Comment by cm2012
9 years ago
That is a myth. Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people.
1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years. "](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453)
2) Giant meta study of long term weight loss: ["Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3% of initial body weight."](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full)
3) Less Scientific: [Weight Watcher's Failure - "about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years."](https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/)
4) [The reason why it's impossible seems to be that although calories in < calories out works, the body of a fat person makes it extremely difficult psychologically to eat less.](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-...) This is borne out by the above data.
5) [The only thing that does seem to work in the long term is gastric surgery.](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/)
Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not even one.
My father decided to lose his potbelly in the early 1980s at the recommendation of his doctor, who sent him to a nutritionist. The nutritionist advised him and gave him a diet plan.
6 months later, he returned to the nutritionist having lost the pot, and the nutritionist was shocked, as nobody had ever followed her diet plan before. He maintained the weight loss for the next 30 years. At one point he was even able to squeeze into his WW2 uniform.
He said it was a constant struggle. But it clearly is possible.
> He said it was a constant struggle. But it clearly is possible.
That is just confirmation of point 4 of the parent post.
It's a struggle in the same way not biting that nail is still a struggle 15 years after one quits biting their nails. Eating poorly and being sedentary are habits like any other.
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A smoker who hadn't lit up in 20 years told me he still wanted a cigarette every day and struggled with it.
This is just defeatism, and falls down here "after completing structured weight-loss programs". The problem here is thinking of weight-loss in the short term.
If you are 200kg, and drink 5L of soda every day, you don't stop drinking soda for 12 months, lose weight and then go back to drinking 5L soda a day and except to keep the weight off.
You change your diet, and keep it that way. For ever. Thats how weight loss happens.
Most people don't succesfully change diet over the long term.
I changed my diet a lot after I got married, and I think it worked mainly because I was embarrassed to buy pie and ice cream all the time. If it's not in the house, I won't eat it casually every day ("if I don't finish this pie soon, it will get all dried out and go to waste!").
Maybe the key is to make diet changes along with other life changes. But I think people do the opposite: "I just started a new job... I'll settle in first before I go on that diet".
Naturally, it would make sense that changing habits would happen all at once. When else in history have we been able to say "I just moved someplace new... Now, where is the nearest KFC?". No, you move, and everything would change, including diet.
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Most people do successfully change their diet over the long term - they just change it too eating too much stuff thats bad for them.
I lost 20% 10 years ago and haven't gained it back (295->225 lbs.). On the other hand I am still overweight and would like to lose more.
I did it by just exercising an insane amount every day. (Like 6 hours of cardio+strength training every day) Most people just aren't going to do that.
No diet I ever tried had any similar effect.
It did do a complete reset of my metabolism to the new weight though. I kind of think it has to be something drastic to have the effect people want.
The only problem is that it's really easy to injure yourself being drastic (that and you have have the right confluence of factors to have the free time to pull it off).
It's really hard for me to imagine spending that much time doing cardio+strength training every day.
I went to music school and I used to practice around 6-7 hours a day, every day. And even after switching to software I still practiced 3-4 hours every day for a long time. It was just part of my routine and I enjoyed it, but even despite those things I had to reduce my daily practice time just because I didn't have time to do my job, sleep, cook/eat, drive to work, handle regular stuff that comes up in life, and then practice for 6+ hours a day. I managed to keep 3-4 hours for awhile, but then it gradually kept getting lower and lower just because I was kind of getting worn out. These days I finally stopped and don't practice daily anymore at all. I still do practice every week, but definitely not daily.
I cut out refined carbohydrates and lost 50 pounds, and have kept it off for the last four years. I eat all I, I just make sure it is reasonably healthy.
> No diet I ever tried had any similar effect.
Have you tried eating 20% less every day with no effect? I have real trouble believing that.
A diet isn't just a change in what you eat, it's also a change in the amount.
Read point 4
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How do you get that much exercise? How did it reset you?
I was on a remote job site where all living expenses were paid (but not entertainment) and there was just NOTHING in the town. The hotel had a nice gym. I was the only person working from my company for quite a period, so I had nothing to do with my free time (the hotel did not have internet access at the time).
So with nothing better to do I thought, time to lose weight. So that's what I did when I wasn't working.
I did not keep the exercise up after the period, but I just wasn't that hungry and the weight stayed off.
You could say my stomach shrank, or metabolism changed, or whatever theory, I just say it as a "reset" to be generic, since I really don't know.
The funny thing about all your links is this:
That most people who lost weight most often times gained it back - yet you somehow think gastric surgery is the cure all when you have to make lifelong changes to your diet and lifestyles and be even more diligent in doing so?
The weight loss for gastric patients levels off after 18-24 months, far shorter than the 5 year mark you use to measure success. I'm not sure how you rate one a success in half the time, and total failure for others since they don't meet your magical 5 year mark.
The problem is, you can't legislate freewill - you have to make a choice to be healthy. Is it easy? Nope, but it can be done.
My grandmother was overweight, had high blood pressure and other ailments. She was able to reverse her Type 2 diabetes through diet and staying active by walking 5 miles a day, hiking and other low impact activities. I had a hockey buddy who was on several different medications for high blood pressure, pre-diabetes and other ailments. Within two and half years, he was off the meds and back on the ice through a combination of intense cardio workouts (P90x, Insanity, etc), weight training, and Brazillian Ju Jitsu - which he had always been into. My best friend was depressed and put on a ton of weight, and became borderline suicidal. He was put on meds and continued to put on weight. Over the course of three years he made various (permanent) changes to his diet and to his life. He started with power lifting, then went to mountain biking, then cycling, then adventure racing, then to mountain climbing. Last year I saw him and he was pushing 40; he was still ripped and finally loving life.
You can't make a switch in 6 months and hope for a five year guaranteed return. Shit doesn't happen like that - it just doesn't. You can't go on a diet for two months and hope that 15 pounds you lost will stay off for five years unless you make permanent changes which is really hard for a lot of people. Finding time and energy to start something new is not how humans function. We constantly look for the shortcut. The shortcut to happiness, the shortcut to getting rich, the shortcut to learning some new programming language. Nobody wants to put in the time to get their shit straight, they just want it to be fixed in some nonsensical time frame.
Everybody I know that went through some serious health problems and got straighten out did not do so in any short amount of time - it took years of dedication, getting up at the crack of dawn, struggling and putting the hard work to get there. No diet can do that for you. The payoff is you get 8-10 years back of your life. You can breathe after you walk up a flight of stairs, you can reduce your cholesterol levels and have a healthy heart and lungs. You can get off your medications, or reduce them from what you're taking now. The upside to being healthy so vastly outweighs the downside and here you are saying - there is no hope, you should give up. How does that even sound to someone who's facing an uphill battle?
Unreal.
Surgery works with a 5 year timeline too, for the average person. The average person does not succeed any other way. It's not impossible - 5% of people in these studies succeed - which is why you see anecdotes like yours.
I didn't think this was true, but apparently it is:
"This study of isolated gastric bypass with a 5.5-year follow-up rate of 88.6% revealed a success rate of 93% in obese or morbidly obese patients and 57% in super-obese patients. " (note that this is a specific type of gastric bypass) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/
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So is that categorized as addiction? Or do these suggest that sugar intake irreversibly damages a person's metabolism?