I recall reading that the extra 10-15% of weight is in the various blood vessels, connective tissue and associated fluids surrounding the fat cells.
That article you are using as a cite is incorrect:
I don’t know how many times this has needed to be said on the SDMB over the years - human bodies obey the laws of thermodynamics. I’m sorry if this upsets people on here (it usually does), but it’s a fact of the physics of the world we live in. It may be difficult to lose weight, it may be unhealthy to the individual from a physical or emotional standpoint, but if you reduce your caloric intake to less than that which you expend via your activity and base metabolism, then by God you will lose weight even if Rabid Christmas Raccoons tear your thyroid completely out of your body.
And regarding self-awareness of calories - a long time ago I posted an array of cites on here from peer-reviewed medical journals, showing how incredibly inaccurate people’s notions were of what they eat in an average day. IIRC, people tended to underestimate the amount of calories they intake by 40-75%. And, IIRC, when I dared to post such on the SDMB I got flamed for “picking on Dopers.” :rolleyes:
I hate it when that happens.
Cite?
I’ve personally known several people who can hold their breath til they pass out (I do it every now and then) and 3% seems like an extremely low number.
I doubt it’s even that high. It is extremely difficult to hold one’s breath until unconsciousness because you have to overcome the extremely powerful panic breathing response which occurs; it’s so strong that drowning swimmers eventually try to inhale even under water–which results in their demise. This occurs, not because oxygen levels drop, but when the blood concentration of CO2 exceeds a certain critical level. Once this happens, your brain starts screaming at you that YOU HAVE TO BREATHE RIGHT NOW OR YOU WILL DIE!!! And almost everyone does. Even if attempting to breathe at that moment will kill you.
And no, sorry, I don’t believe you can do it.
Wow, that’s a lot of “cite” requests, mostly among people who are misreading my comments. I’m not claiming to violate any thermodynamic laws. I’m not claiming that diets don’t work among people who follow them to the letter. Let me state my claims specifically, and if anyone wants cites after that, I’ll try to dig them up: (read diet as diet + exercise, if you want)
- The FDA has standards for drug treatments re: safety and effectiveness.
- Trials to meet those standards must INCLUDE THE EFFECTS OF NON-COMPLIANCE.
- Most diets don’t end up with the dieter losing weight after a year, but gaining it.
- Higher weight is unhealthy.
- Therefore, if diet were a drug, the FDA would not approve it as safe and effective.
- But there are no better alternatives for most people (Bariatric surgeries carry a high (but declining) mortality rate, cost $30,000 or more, and are not covered by most insurances. Therefore they’re not a viable option for most people. For those people who do have the option, bariatric surgery is far, far more effective than dieting, and widely recommended by doctors, especially for those with AO Diabetes).
I also made the claim, that I probably can’t cite, that diet failure is likely a willpower issue. If you want to dispute that, fine.
My final claim is that “it’s just willpower” isn’t a valid reason to dismiss something: lots of things are “just willpower,” and are difficult or impossible for much of the population. As far as determining effectiveness goes, you can’t just disregard those negative effects which are willpower-dependent. If people could routinely overcome willpower-issues, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, because dieting would work. And for most obese people, it doesn’t.
I’ve you’re not going to provide a cite don’t just complain that you’ve been asked to give one and repeat things that others in the thread clearly don’t agree with. If you can’t substantiate your outrageous claim that 95% of people who go on diets end up heavier than they start then either retract it or make clear you don’t have a cite, but don’t just post a follow-up saying effectively “my post is my cite”.
Although an apparent exaggeration, it’s not nearly as outrageous as you’d like to believe. A recent UCLA metastudy found, in part:
Bolding mine.
I didn’t provide cites, because people were mostly asking me to cite things I didn’t say (that there were medical conditions that violated thermodynamics, for example). But you’re quite clear above, so:
Cite (PDF), UCLA Research Cite: Note that the article claims they think it’s a myth, but then give evidence in support. Cite: costs money to read, but it’s the original study Cite that there isn’t a lot of study here.
This “outrageous claim” has been the mainstream clinical success number since 1959. People keep claiming that it’s inflated, but few studies do better, and I’ve never seen a study for any diet that gets a success rate better than about 15% without sequestering patients.
But even if the number is, say, 75%, I claim that won’t meet the effectiveness bar, especially when failure results in more harm.
I’m claiming dieting doesn’t work, not that it can’t, and people are having trouble making the distinction.
Fine, I stand corrected. TimeWinder - I think I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think the final sentence of our latest post is a good summary of what you’re arguing as doesn’t and can’t seem to be the same thing in practical terms. If dieting doesn’t work for the vast majority (95% or 83%) and indeed makes people heavier than when they started, then that’s tantamount to saying it can’t work for most people.
Yeah, I keep trying to re-word that to be clearer. Really the issue is (and I think always is when this debate comes up) that thermodynamics isn’t even really relevant - compliance dwarfs it as an effect, and people just dismiss that as “willpower,” as though it were something easy to turn on and off.
An interesting question, I think, would be: can we identify the people for whom it “can” work, before subjecting them to the diet? For example, those 3% (or whatever, I couldn’t find a cite for it) who can hold their breath until they pass out are probably good dieting candidates. There’s a magic 5-17% of people out there for whom dieting and exercise IS the answer – the problem is identifying them without making the situation worse for everyone else (well, everyone else overweight, anyway).
But given that the thread title is “Can some people NOT lose weight” what you’re positing isn’t that they can’t (in that it’s not physically impossible for them to lose weight) just that it’s incredibly unlikely that they will. That isn’t, however, the same question. As Una says quite clearly even if you have a missing thyroid your body can’t run itself on nothing, and an absence or very low level of calories (particularly against a regime of higher levels of activity) WILL result in weight loss.
So what we seem to have agreed on is that there is no medical condition which makes it completely impossible to lose weight, that a small number of people have medical issues that make it extremely hard to even if they do everything right, but that the main reason people don’t (even when they try) is that they don’t really try very hard.
Or am I summarising wrong?
People can’t lose weight if they are taking in more calories than they are burning.
That said, I believe individual metabolism is genetically programmed. I have always been thin and I eat like a cow, I presume because I burn calories faster than average. It is very easy for me to lose weight if I need to with very little effort. But I have many friends who put tremendous effort into their weight loss programs and still struggle to lose . It doesn’t mean they can NOT lose weight, but it will be more of an effort.
WHAT?
IMHO
Eating healthy and consuming the number of calories to meet your dietary and health goals works. There are ways for most people to exercise. A person can lose weight and improve their health if they set out to do it and it is a high priority.
One of the most important things to consider is patience. It takes a while.
I cry bullshit to the studies that say diet and exercise don’t work or detrimental in the end. You are either eating right, exercising and living a healthy lifestyle or not. Once you stop being patient and determined and break the diet you are living an unhealthy lifestyle. WTF. The studies mean nothing to me. I don’t give a shit if you gain 20% more fat after you stop eating right and start sitting around. It dosent really have anything to do with anything. Yes there are some reasons you can gain more weight back but probably because you shed it to fast, didn’t exercise, or eat right and further ruined your metabolism. To me it is further evidence that one really needs to take their health more seriously.
I quit smoking, drinking, and drugs and lost a good deal of weight. If I start smoking again it is not the fault of a quitting philosophy. If I started drinking today and by next year I drank more than when I quit does that have anything to do with AA?
Wanna quit looking like a cake eater quit fucking eating cake.
Move your body and eat the proper amounts of good healthy food. If you must, abstain form certain foods or even categories completely. Write it down and log your exercises and caloric intake.
It is not easy in fact this kind of lifestyle change is very difficlut.
Since you failed to provide any link at all, I’m going to call your quote worthless.
Your own quoted text only cites one study, and that only involved a portion of the population as a whole (obese folk), and also fails to indicate whether the weight was regained while a diet regime was in place, or if the subjects had returned to pre-diet eating habits.
eta for the OP: I also think that some people grossly overestimate the effectiveness of their own fitness and dietary routines, or the speed at which their weightloss should happen. If they are exercising they may have a weight increase due to muscle growth which would also offset the loss of fat.
You can call it potato salad, if you want to, but that don’t mean it tastes good at a picnic. Despite the fact that I forgot to include the link, it’s out there for anyone who has the vaguest clue how to search. Since that’s not you, apparently, here you go.
Thanks for the link. But have a little grace in the future and don’t lash out at others for your own mistakes. The quoted text you provided was ambiguous in nature and statistically of no merit to the OP or debate at hand.
Cheers.
Horseshit. If you were truly concerned about displaying grace and civility here, you’d have simply asked me to provide the forgotten link instead of attacking my post as worthless. What, did you think I just made shit up?
Hey, that’s my word! 
Sorry! I usually say “bullshit” but I was afraid if I used it too much, Penn & Teller would come after me for copyright infringement or something. I think I could take you if you wanna fight over it, but there’s two of them! 