So I heard a somewhat outrageous claim on the radio this morning. It was made by an advertisement for a very prestigious hospital chain in my area (SE Michigan).
The claim was that for 1/3 of severely overweight people, no amount of dieting is ever going to help them.
They then go on to discuss various “procedures” they offer to help people lose weight, up to 100lbs in 6 months. They don’t specifically mention gastric bypass or other procedures by name, but you are left witht he distinct impression this is what they are referring to.
Are there other medical procedures that don’t involve basically bypassing the digestive system that would cause someone to lose 100lbs in 6 months? and really, if you’re bypassing the digestive system, isn’t this really just a way of forced dieting?
I guess I am wondering how it could be impossible for someone to lose weight by dieting, but possible for it to work with this procedure. Either that, or I am losing respect for this hospital chain.
You can’t violate the laws of thermodynamics, no matter how massive you are.
That said, there is certainly a segment of overweight people who won’t be helped by “dieting” because they delude themselves about how much they are actually eating, or have a serious addiction-type problem with food. If you’re not in the right psychological state to lose weight, it’s not going to happen.
to the op, I seriously doubt that if you locked a bunch of fat people up and had ultra strict control over their diets that 1/3rd would mysteriously fail to lose weight…but as quoted there are other reasons for failure to lose weight via dieting.
fad diets have never worked but still sell well because people are looking for a magic fix. diets are simple, eat less, eat better, exercise. and have some patience.
hell I started working out regularly again a few months ago, and watching what I eat more closely. I havent lost a single pound but DAMN if I dont look and feel tons better. basically in my case I just moved stomach fat into muscle mass. so I am thinner even though I still weight the same.
Personally, I agree, I just dislike the marketing technique here. It seems to almost encourage people to give up on their health and go for a risky, invasive surgery because hey, they are probably in that 33% of people who can’t lose weight by dieting.
One of my customers is a bariatric surgeon. You are effectively limiting the amount of food they can take in and or process. The wiki page covers several methods of achieving this.
That said, there are ways people can sabotage even those. Small/fluid high calorie foods like squares of chocolate, various coffeehouse beverages or milkshakes for example can pump in enough calories even with the stomach only able to hold 2-4oz of food at a time.
As a guy who has lost 60 pounds over the last two years, this is the correct response and it can’t be emphasized enough.
IMHO, put away all of the diet colas, the “low-fat” whatevers, the processed crap, and just eat reasonable portions of healthier foods. If you want a steak, fine. But keep it to a couple of times a month and eat an 8oz. portion.
Don’t think that just because you eat “fat-free” cookies that you are going to lose weight. Don’t eat cookies at all except for the very rare occassional treat. Get used to not eating garbage food.
Hm, for-profit business claims that for a noticeable percentage of their target audience, nothing but their service will work. No possible conflict there
Never heard that claim myself, however it wouldn’t surprise me if somebody did a study of severely obese people and found that of those who reported trying “some kind of diet”, 1/3 of them didn’t lose any weight. That is not the same thing as saying that a diet won’t work, though. Not enough detail to draw any kind of meaningful conclusion.
I know a number of people who are or were extremely obese and they have all been able to lose weight without medical procedures or any kind of weird eating plan - just sensible portions of healthy food and becoming more and more active. No magic, but it requires really sticking to it and focusing on the long-term.
The problem is that everyone says “diet” like it’s all one thing. Changing your diet and exercise is an approach, much like medication is an approach. It’s so generic as to be meaningless (can you imagine if your doctor recommended you “take pills” when you were sick?).
Back in the 80s there were no overweight Ethiopians. Suggesting that a 1/3 of people can’t lose weight through diet is goofy.
However, suggesting that 1/3 of people don’t have the willpower necessary to make a diet work might be reasonable. Given the current degree of overweight/obese people in the western world, that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.
Yeah, substitute “won’t” for “can’t” and I wouldn’t disagree.
Rapid weight loss through a doctor-supervised, protein-sparing modified fast works for anyone who has the stones to see it through. I lost 150 pounds in 8-1/2 months, and have kept off 130 of those pounds (currently on a tune-up to lose those last 20 again). These programs exist all over the country, although I found the one I did by chance (a co-worker who went through it). Kaiser in San Francisco has the programs, and HMR also sponsors some. They’re not cheap, but that’s because of the doctor supervision and the regular blood tests to make sure you are staying healthy. (Actually, losing the weight isn’t nearly as difficult as keeping it off once you are eating real food again. It requires real discipline and a complete change of eating habits, much like **jtgain **was talking about.)
I think anyone considering bariatric surgery should look into this first. Surgery should be the last option, not the first.
Roddy
This is the key. A “diet” is something you do temporarily. That way lies Failure. You have to adjust your lifestyle if you want to make serious, lasting changes in your weight. We’ve seriously tweaked the way we eat around Casa Silenus, and it shows. I’m down 9 lbs. since the end of April, and I don’t feel the need to snack or binge. We eat fresh foods as often as possible, and have eliminated fast food from the diet completely. I have dropped a pants size, and I’m finding all sorts of new shirts in my closet that suddenly fit.
I don’t find this statement to be very sensitive, or very helpful. I am sure that for some portion of the population, it is really a very tough psychological battle to lose weight. I wouldn’t call those people “weak” anymore than I would call someone with clinical depression or diabetes “weak.”
I mean I suppose in the “survival of the fittest” line of thinking, they are less than optimally healthy, but to call them weak is just not productive.
They are using the phrase as a metaphor. As Blanche from the Golden Girls says: “When I say men are blinded by my good looks, they don’t actually do blind. They get their sight back in a few days”
All one has to do is look at people in concentration camps or the Siege of Lenningrad or the famine after WWII in Europe to see even really fat people got rail thin when they had only 1,000 calories (or less) to eat for extended periods of time
A great many also go on to lose the weight and then slowly start stretching that 2-4oz stomach out by going back to those same bad eating habits.
What’s really frustrating is that after gaining the weight back many of these people go on to try to rationalize with the myth spoken of in the OP. They can’t lose weight. It’s not possible for them. Completely untrue.
It’s not easy, that’s for sure. But like mentioned above, if you had the means to people into an area where they only had access to the food you give them they absolutely will lose weight.
I think it would be fair to say there are variations in how quickly some people will lose weight, which means people will perceive different levels of success from dietting. There are laws of thermodynamics but also some variations in people physiology. Men for instance seem to have to burn a lot more calories than women for a pound of weight loss, and people vary in their ability to gain muscle mass.
Another thing very often forgotten when people bring up the “thermodynamic” or “laws of physics” aspect of weight loss is that a substantial portion of the calories from food go into keeping the body’s temperature, and this portion varies widely from person to person. So it is certainly possible that the same amount of food that makes one person fat will not have the same effect on another – he’ll just sweat a lot more.
I don’t know about you, but being hungry (whcih happens a lot because of my overly large stomach) makes my already existing psychological problems a lot worse. I wouldn’t say this means I can’t lose weight, but I wouldn’t say it means I won’t either. Neither word covers the concept well enough.
In other words, I’d say can’t works in the same way as when you say a meth addict can’t quit. I believe addiction to food, since it causes a dopamine response, is highly underreported.
If they’re talking about willpower, 1/3 seems way too low. If they’re talking about metabolism, 1/3 seems way too high. I’m a high metabolism person, and I’ve met nobody else who has kept it past 30 (I started gaining weight after 35. I was 115 lbs from sophomore year in high school until 35, and my waist size fluctuates between 27-29". I expect to hit 150 lbs by 40, but currently I wear a 31".)
