burping_buzzard-the unwritten rule around here is, you make a claim, it’s up to YOU to back it up. Not for others to do so for you. Or to prove you wrong.
Point 6 is true, unless the person’s body is in starvation mode–then muscle will be used for fuel as well as fat, as Scylla pointed out. People with glandular disorders may be in starvation mode most or all of the time, so they would have an extremely difficult time burning fat. True, these people are very rare, but they provide a counterexample to your reasoning.
Other than that, you’re mostly right. There are also complications from leptin, the hormone that controls sensations of hunger. You can find the exact details in an article that you’ll find by googling on “Pima paradox”, which is a fascinating read for anyone interested in this subject.
Scylla,
Of course you are correct. This is what I get for being silly on my last point.
I stand by the rest of my post. Lets look at things on the simplest level. Lock a person in a room with nothing to eat (only water) for two weeks. Does anyone here truly believe that person will come out weighting the same or more as when they went in? Does this actually need to be “proven”? You can take skepticism too far. Eat less (yes, the definition of less varies from person to person), exercise (this isn’t even necessary, but will help) and you will loose weight. It is a fundamental fact of physics and biology.
I know that anecdotes don’t make up for statistics, but… In my family some people seem to have a tendency to be overweight. Diabetes and high blood pressure is normal among women after 35. My mon was obese a few years ago, until she was diagnosed with diabetes. Changes in her diet and walking 30 mins a day lead to her losing more than 60 lbs. Needless to say her health improved tremendously.
I did too gain a lot of weight a few years ago after taking a new job that didn’t leave me free time to exercise. I could have argued that I had a “normal” diet. Not bingeing, not meat, nothing fried, yet I did manage to put up on 45 extra pounds (I am 5’1"). I could have argued that it runs in the family, and yes it does. But I did have to change some things, eat more fruit, more liquids, more grains, less sugar, exercise regularly. But what really did the trick was weight-lifting. I am back to my original size 6 (no, I am not skinny). Scylla is totally correct. Only increasing your muscle mass will do the trick.
All too often I see people investing more energy in short term solutions and excuses than trying a change of life style. I know. I did. And now that I think of it, it wasn’t really a sacrifice. It’s even fun.
Okie Dokie…
To start I’d like to clarify my basic premise:
- Reliable study by reputable source – everything I have seen thus far meets my criteria. I think of a reputable source as being someone whose opinions are heard and respected by the FDA, the NIH, published in the various big journals, etc.
I do not consider studies that rely entirely on self-reported information as reliable. As will probably be pointed out here at some time, people who self report are notoriously inaccurate. This is usually used as an argument as to why a fat person cannot maintain weight on a low calorie diet, i.e. they are not actually taking in 1200 calories like they think they are. This is an argument for another place and time. However, if we discount the fat people’s testimony, then I think we have to discount the self-proclaimed formerly fat people’s testimony as well.
-
I said “lose it all successfully and keep it all off for 5 years” and that is exactly what I meant. Yes, for me to lose 75 pounds would be a great success, but it will not make me thin (or fit, if you prefer, say BMI of 25?). Only a 150 pound loss will get me there. Until I am thin, I am still subject to the same ridicule and biases that all fat people face. A success in the eyes of society at large is loss of the total amount, and maintenance of the new weight for life. Most media sources that refer to these short term studies as evidence of success don’t tell explain how the studies define a success, so everyone believes that success = thin. This is the kind of thinking I am trying to point out here.
-
blowero has an excellent question. I am referring to the total number of people who start a diet. If the vast majority of people cannot stick with a given program for 5 years, then there is something wrong with the program that makes it unlivable.
So, in sum I’m looking for studies that follow large groups of people for an extended period of time and report their findings on the entire group, for the entire duration of the study.
A couple of other things, I am primarily interested in the morbidly obese (BMI 35 and up) but I will take anything for starters here. I think that this is really going to come down to what people consider to be the nature of “willpower”.
Also a few givens that I am not going to begin to debate:
- Exercise provides excellent benefits to every person who does it, no matter their weight. It absolutely helps in the loss of weight and the maintenance of that loss.
- Eating healthfully (a wide range of fruits and veggies, quality lean protein, not a lot of extra calories from processed foods) provides excellent benefits to every person who does it, no matter their weight. It absolutely helps in the loss of weight and the maintenance of that loss.
- Everyone should do both on a regular basis for health reasons, regardless of weight.
- An excess of calories ingested over calories burned will cause weight gain. Fewer calories ingested than burned will cause a loss.
Epimetheus, since you agreed that your first example does not really meet my criteria, I will not waste time tearing it apart now. If you would like me to, let me know and I’ll deal with it later.
I think I addressed most of your other points/questions above. I do not think everybody should give up on healthful behavior. I do think that it is harmful to present diet/exercise as a cure for obesity when nobody has proven it to be so for large groups of people.
RickJay, agreed, however still being fat is always going to be a problem, plus the people who even can accomplish this much are few and far between.
Scylla, I agree with you in theory. I have lost somewhere between 30 and 45 pounds and kept it off for a couple of years. (I don’t know my highest weight, but I’ve dropped from a size 28 to a 24 and maintained it.) I know exactly how much effort it takes because I do it every day. The problem is that when you deal with people who are morbidly obese like me, while that loss is a vast improvement to health it’s not enough. I have another 150 pounds to go, but I expend all my energy trying to maintain the loss I have, every time I have dropped another 10-20 pounds below this it has bounced back up fairly quickly.
Another issue that I’ll try to dig up the cite for is that people who gain weight as adults, like you, find it much easier to lose that weight than people who have been overweight since childhood or adolescence.
even sven and ultrafilter I agree. The whole “willpower” issue is just another way of calling us lazy and creating a moral standard for a cultural and medical problem. More on that to come.
AlaItalia A for effort, but no cigar yet. Do I need to subscribe to the lancet to see the whole study, or is this all there is to see? All I see is the front page of the statement written by Alain Golay. Based on what I see here this one doesn’t meet my criteria stated above for this reason “The objectives of weight loss must be reasonable (5-10% weight loss)…” If the entire contents of the study were people who were only 5-10% overweight and they maintained that loss then you win. If they were bigger than that and only lost 5-10% they’re still fat, just less so. I’d really like to see rest of the study if there’s a way into the actual numbers.
Your second cite doesn’t fit the bill either. You’ve got about 450 people who were successful in losing some weight to start with. That’s fine, but out of how many? I have no problem believing that 450 people lost that much weight, but how many started diets at the same time as these 450? What did all they weigh when they started? Are all 450 of them considered to be fit at the end of 5 years, or are they still fat despite the loss? Also, if I’m not mistaken this group is entirely self reported, they voluntarily joined the registry after they had a loss, so these numbers are not as reliable as they would be if they joined a study, had a starting weight recorded, and then lost over a period of 5 years.
Mgibson, I fall somewhere between you and even sven on this issue. I have one great great aunt who was built like me. She died 10 years ago at 102. Everybody else in my family is slim to chunky. I believe that I am a product of my culture. My parents fed me what they believed to be healthy food when I was a kid (low fat was king, so lots of pasta, rice, cereal for breakfast, etc.), and they gave me what they considered to be healthy proportions. I have other issues on top of this, but I have no trouble believing that if I was born 200 years ago in Romania or Holland like my ancesters that I would have been thin. But I wasn’t and I’m fat. I know what got me here, I’m just trying to reverse the damage.
The Great Unwashed, no argument here. Where can I get that twitchy gene?
More later…that evil job thing keeps getting in the way.
So you want a study that shows that 15% of morbidly obese people who start a given diet have lost all the execess weight and kept the weight off after 5 years?
That seems virtually impossible. Let’s suppose that there is an effective diet that would do this if followed properly. I’d bet at least half the people who start the diet won’t continue due to lack of willpower or hardship or death or whatever. I’d bet at least half of the people left don’t manage to lose all the weight. Once you get to a reasonably fit level, it is quite difficult to go the last mile. And I’d bet that half of the people who did lose the weight didn’t manage to keep it all off for 5 years. IMHO, as long as you’re not morbidly obese again, a little weight gain isn’t that big a deal, especially over a long time period like that. That gives about 12% of people who meet your requirements. Which doesn’t even meet your desired level.
I don’t think there’s a chance that anyone will find a study that meets your standards. And I think that proves nothing.
I don’t feel that no willpower=lazy. An example is I know several of people that lead overly active lives. (as in moving all the time) One of them smokes. Has wanted to quit for years, but cannot muster up the willpower to do so. I would not call her lazy at all, since she probably sits down once in any given day. (to sleep) and has kept up this pace for 30 years. I think willpower is different from lazy. If I am wrong on this part let me know. I lack willpower in many different areas, but I wouldn’t consider myself lazy.
I hear that, and sleep.
As for the “something must be wrong with the diet, if many people cannot stick to it”, I offer another comparison.
Smoking again. I quit smoking some time back, and I used the nicotine patch. For two weeks. Many go through the whole 3 month program and still cannot quit smoking. It worked for me, and several people I have known, but for others it has not worked. Since it has not worked for so many people does that mean there is something wrong with the program? Or the people that cannot stick with it?
Smoking’s a little different, as nicotine is very strongly addictive. I’m not sure that invalidates your analogy, but it does cast some doubt on it.
But the following is what you originally posted in the Southwest Airlines thread (that this one spun off from):
When I originally read that, it really sounded like you were saying that, in spite of sticking to a diet, that some people such as yourself are incapable of losing weight.
Now it seems like you are backing off from that position, and saying that this subgroup of people are in fact incapable of sticking to a diet for 5 years. So isn’t it true that “healthful eating and exercise” in fact WOULD make one lose a significant amount of weight over time, the real problem being that they don’t continue it long enough? I don’t mean that as a slam on anyone, and please don’t think that I consider obese people to be somehow lacking in “willpower” or whatever you want to call it, or having some kind of moral failing, because that’s not what I think. But you DO agree that if you are overweight, you are eating more calories than you are burning, right?
So isn’t this really a behavioral issue? It seems to me that if you start a study with a group of obese people, you have already pre-selected a group that has trouble controlling their eating, so would it be any surprise that the majority are unable to stick to the program? If they had that ability, then they probably wouldn’t be overweight in the first place. So it seems to me that saying “there’s something wrong with the program” is kind of begging the question.
OK, let me rephrase slightly. There’s nothing wrong with the program if it works for 3% of the population, as far as that 3% are concerned. However, to tell 100% of the population that it’s going to work if they just try harder next time (and the next time, and the next time, and the next time) is assinine when it’s been proven over and over again that they won’t be successful.
Yes it’s a behavioral issue at it’s roots. Yes, eating more than you’re burning is the cause. The problem is that people throw around these over-simplifications without acknowledging the other influences in that behavior. Influences that come from the environment we live in (would you like fries with that?) and our bodies (production of hunger inducing hormones and other biological factors).
I’m very familiar with the willpower required to quit smoking. I’ve done it myself.
I think a better analogy is sleep. Everybody eats. Everybody sleeps. You can’t just stop sleeping for an extended period of time. Your body won’t let you. Cutting back on sleep for an extended period of time will cause deficits in emotional and intellectual capabilities. It will make you crazy eventually.
I can tell you two reasons why every weight loss attempt I have made has failed.
- Injury preventing regular exercise
- Hunger
If you take the sleep analogy a little farther, there’s two kinds of sleepiness. There’s the standard, end-of-the-day “I’m tired, I’ll go to bed now” sleepy. If you stay up for 24 or 48 hours at a stretch at some point your body just starts shutting down. You get that loopy drunk feeling (hell, maybe you’re drunk too, but that’s beside the point) and you start nodding off.
Maybe you’ve still got studying, or posting, or game playing to do. Maybe you’re driving your car and you know that you will hurt yourself and others if you do fall asleep. You reason for not sleeping doesn’t matter, after a point, no amount of willpower is going to keep you awake.
I think there are two types of hunger too. Maybe thin people don’t get the second kind. I don’t know. My personal experience with this is I get the standard “it’s been 5 hours since lunch, it’s time for a snack or dinner” hungry just like everyone else.
If I’m eating a more restricted diet I’m usually comfortable with that for several weeks. But after a while the deficits start adding up. I always know when I’m about to drop 5 pounds because I get that second type of hunger.
It really does feel like that insane need for sleep. Frighteningly so. When I get that kind of hunger it stays with me for several days. All the time.
So back to the analogy – you’re used to 8 hours of sleep a night. You decide that you need to accomplish something that will only allow you 4 hours of sleep a night until you get it done, possibly several years down the road. Once you get it done you can have 6 hours of sleep for the rest of your life. If you sleep more than that, you undo all the great stuff that you’ve accomplished so far. You go to bed every night at 2am and you get up at 6am. No naps, ever.
How long before you start hitting the snooze button? At what point do you sleep through the alarm and not even notice?
Is willpower ever going to be enough to keep you awake, normal, and productive on that schedule? For the rest of your life?
If 1-2% of the population does pull this off (say hello to your local E.R. phsyician), does this change your physical needs?
The heavier you get, the more biological factors come into play. Somebody mentioned leptin earlier. These triggers make our bodies think they need more food. Here’s another one they just discovered recently – http://www.msnbc.com/news/755855.asp
I think that there are probably many more little triggers like this. Each time we find one, it may help 2-3% of the people, but fail everybody else. That’s great, it’s progress.
However, to call it “lack of willpower”, or lazy, or whatever PC euphemism we throw at it next, when the majority can’t do it after 1 or 2 attempts is cruel and will continue to enforce feelings of failure and inadequacy in the morbidly obese.
People who feel like failures tend to be depressed and less productive members of society. The farther they get smashed down the harder it’s going to be on them to try the next thing.
Most people, including me up until a couple of months ago, buy into the whole idea that diet and exercise is enough to make motivated fat people thin for life. They sell it to us every day in magazines, on television, and in our doctors offices. It is enough for a very very small number of people. There’s more to it for the rest of us, but nobody seems to want to acknowledge that in a helpful way.
OK, let me rephrase slightly. There’s nothing wrong with the program if it works for 3% of the population, as far as that 3% are concerned. However, to tell 100% of the population that it’s going to work if they just try harder next time (and the next time, and the next time, and the next time) is assinine when it’s been proven over and over again that they won’t be successful.
Yes it’s a behavioral issue at it’s roots. Yes, eating more than you’re burning is the cause. The problem is that people throw around these over-simplifications without acknowledging the other influences in that behavior. Influences that come from the environment we live in (would you like fries with that?) and our bodies (production of hunger inducing hormones and other biological factors).
I’m very familiar with the willpower required to quit smoking. I’ve done it myself.
I think a better analogy is sleep. Everybody eats. Everybody sleeps. You can’t just stop sleeping for an extended period of time. Your body won’t let you. Cutting back on sleep for an extended period of time will cause deficits in emotional and intellectual capabilities. It will make you crazy eventually.
I can tell you two reasons why every weight loss attempt I have made has failed.
- Injury preventing regular exercise
- Hunger
If you take the sleep analogy a little farther, there’s two kinds of sleepiness. There’s the standard, end-of-the-day “I’m tired, I’ll go to bed now” sleepy. If you stay up for 24 or 48 hours at a stretch at some point your body just starts shutting down. You get that loopy drunk feeling (hell, maybe you’re drunk too, but that’s beside the point) and you start nodding off.
Maybe you’ve still got studying, or posting, or game playing to do. Maybe you’re driving your car and you know that you will hurt yourself and others if you do fall asleep. You reason for not sleeping doesn’t matter, after a point, no amount of willpower is going to keep you awake.
I think there are two types of hunger too. Maybe thin people don’t get the second kind. I don’t know. My personal experience with this is I get the standard “it’s been 5 hours since lunch, it’s time for a snack or dinner” hungry just like everyone else.
If I’m eating a more restricted diet I’m usually comfortable with that for several weeks. But after a while the deficits start adding up. I always know when I’m about to drop 5 pounds because I get that second type of hunger.
It really does feel like that insane need for sleep. Frighteningly so. When I get that kind of hunger it stays with me for several days. All the time.
So back to the analogy – you’re used to 8 hours of sleep a night. You decide that you need to accomplish something that will only allow you 4 hours of sleep a night until you get it done, possibly several years down the road. Once you get it done you can have 6 hours of sleep for the rest of your life. If you sleep more than that, you undo all the great stuff that you’ve accomplished so far. You go to bed every night at 2am and you get up at 6am. No naps, ever.
How long before you start hitting the snooze button? At what point do you sleep through the alarm and not even notice?
Is willpower ever going to be enough to keep you awake, normal, and productive on that schedule? For the rest of your life?
If 1-2% of the population does pull this off (say hello to your local E.R. phsyician), does this change your physical needs?
The heavier you get, the more biological factors come into play. Somebody mentioned leptin earlier. These triggers make our bodies think they need more food. Here’s another one they just discovered recently – http://www.msnbc.com/news/755855.asp
I think that there are probably many more little triggers like this. Each time we find one, it may help 2-3% of the people, but fail everybody else. That’s great, it’s progress.
However, to call it “lack of willpower”, or lazy, or whatever PC euphemism we throw at it next, when the majority can’t do it after 1 or 2 attempts is cruel and will continue to enforce feelings of failure and inadequacy in the morbidly obese.
People who feel like failures tend to be depressed and less productive members of society. The farther they get smashed down the harder it’s going to be on them to try the next thing.
Most people, including me up until a couple of months ago, buy into the whole idea that diet and exercise is enough to make motivated fat people thin for life. They sell it to us every day in magazines, on television, and in our doctors offices. It is enough for a very very small number of people. There’s more to it for the rest of us, but nobody seems to want to acknowledge that in a helpful way.
OK, let me rephrase slightly. There’s nothing wrong with the program if it works for 3% of the population, as far as that 3% are concerned. However, to tell 100% of the population that it’s going to work if they just try harder next time (and the next time, and the next time, and the next time) is assinine when it’s been proven over and over again that they won’t be successful.
Yes it’s a behavioral issue at it’s roots. Yes, eating more than you’re burning is the cause. The problem is that people throw around these over-simplifications without acknowledging the other influences in that behavior. Influences that come from the environment we live in (would you like fries with that?) and our bodies (production of hunger inducing hormones and other biological factors).
I’m very familiar with the willpower required to quit smoking. I’ve done it myself.
I think a better analogy is sleep. Everybody eats. Everybody sleeps. You can’t just stop sleeping for an extended period of time. Your body won’t let you. Cutting back on sleep for an extended period of time will cause deficits in emotional and intellectual capabilities. It will make you crazy eventually.
I can tell you two reasons why every weight loss attempt I have made has failed.
- Injury preventing regular exercise
- Hunger
If you take the sleep analogy a little farther, there’s two kinds of sleepiness. There’s the standard, end-of-the-day “I’m tired, I’ll go to bed now” sleepy. If you stay up for 24 or 48 hours at a stretch at some point your body just starts shutting down. You get that loopy drunk feeling (hell, maybe you’re drunk too, but that’s beside the point) and you start nodding off.
Maybe you’ve still got studying, or posting, or game playing to do. Maybe you’re driving your car and you know that you will hurt yourself and others if you do fall asleep. You reason for not sleeping doesn’t matter, after a point, no amount of willpower is going to keep you awake.
I think there are two types of hunger too. Maybe thin people don’t get the second kind. I don’t know. My personal experience with this is I get the standard “it’s been 5 hours since lunch, it’s time for a snack or dinner” hungry just like everyone else.
If I’m eating a more restricted diet I’m usually comfortable with that for several weeks. But after a while the deficits start adding up. I always know when I’m about to drop 5 pounds because I get that second type of hunger.
It really does feel like that insane need for sleep. Frighteningly so. When I get that kind of hunger it stays with me for several days. All the time.
So back to the analogy – you’re used to 8 hours of sleep a night. You decide that you need to accomplish something that will only allow you 4 hours of sleep a night until you get it done, possibly several years down the road. Once you get it done you can have 6 hours of sleep for the rest of your life. If you sleep more than that, you undo all the great stuff that you’ve accomplished so far. You go to bed every night at 2am and you get up at 6am. No naps, ever.
How long before you start hitting the snooze button? At what point do you sleep through the alarm and not even notice?
Is willpower ever going to be enough to keep you awake, normal, and productive on that schedule? For the rest of your life?
If 1-2% of the population does pull this off (say hello to your local E.R. phsyician), does this change your physical needs?
The heavier you get, the more biological factors come into play. Somebody mentioned leptin earlier. These triggers make our bodies think they need more food. Here’s another one they just discovered recently – http://www.msnbc.com/news/755855.asp
I think that there are probably many more little triggers like this. Each time we find one, it may help 2-3% of the people, but fail everybody else. That’s great, it’s progress.
However, to call it “lack of willpower”, or lazy, or whatever PC euphemism we throw at it next, when the majority can’t do it after 1 or 2 attempts is cruel and will continue to enforce feelings of failure and inadequacy in the morbidly obese.
People who feel like failures tend to be depressed and less productive members of society. The farther they get smashed down the harder it’s going to be on them to try the next thing.
Most people, including me up until a couple of months ago, buy into the whole idea that diet and exercise is enough to make motivated fat people thin for life. They sell it to us every day in magazines, on television, and in our doctors offices. It is enough for a very very small number of people. There’s more to it for the rest of us, but nobody seems to want to acknowledge that in a helpful way.
OK, let me rephrase slightly. There’s nothing wrong with the program if it works for 3% of the population, as far as that 3% are concerned. However, to tell 100% of the population that it’s going to work if they just try harder next time (and the next time, and the next time, and the next time) is assinine when it’s been proven over and over again that they won’t be successful.
Yes it’s a behavioral issue at it’s roots. Yes, eating more than you’re burning is the cause. The problem is that people throw around these over-simplifications without acknowledging the other influences in that behavior. Influences that come from the environment we live in (would you like fries with that?) and our bodies (production of hunger inducing hormones and other biological factors).
I’m very familiar with the willpower required to quit smoking. I’ve done it myself.
I think a better analogy is sleep. Everybody eats. Everybody sleeps. You can’t just stop sleeping for an extended period of time. Your body won’t let you. Cutting back on sleep for an extended period of time will cause deficits in emotional and intellectual capabilities. It will make you crazy eventually.
I can tell you two reasons why every weight loss attempt I have made has failed.
- Injury preventing regular exercise
- Hunger
If you take the sleep analogy a little farther, there’s two kinds of sleepiness. There’s the standard, end-of-the-day “I’m tired, I’ll go to bed now” sleepy. If you stay up for 24 or 48 hours at a stretch at some point your body just starts shutting down. You get that loopy drunk feeling (hell, maybe you’re drunk too, but that’s beside the point) and you start nodding off.
Maybe you’ve still got studying, or posting, or game playing to do. Maybe you’re driving your car and you know that you will hurt yourself and others if you do fall asleep. You reason for not sleeping doesn’t matter, after a point, no amount of willpower is going to keep you awake.
I think there are two types of hunger too. Maybe thin people don’t get the second kind. I don’t know. My personal experience with this is I get the standard “it’s been 5 hours since lunch, it’s time for a snack or dinner” hungry just like everyone else.
If I’m eating a more restricted diet I’m usually comfortable with that for several weeks. But after a while the deficits start adding up. I always know when I’m about to drop 5 pounds because I get that second type of hunger.
It really does feel like that insane need for sleep. Frighteningly so. When I get that kind of hunger it stays with me for several days. All the time.
So back to the analogy – you’re used to 8 hours of sleep a night. You decide that you need to accomplish something that will only allow you 4 hours of sleep a night until you get it done, possibly several years down the road. Once you get it done you can have 6 hours of sleep for the rest of your life. If you sleep more than that, you undo all the great stuff that you’ve accomplished so far. You go to bed every night at 2am and you get up at 6am. No naps, ever.
How long before you start hitting the snooze button? At what point do you sleep through the alarm and not even notice?
Is willpower ever going to be enough to keep you awake, normal, and productive on that schedule? For the rest of your life?
If 1-2% of the population does pull this off (say hello to your local E.R. phsyician), does this change your physical needs?
The heavier you get, the more biological factors come into play. Somebody mentioned leptin earlier. These triggers make our bodies think they need more food. Here’s another one they just discovered recently – http://www.msnbc.com/news/755855.asp
I think that there are probably many more little triggers like this. Each time we find one, it may help 2-3% of the people, but fail everybody else. That’s great, it’s progress.
However, to call it “lack of willpower”, or lazy, or whatever PC euphemism we throw at it next, when the majority can’t do it after 1 or 2 attempts is cruel and will continue to enforce feelings of failure and inadequacy in the morbidly obese.
People who feel like failures tend to be depressed and less productive members of society. The farther they get smashed down the harder it’s going to be on them to try the next thing.
Most people, including me up until a couple of months ago, buy into the whole idea that diet and exercise is enough to make motivated fat people thin for life. They sell it to us every day in magazines, on television, and in our doctors offices. It is enough for a very very small number of people. There’s more to it for the rest of us, but nobody seems to want to acknowledge that in a helpful way.
slackergirl,
I agree with everything you said. People gain weight b/c they eat more than they burn. Why they eat more than they burn is an entirely different, and much more difficult question. I have no problem believing that some people are genetically programmed to eat a lot (via some type of “always hungry/extreme hunger” feedback from the brain), and that “just say no/will power” is not a realistic complete solution for many people. Makes perfect sense to me. OTOH, I question that this is not at least a partial factor for many people. I admit I don’t have the faintest idea myself. I feel qualified only to address the first issue, which many over-weight appear (in my experience) to deny.
slackergirl,
I agree with everything you said. People gain weight b/c they eat more than they burn. Why they eat more than they burn is an entirely different, and much more difficult question. I have no problem believing that some people are genetically programmed to eat a lot (via some type of “always hungry/extreme hunger” feedback from the brain), and that “just say no/will power” is not a realistic complete solution for many people. Makes perfect sense to me. OTOH, I question that this is not at least a partial factor for many people. I admit I don’t have the faintest idea myself. I feel qualified only to address the first issue, which many over-weight appear (in my experience) to deny.
Holy quad-post batman. I swear I only hit submit once. I am one wordy mo-fo today.
slackergirl, these are things you have said in this thread:
You are the only one I see throwing around generalizations about fat people. Everyone doesn’t believe success (on a diet plan) = thin. So far the responses seem to indicate that others think success = loss of any amount of weight.
What do you mean the “willpower issue” is a way of calling “us” lazy? I think Epimetheus answered that one. No willpower does not equal lazy. You brought lazy into this discussion. In my experience, “everyone” does not think fat people are lazy.
Nor does everyone think diet and exercise will make anyone “thin for life.” Reasonable people know a person who is morbidly obese in their 30’s is probably not ever likely to be “thin.”
Some people decry the public’s perception of fat people and the media’s glorification of thin people yet misunderstand the public’s perception and subconsciously accept the media’s influence. Some people also will constantly look for options other than diet and exercise as a means to weight loss, whether they are behavioral techniques, drugs, or surgery. These people should take their own advice and ignore the media (do you hear ugly people saying, oh, I can’t believe the media pushes all these pretty people on us and creates unrealistic expectations!), not try to “lose it all,” try instead to modify their lifestyles to include healthier eating, daily reading of affirmations if necessary, as much exercise as you can get, all those common sense things which have been preached by the American Dietetic Association, American Medical Association, American Heart Association, etc. They shouldn’t make “lose 100 pounds” their goal, but joining a gym and swimming twice a week, something attainable. They shouldn’t search and search for justification and the magic bullet, knowing it doesn’t exist.
I agree with SmackFu, the study for which you search does not exist.
So the best weight control plan has to account for the person on it getting injured or otherwise incapacitated all the time. And hardly any one of them does. Interesting.
I personally don’t think laziness has anything to do with it.
An overweight person is just as likely to be extremely conscientious and hard working as a thin person.
Willpower and discipline may come into it.
For example, an overweight person may desire to become thin very badly, and plan diets, and think about it all the time, but lack the willpower or discipline to follow through on their desire. Deferring gratification is not so easy for some people.
On the other hand, what I think is most important is what I’d call the desire threshhold.
There’s an old saying that I like:
“The cook was involved in dinner. The chicken was committed.”
If the desire threshhold is elevated to such a degree that weight loss becomes a priority, the person will likely succeed and remain sucessful in their goal.
I think a lot of people fail at weight loss because while it may be desirable it never becomes so important that it supersedes the other desires that contradict it.
It was that way with me when I quit smoking (which remains the hardest thing I’ve done) I failed many times over ten years, simply because my desire to quit smoking wasn’t strong enough to overcome the pleasure I recieved from cigarettes long enough for me to break the addiction.
When my wife became preganant I became committed to quitting (in a not unsimilar manner in which the chicken was committed.)
That’s really it. If it’s important enough to a person, they will lose weight.
Well of course the study I’m looking for doesn’t exist. That’s kinda the point folks.
Obviously a few of you took the bait because you thought somebody must have proven by now that it is possible for more than 15% of fat people to lose all of their extra weight based on diet and exercise, and keep it off for 5 years. Some of them have to be motivated enough, right?
It seems like a reasonable statement to make. It’s common sense.
Except you discovered that it’s not true when you looked it up. There are billions of dollars to be made by the people who reinforce this idea in the media and the medical establishment. They have a vested interest in pushing this idea.
AlaItalia, you’re right. I have been throwing generalizations around here, and I apologize for it.
When I made the original statement in the other thread I was tired and angry at the people who stick with the idea that if we’d all just stop eating we would fit in the airplane seats. I expect it in daily life, but I always hope for a little better from the people I respect around here. I wasn’t really considering the fact that somebody might actually base a thread on it.
I wasn’t worried, because I knew that such a study does not exist. The real numbers mostly come to a 0-4% success rate with 50% of total excess weight lost and maintained for 5 years. The percent of success gets lower as the starting weights get higher. (I’m referencing studies primarily referred to in Losing It by Laura Fraser, The Fat of the Land by Michael Fumento, and the NIH guidelines for the treatment of obesity)
Having said that, I do still stand by the basic idea that prompted it.
You are also correct that reasonable people don’t take the media seriously. I don’t. I never did. But I took my doctors seriously. And they also have sold me the same line for 10 years now. Mostly to get me out of their offices because they know there isn’t anything else they can do for me.
Plenty of reasonable people don’t have the time to read the right books and really look at the actual numbers behind the research. If they did the diet industry wouldn’t be the 34 billion dollar enterprise that it is. As long as they believe in the possibility they’ll keep wasting time and money on it, and then feeling like shit when they fail.
capacitor, huh? They do need to take it into account as a possibility. And that possibility gets greater as the weights get higher. Most people with BMIs greater than 40 have comorbidities including constant foot pain, arthritis, and respiratory difficulties. They start out being physically uncomfortable with exercise, and they increase their risk of injury because their bodies aren’t built to handle that kind of stress on top of the weight.
I was listening to Science Friday on NPR a few weeks back and a woman on there was referencing a study, which I believe is the second one AlaItalia mentioned earlier, in which people who successfully lost weight and maintained it described their exercise routine. They reported 75 minutes of exercise daily to maintain. I don’t know any thin people who exercise that much.
When a person who hasn’t ever had a weight problem sprains an ankle they aren’t going to lose much ground by being sedentary for 2 months, and then limited for a few months beyond that. A formerly fat person who depends on regular exercise to create a calorie deficiit is going to start gaining back the weight fairly rapidly.
Any weight loss program that eventually does work for the majority of people will have to take into account the day to day realities of our lives. Illness, injuries, rainy days, and children all play a part in life, and all can occasionally prevent exercise.
Scylla, I agree that motivation plays a part. There’s just more to it than that when people get bigger.
I am motivated to the point that I will be paying $30,000 for a surgeon to install a silicone band around my stomach in a couple of months. I will be paying this bill for the next 6 years, assuming everything goes right. If it doesn’t I’ll be dead and it won’t matter, or I’ll be deeper in debt to the tune of $2000 a day for every extra day I spend in the hospital.
It was dealing with my injury and realizing that it wasn’t going to get any better until I lost weight that led me down this path. If someone had told me 5 years ago that this was the only way to increase my odds of dropping below 300 pounds I would have done it then and saved myself a lot of physical pain and emotional hell. But they didn’t.
My primary doctor, endocrinologist, podiatrist, and physical therapist all told me to “try harder this time” because I could do it if my heart was really in it. They would pull out authoritative brochures and things that state that 50-60% of people who tried X lost Y amount of weight. Those statistics were accurate. They just never told me that the studies ended after a year and 99% of the morbidly obese people gained every pound back within 10 years.