So many physically fit people in the gym.
So many physically fit people on diets.
So many physically fit people claiming that their efforts are keep them fit.
So many people fooling themselves…
Worse yet, they claim that anyone can do it. “See, I can…”
So many people don’t know that no matter what they do, they will neither gain of lose weight.
95% of attempts to “diet and exercise” fail, fall off the charts and studies, and the “healthcare professionals” use the 5% as showing themselves to be successful.
Congratulations, John DiFool! I hope your good work continues. I lost 30 pounds and have kept it off for four years. I know 30 is not a lot but still, I’m proud of it. My goal is to lose another 20 but I suspect that may not happen. Exactly because of the things explained in this thread. The number of calories I ate to lose that weight will now make me gain back, and fewer calories feel like “deprivation”. So as of now I am happy to keep the weight off and my blood pressure back to normal. I hope all the other “losers” in this zombie thread are still succeeding at their losses. And Manda Jo, your posts were very clear, correct and convincing, and helpful!
Oh, and GarySutcliff, if you really think that people are not physically fit through their efforts and that the things we do are not helping us lose weight, I wonder how you explain the fact that since I started working out my blood pressure is 20 points lower.
I don’t think grumbling stomach is the main thing. I don’t think it is that difficult to experience hunger. I can quite easily go a day without eating if I want. I think it’s an addiction of sorts. It’s not that it’s difficult to not eat, it’s that it’s difficult not to eat.
Humans only have a certain amount of will power. This probably has an adaptive evolutionary reason, since it could be disadvantageous if people start deciding not to eat or not to have sex and would have no trouble carrying through with this. I don’t think overweight people have less will power necessarily, I think that they like food more. For me, if playing computer games would make me overweight, I’m quite certain that I would be. It requires too much will power to constantly fight the urge, when the loss you incur of a single failure is so low.
Old thread I know and the National Weight Control Registry numbers have already been cited but here’s some more numbers, these from 2010.
Note: this study evaluated those with >5% weight loss (many others used 10%) but losing at least 5% has been found to be highly correlated with significant health impacts so long as it maintained with healthy lifestyle habits.
Achieving and maintaining a weight loss sufficient to have major health impact is doable. It takes consistent effort but it is doable.
As to the rest of this … maybe we should just have a sticky with all the studies demonstrating how the body (perhaps primarily hypothalamic brain centers that control metabolism, activity, and eating behaviors) works to preserve a body mass as a set point once established; how the reward centers (that indeed overlap some with the circuits involved in certain addictions) work to overpower the satiety centers given certain inputs; how the tendency to become obese if placed within our modern obesiogenic environment is strongly influenced by genetic and epigenetic factors and by changes to the brain that often occur beginning with the prenatal environment and exposures there and continue across the lifespan; and how fitness may matter if not more than, then at least as much as, fatness.
Humans did not suddenly become creatures of less will power than they have been for the rest of our time on this planet. But we have created a different environment, one that has Big Food Inc created foods designed to hit the pleasure centers and not hit the satiety ones (and thereby sell more product), one in which those foods (or food-like substances if you will) surround us all the time in abundance, and one in which the default state is not at least moderate activity (as it pretty much has been for most of history) but being sedentary.
The odd thing is not that this historically extremely atypical modern environment causes obesity in many but that it doesn’t in all of us!
Is the solution to exhort greater will power? Or does identifying the cause as a changed environment suggest some alternative approaches as well?
Five percent of 300lbs is about 15lbs. I could not find the average weight for the participants in the study, but we can guess it’s less than 300lbs.
In this meta-study cited at the beginning of this thread, 5% percent of participants in a certain diet kept off more than 7kg (15.5lbs.) for over a period of five years (three diets were tested, and this was the best result).
It looks like both studies produced pretty similar results. If one-third of participants managed to keep off more than 5% of their body fat, we still do not know how much more than 5% they kept off. It’s possible that a majority of the one-third only kept off between 10-20 lbs.
Probably correct with the caveat that if that I would not use the word “only” there before the 10 to 20 lbs. Again, significant health benefits are gained by such a loss.
My question is… when does working out get easier? Almost every success story I read tells me that working out = energy and healthy eating = energy… I don’t eat junk food (I love to cook from fresh - but I like to eat enough to get me to my current 248 lbs)
I’ve gone on diets and fallen off the wagon about a dozen times. Mainly, I’m trying to stick to working out an hour daily. I’m usually dead after thirty-forty minutes. A few times I push through to an hour, and then I’m just dead tired after.
My current exercise kick has been going since January, and I’m pretty much constantly tired.
What kind of working out do you do? You shouldn’t be tired after 30 minutes unless you are doing too much of one thing. I do weights for maybe 15-20 minutes, and ride a bike (I’m rehabbing a new knee) and then walk for an hour. I only get tired on the days I don’t work out. Are you mixing up things or what?
I’ve been using an exercise bike. I actually really liked biking as a kid. I’m wishing I stuck with it longer - I had this idea where I worked out for a year, and then I’d be at a point where I can buy a bike and go to the park again.
It wipes me out, though. It’s quite demoralizing.
It’s not supposed to get easier. If working out feels easy to you, then you’re not going to see progress. Progress comes from pushing past your comfort zone.
If you’re exhausted after 45 minutes, then you’re doing it right. Feel good about it.
Yes, I agree. But on the other hand , a decent percentage of weight loss recidivists are people who fall into one of the following categories:
People who are focused on losing weight for an event like a wedding or a reunion and once the event is done their motivation fades.
People who go on unsustainable diets like 800-calories-a-day worth of diet shakes.
People who are seriously mentally ill.
So if you are reasonably sane and you follow a reasonable, sustainable, balanced diet which you intend to follow long-term, then I would guess your chances are a lot better.
My free unprofessional advice:
Don’t build your weight loss strategy around a daily workout. Because if you do, you are just one torn muscle away from re-gain. Instead, build your weight loss strategy around eating less junk food and eating less in general. Use your daily workout to improve your fitness and to improve your self-image.
My son took a nutrition class that claimed the following. You have a certain number of fat cells that are a certain level of full. If you lose weight, you have the same number of cells, they’re just emptier or empty, and they can send signals that they’d like to be filled. It takes seven years for your body to adjust, pruning away the extra fat cells. Until those cells are gone, it is very easy to regain the weight you’ve lost. So don’t count your weight loss as yours until it’s been off for seven years.
Emphasis added. The bolded part is variable. What people mean when they say that is that what they’ve been told to expect they were burning is not what their bodies actually burned.
An example is my youngest son, who tends to be a bit OCD. He’s lost about 50 pounds over the last three years or so. He’s kept records of every bite and any significant exercise. (And he’s been doing significant walking, running, and cycling.) He hit a plateau for about half a year. He tinkered with his diet during that time, changing his daily caloric intake for three week segments. He also changed the number of miles he was running per week. He found out that he could vary his intake by 500 calories, within a certain range, and he would still stay at the same weight, plus or minus the standard wobble. Changes in exercise also did not cause a breakthrough, not even doing half marathons three times a week.
Most of the calories you burn in a day are not for excercise or work. Your basal metabolic rate accounts for about 75% (first page google results - actual percentage may vary) of the calories you burn. If the body wants to conserve, it has a lot of room to do it in.
My son may be pushing past his plateau. He’s lost a few pounds again in the last month. But for half a year, he was planning his meals for weight loss, cooking his meals for weight loss, avoiding celebration foods for weight loss, recording for weight loss, exercising for weight loss, and not losing any weight. After having done all of that for three years.
Not everyone can sustain momentum through that kind of thing. If he hadn’t been keeping such complete records, he might have started second guessing himself. If he hadn’t known that the body can pull these tricks, he might have gotten depressed or given up. Because according to the charts that purport to measure calories burned, he was supposed to be losing weight. Fortunately, he was aware that the body can turn the thermostat down and burn less, just because it wants to.
He keeps shaking his head. “I’ve started losing weight again. You know what I’m doing that’s different? Nothing.”
I agree, except I do think it gets more enjoyable after a while. I’ve been doing crossfit for a few months now, and the first 3 weeks were pretty brutal. I had to drag myself to class. Now I really love it and hate to miss a day, even though every time is still hard as hell. So it gets better, but not really easier.
Not quite though. Fat cells (adipocytes) are actually in flux, being replaced along the way in similar numbers. Fat mass gain, especially early in life can cause an increase in both the size of the cells (hypertrophy) and in their number (hyperplasia). With fat mass loss cells are replaced such that the numbers don’t change much but the average size decreases. Different size cells function differently metabolically even if total fat mass is the same in many positive ways but fat mass loss also causes the fat cells to send out less leptin which changes BMR and has brain impacts that increase the sense of hunger. And obesity causes leptin resistance so higher levels had become ineffective … OTOH maintained lower calorie diet and exercise can partially reverse that resistance …
It really gets very complicated. Which brings us to your next part …
Exactly. The problem with the “the laws of physics” folks is that they think in terms of a very simple machine, not one that adjusts itself constantly in response to changes made. There are few constants in these calculations, it is instead a non-linear system of many parts, only a few of them that we have the vaguest grasp of.
Though I suspect that people generally fail to lose weight more because of hunger, addiction, and so on, than because they’re putting too much trust into average metrics.
If you have posted this earlier you might remind us but maybe you can regale us of your story.
Here are a few if my questions for starters…
What age range are you.
What was your highest weight?
What did you do to lose the weight?
Why did you stop losing?
Did you have a support team helping you?