by Dr. Rosenbaum and Dr. Rudolph Leibel at Columbia University. They found that after you lose 10 percent or more of your weight by diet alone, your muscles start using genes that make them more efficient. They burn 20 to 30 percent fewer calories for the same exercise.

And yet, exercise still burns calories - this all seems to be a weak argument to not exercise.

Is there a type of diet that helps keep weight off?

Many people swear by diets that are low in carbohydrates or gluten free, or revolve around fasting two days out of seven. Dr. Lee Kaplan, an obesity researcher at Harvard, says there is no diet or weight-loss regimen that is guaranteed to work but that people can often maintain a loss of 5 percent of their weight, which is enough for health benefits to kick in. He tells his patients to try one weight-loss program after another in hopes of finding something that works for them.

CICO.

So what hope is there for weight maintenance?

Anecdotal reports by people who have succeeded in keeping weight off tend to have a common theme: constant vigilance, keeping close track of weight, controlling what food is eaten and how much (often by weighing and measuring food), exercising often, putting up with hunger and resisting cravings to the best of their ability. Those who maintain a modest weight loss often report less of a struggle than those trying to keep off large amounts of weight.

The success section is perhaps anecdotal - if a constant stream of success stories can still be described by that word which conjured the idea of the rare event.