Most of the time, but not always. And it’s rare for people to lose 100% of their excess body weight, and rare for them to keep it off. It appears as though at about 6 years out from surgery the weight starts to creep back up.
I don’t think anyone is incapable of losing weight, but it’s much harder for some people than the average guy. I know from experience that even with a great diet and exercise plan, my body permanently plateaus around 190 and has since I was 18 (I’m 5’2" and female, for reference). You might say I’m not trying hard enough, but I know exactly how hard I worked out in those days. I had a 6 pack and massive biceps under that fat layer. Couldn’t lose it, though.
People who say calories in/calories out are *really *underestimating the body’s propensity to retain and store calories when the body is undergoing perceived starvation.
This is oversimplifying. People’s bodies work differently.
I had a close friend in highschool who ate pizza, white bread, cookie dough, and Mountain Dew almost exclusively for years. She ate almost nothing healthy, and her caloric intake had to be shocking. Her only hobbies involved sitting in front of a computer. She was rail thin the whole time I knew her.
I had another friend who was anorexic, following years of having a restricted diet from her mother. She exercised regularly. She was…not thin.
Obviously the fat friend had to eat enough calories to gain weight at some point, but I have no doubt the former friend out-caloried her at pretty much every point in life.
In Atul Gawande’s book Complications, he had a chapter about weight loss via bariatric surgery. There is small percentage of people who undergo the surgery but never successfully learn to control their eating, even though doing so is extremely uncomfortable or painful, and gain weight. Don’t have the book handy, but I believe it was 5 percent.
My ex wife worked for a time for a bariatric surgery clinic. It was indeed possible to avoid losing weight if you were remarkably disregarding of the eating guidelines. One woman complained about not losing weight, and they found she was drinking one and a half bottles of wine a day. Well, that’ll do it.
Yeah, it’s more complicated than just 3,500kcal = one pound. I lost about 60lbs several years ago (and have since had health problems and regained), and when I lost the weight it was through careful calorie counting. I carefully tracked absolutely everything I ate in a computer program and calculated my expected metabolic rate based on age, gender, height, general activity level, and all additional activity and exercise that I did. According to all of the calculations I should have lost 2lbs per week based on what I ate, but I actually lost 1.5-1.6lbs per week. And the discrepancy wasn’t due to cheating on my diet or overestimating how much I exercised - it was because all of the theoretical formulas and calculations are based on an “average” individual, and a lot of people aren’t actually average.
The NY Times article linked upthread in post #9 mentions how different people will gain different amounts of weight when having the same exercise level and calorie intake, and twin studies show that weight gain tendencies are at least party biological (my emphasis added in the quote):
This doesn’t mean weight loss is impossible, but metabolism and ability to quickly gain/lose weight does vary tremendously between individuals. And the men in the study were most likely otherwise healthy, and none of them were “at risk for obesity”. Now take someone who is at risk for obesity, and is already obese and has a crappy metabolism and possibly other health concerns. Their ability to lower their caloric intake enough to safely lose weight without damaging their health in the process may be very difficult. Lowering your caloric intake enough to ensure weight loss may cause vitamin deficiencies and other problems from not getting enough variety of food. And we are always told that diets are bad and we should be using sustainable lifestyle choices - doing a medically supervised Very Low Calorie (VLC) medically-supervised diet with processed foods or food substitutes (e.g. shakes and vitamin supplements) is the polar opposite of sustainable.
And the NY Times article makes the point that although almost anyone can lose weight through a variety of methods, the trick is keeping the weight off. Most diets and therapies define “weight loss success” in the short-term to make their “success rates” look good. But the fact is that the vast majority of people (usually stated as 95% or higher) regain their lost weight (and often more) within five years, and weight cycling can have detrimental health effects. I would think that those who have extreme difficulty losing weight and have to resort to extreme and unsustainable methods are even more likely to regain.
Also, again from the NY Times article, there is lots of research showing that those who lose weight successfully and keep it off are not biologically the same as those who were always at the lower weight and never had to lose weight.
So to answer the OP, I would say that very few people cannot lose weight, but it is much more difficult for some people than for others (especially if they are trying to lose weight in a healthy way). And given the fact that most people who lose weight will regain it, it would not be surprising if those who have the most difficulty losing are also those we regain the easiest/quickest. I think that the major emphasis shouldn’t be on whether you can lose weight, it’s should be on what weight you can maintain by doing so in a healthy way.
I have often wondered about this. About 15 years ago I had a tight knit group of friends and one of these friends was a obese female about 20 years old. I always felt bad for her because her weight bothered her so much. We would all go out eating and drinking and she would always have water and a salad. We would be slamming pizza, beer, wings etc… as fast as we could shovel it into our mouths. The rest of us were normal to thin, having a typical young persons ability to eat a ton and not gain weight.
I couldn’t imagine how this girl continued to be heavy eating the way she did. We (the rest of us) came to the conclusion that either she just couldn’t lose weight and was destined to be heavy OR he eating habits around us were for show, so we would all think she wasn’t a piggy. Then when she was alone would devour anything she could get her hands on. I almost wished for her it was the latter, because I could always see the frustration in her eyes as she “starved” herself while we pigged out. Always did feel bad for her.
Nah, we’re underestimating some people’s need for it to be something, anything else’s problem but their own.
Do you deny that the body conserves more calories when undergoing perceived starvation? That’s not an opinion.
I don’t blame external forces on my inability to get to a “normal” weight and keep it off. But people don’t always have control over internal forces, either. I can’t talk to my lizard brain and say, “Hey, I’m not starving! There is plenty of food, I’m just choosing to eat less of it!” any more than a drowning person can tell their lizard brain not to gasp for air underwater.
The mounting evidence shows that there is a *lot *more to weight loss than calories in/out, while smug people who’ve never struggled with weight loss continue to claim it’s purely a lack of willpower. The science is proving you wrong. I don’t suppose you have to change your opinion, but you’re perpetuating ignorance. It’s counterproductive.
Of course it’s not an opinion, and of course it’s true. Do you deny that if you consume fewer calories than your body uses, you’ll lose weight? Because that’s not an opinion either.
You’re comparing being fat to drowning. They’re not the same thing. Try to breathe underwater and you’ll die. Try to eat less food and you most likely won’t. Seriously, try it sometime.
You have no idea about my past or whether I’ve ever struggled with weight or not. “You don’t know me,” as the kids say. So you might want to back off the “smug thin people” talk a little bit.
It’s damn hard to convince yourself that you should eat less food than you “need” to eat. I know it’s not about a decision between having four Twinkies or the whole box, it’s a decision about I AM STARVING RIGHT NOW AND I CAN’T DO ANYTHING UNLESS I HAVE SOME FOOD. But it’s still a decision. You choose to put food in your mouth. You choose WHAT food to put in your mouth. And how much of it.
Regardless of whether you choose to let your lizard brain live your life or whether you decide to act like a responsible person, “the science” is that if you eat fewer calories than your body requires, you will lose weight. If you eat more calories than your body requires, you will gain weight. Really.
Simple != easy. I don’t know of anyone who believes it’s easy to lose even five pounds. It isn’t easy. It’s very very difficult. But to answer the GQ, for most people it is physically possible to lose excess weight through diet and exercise. Whether they’re capable mentally is a whole 'nother issue.
“Somebody should do something about how fat I am.” - seen on a t-shirt
If all the obese people were put on the diet that the poor people were subjected to in the Nazi concentration camps, they would all look very thin after a few months.
Obesity is self inflicted. Don’t try and blame it on others, it is nothing else but to much food intake.
Don’t forge the ‘without seriously compromising their overall health’ part of the question.
It is not impossible for anyone to lose weight healthily if they are in the context of controlled circumstances.
For your body to burn fat, it by definition has to go into a certain kind of ‘starvation mode’ which involves breaking down fat into trigycerides and then into ketone bodies. However I believe the effect of ‘starvation mode’ is exaggerated by some people: according to what I’ve read it several reputable sources that it really only kicks in for real once fat deposits are used up.
That saiid, unless you can afford to have someone monitor and control your intake, I’d say that it is practically impossible for some people to lose weight by self-management in the context of modern society.
This comment, and several others like it, in response to both the op and the other responses in this thread, is bizzarre.
Everyone agrees that extreme calorie deprivation such as in a concentration camp will cause weight loss, not healthy weight loss, but weight loss. Everyone agrees that it is possible to have a medically supervised very low calorie diet that causes weight loss while getting adequate key nutritional requirements (the op’s question). No one is here “blaming others” for personal obesity.
Understanding how different individuals’ bodies differ greatly in how much they burn and how that changes in different ways in different people in response to both hyper and hypocaloric conditions, and in the manner in which their brains are intrinsically wired to respond to food reward stimuli, including the supernormal ones that modern society has created, is worthwhile.
The points that that NYT Magazine article was making is that some people really do come to this world predisposed to being obese in our obesiogenic environment, and some don’t, that once obese the body has mechanisms that fight hard to prevent maintaining significant weight loss, that success at maintaining near normal weight long term for the formerly obese is achieved by a few mainly by very diligent, to the point of obsession, for the rest of their lives, and that the majority of the health benefits of weight loss can be gained by maintaining a more modest 5 to 10% body weight loss.
The obese can lose all of their excess weight but for some losing all of it and keeping it off long term is both a fairly unrealistic goal, and one that is not necessary for their improved health.
Anybody have any information on how much a metabolism can vary? Of course we all have different metabolisms but can one person burn twice as many calories as another for the same amount of work? Three times? Ten times? I suspect that when we talk about differences in metabolism we are only talking about a few percentage points at most. If a person exists who can live on half the calories of another then I’m surprised nobody is studying this phenomena to try to end world hunger.
Well first off there are several componants to metabolic rate.
Resting or Basal metabolic rate can vary quite a bit from person to person, such as found in this older study:
[quote]
the absolute range of variation in basal metabolic rate was almost 4:1. The average B.M.R. of the high energy group was twice that of the low energy group (P < 0.001) and the high intake subjects expended significantly more energy in performing standard work tasks.
[quote]
Unclear how much this has to do with developing obesity however.
Those who have been obese and have lost weight can have lower BMR by 30%. (I’ll try to find the cite later if requested.)
BMR also varies, beyond changes in fat free mass, based on the sort of exercise done. Within the same individual by over 7%.
Another componant is how the body responds to overfeeding with changes in “Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis” (NEAT) which has long been found to vary greatly hundreds of calories worth a day.
While perhaps not a direct answer to your query, this link that someone else posted in another thread is very informative and covers all the bases relating to calories-in/weight-loss.
It’s a useful guide to understanding that while “calories in, calories out” is basically true, there are so many other factors involved, that weight-loss (specially healthy weight-loss) can be very difficult to compute based simply on energy-in/energy-out.
ETA: That link touches on some of the same points that **Dseid **just mentioned.
Very interesting. Thank you for the links** DSeid. ** Maybe I’ll comment once I’ve done some reading.
From comic Jay Riesman:
“maybe it’s glandular?.”
“Yeah, the problem is that the glands are stuffed with burritos.”
The medical profession have a scale called the Body Mass Index. If you are outside these norms your health is being compromised by your body fat.
I think that certain people protest to much. I wonder if they are healthy eating challenged.