It’s almost like I said something along those lines in my very next sentence:
Sure, but those calories are useless. They go to unhealthy belly fat.
The equation isn’t “useful calories minus calories burned”. The usefulness of the calories is irrelevant, unless by “usefulness” you mean that they encourage you to go out and be physically active, thus burning them.
OK, sure. I probably misunderstood your OP.
Scared Shitless Fitness?
Summary
(hidden because we’re in GQ, but the video still starts out pretty loud and the first few seconds might not be work appropriate)
The problem with crash diets is that the ‘reward’ you get is losing lots of weight. Every dieter eventually has to transition to a point where weight loss is no longer the goal, and that’s tough.
You need to create a feedback loop independent of weight loss, because weight loss always plateaus. That’s a big part of why exercise is important: it’s a positive feedback loop that mitigates hunger, produces its own happytime endorphins, is measurable, and is independent of weight loss.
That is not at all “along those lines” of what I wrote, and your simplistic equation of:
is not correct. Again, calories are literally a measurement of enthalpy released from a bomb calorimeter which is not at all representative of the way the body breaks down and uses nutrients from food.
Stranger
No. Whst they need for their body weight is the amount that will sustain that body weight. If they’re getting exactly what they need for their body weight, they won’t gain, but they won’t lose either. (Exercise may well cause them to gain muscle and lose some fat; there may be some weight loss, or there may be little weight change or even a gain in weight, but with results of better appearance and more importantly better health and greater ability to get around easily.)
What you seem to be talking about is giving them only what appears to be needed for the body weight you think they should have. And that one’s really tricky, because their bodies, as has been said, will adjust their metabolism in one of the few instances of actually doing more with less.
The best thing to do is to not get so heavy in the first place that it’s interfering with one’s life. And I strongly suspect that part of the key to that, for many people, is to not go on weight loss diets; or at least to stop going on them before the resulting bounce upwards gets entirely out of hand.
As an avid fan of My 600 Pound Life, I feel extremely well qualified to answer this.
Every episode follows the same formula, albeit with differing results based on the individual. Prior to approving his patients for gastric bypass surgery, the show’s doctor, Dr. Nowzaradan, asks them to lose between 40 and 60 pounds a month (based on gender and height). If they can do that for 2 months consecutively, which requires them to stick to a sub-2000 calorie a day diet, they get the green light for surgery.
Some people do this out of the gate, which makes you wonder if they even need gastric bypass. It’s shocking, because these are people eating 8 to 10 thousand calories a day (or more) who are somehow able to just… stop. I don’t think the long-term data is in their favor, which is why the gastric bypass is still necessary, but it’s still impressive.
Most patients take a month or two to really “get” it – they’ll cut back to 5 or 6 thousand calories a day, which I’m sure is incredibly difficult, but is nowhere near enough to get them where they need to be.
Other patients never get it, and in a few very sad examples, they end up hospitalized because their bodies are shutting down. In direct response to the OP, in these cases people are put on 1200 calorie diets, enforced by hospital staff. These patients invariably lose weight at the rate that’s expected of them, 40 to 60 pounds a month.
The drawback, of course, is that this is very expensive, and is only ever done in life or death situations. Is the same thing possible for less money via some food-prison? Sure. But…
What you learn from the show is that most of the people in this situation are not mentally well, and they’re also generally living in extreme poverty. They almost all have kids or family members that they’re taking care of. Voluntarily checking themselves into a food-prison is just not realistic.
I think I worded that both poorly and incorrectly. What I meant was determining how many calories they need to maintain their current weight, and putting them on a healthy diet that will put them at a reasonable caloric deficit rather than a crash diet.
So if the Mayo Clinic’s calculator tells me a given individual needs 4000 calories a day to maintain their weight, they probably shouldn’t jump right to a 2000-calorie diet. They can eat 3500 a day and they’ll still lose weight.
I just so happened to catch an episode of 60 minutes recently where they discussed obesity. It seems they have a medication that very effectively treats this disease. It’s very costly though. I know that doesn’t quite address your question, but they do mention that the # one cause for obesity is genetic.
Ozempic, and some other recent medications. Unfortunately diabetics and people who are obese are having a hard time getting it because people like Elon and Kim Kardashian are touting it for non-medical weightloss.
Locking somebody in a cell won’t work by itself. You need to isolate him from the other prisoners because they will find it amusing to feed him.
Speaking from experience.
This. There are some patients that Dr. Now admits to the hospital and places on a controlled diet. As you note, all but one of those patients lost weight. The one that didn’t had a very forceful personality and had her boyfriend sneaking food in for her, leading to an infamous scene where Dr. Now discovered an empty box of pizza that they attempted to hide by dumping in another patient’s trash can. Yes, some people do have a lower basal metabolism than others, but none so slow that a morbidly obese person won’t lose weight on a controlled 1200 calorie a day diet. It’s not possible.
Yes, most of these morbidly obese patients are already nearly ‘locked’ into their bed. So the only way they can keep eating 10,000 calories a day is that someone else in their family is providing that food for them. (In alcohol treatment, we call such people ‘enablers’.)
So it seems that effective long-term results would require that both the patient AND their immediate family get mental health counseling. Treating just the patient (even locking them in a cell) won’t work long-term if their spouse/family don’t want it to work, and actively try to subvert the treatment and help the patient to go back to the same unhealthy eating habits.
I believe it was the point of the Atkins diet (and these Keto diets, etc.), that eating a high-protein but low-carb diet results in weight loss. My experience 15 years ago was that it did. I was losing about a pound a day at first, when I went from 235lb to 208lb and size 38 to 33 waist in less than a month. My anecdotal evidence - yes, I eventually put it all back on and then some, although last year I dropped 30lb by the simple expedient of being more cautious about sugar consumption. (Hint- don’t spend 3 months on the couch going through the Halloween stash you never handed out). The other side effect of the Atkins weight loss - I used to be like a furnace, always giving off heat. Now I do experience being colder sometimes. Maybe that’s a version of the “reduced calorie burning becomes permanent” problem?
The theory of the Atkins diet was that eating sufficient proteins and fat prevented the body from going into “starvation mode”, but without a decent amount of carbohydrate input you body will burn your accumulated fat instead - that the starvation mode trigger and the “burn fat” trigger were two different body mechanisms. I wondered if instead, limiting the number of qualifying treats meant I was actually reducing total caloric intake.
OTOH, I’ve noticed on a few vacations that I also tend to lose weight - not being in the vicinity of refrigerators and constant snacking, and spending much of the day walking, was also a means to lose weight. One vacation I bought a nice leather jacket in Florence. A year later, it no longer fit, because walking all over Italian cities for 3 weeks had changed my weight - then of course it all crept back on. After I lost 30lb last year - it fits again.
Humans (and hominids preceding us) were evolved to be walking machines, and we’re actually highly efficient at it to the point that once you are conditioned to regular walking it actually doesn’t burn as many calories (both because of adopting more efficient gait and because the muscles and tendons become better adapted and don’t require constant regeneration), which is why people walk for weight loss they often hit a plateau unless they increase distance or elevation gain, or carry extra weight. However, I found that when you spend the day walking I wasn’t as hungry; I ate to satiate my appetite but was far less inclined to just snack out of boredom.
I once spent a six week vacation walking all over various islands in Okinawa (and kayaking, which amused people to no end) and probably dropped two stone without even consciously thinking about changing my diet, and this is despite the fact that I was eating a lot of white rice, udon, and drinking awamori with Orion chasers because there was nothing else to do once it got dark.
Stranger
I don’t think anyone ever gets used to hunger. Studies have been done on hunter/gatherer tribes with extremely low rates of obesity and they often report being constantly hungry.
Source: The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter.
To expect humans to acclimate to what is arguably the most instinctive evolutionary urge in existence seems to be asking a lot. Hunter gatherer tribes can only do it because there is barely enough food to go around.
I do think it’s possible to teach people how to better manage their hunger, but not in extreme circumstances like being 600 pounds and having to slash exorbitant amounts of calories. I think in this experiment the weight would come off, but you would end up with a pretty miserable human with an unhealthily low metabolism who would be more likely to act on future eating impulses than they were before the experiment started.
Calories in vs. calories out is also pretty difficult to measure.
Calories metabolized is not the same as the number of calories in the food. And some calories go “out” by being burned, and others go out…a different way. This can depend on anatomy, digestive enzymes being produced, gut biome, and how the food is prepared.
See this article, for example:
This summarizes some important research into microbiomes’ role in digestion and weight loss or gain.
Obesity (Excessively Overweight): Health Effects and Next Steps.
That’s what I was going to say; losing the weight isn’t actually the hard part, it’s keeping it off long-term. And there are biological reasons why we work that way.
@Danger_Man’s idea would work, for as long as the person was on the island. But once they got back to civilization, they’d gain it all back and then some. Partially because of the way our bodies work, and partially because that person wouldn’t have done anything to change those habits/relationship with food/mental health/what-have-you that caused them to be fat in the first place.
It’s fundamentally different than say… being addicted to tobacco or alcohol or whatever, in that as I understand it once you’re clean from a drug, the actual physical cravings aren’t there anymore, and it’s a matter of willpower. Everyone’s got to eat, typically more than once a day. And as a result you can’t “get clean” from food either.
Imagine it this way… take your average three pack a day smoker, serious alcoholic, etc… and tell them that they have to smoke 9 cigarettes a day, 3 at each meal time. But they can’t go over that, and they can’t go under that. Or for the alcoholic, that they have to drink one shot, but no more at each meal. Of course they’re not going to succeed. They’re going to fail spectacularly in fact.
But that is exactly what dieting is expecting overweight/obese people to do.