There’s a very interesting article in the Feb 2017 issue of Scientific American on this topic, titled “The Exercise Paradox”. The bottom line is, the number of calories that a person uses has very little correlation to his level of physical exercise. Hunter-gatherers who spend all day on the move use essentially the same number of calories as moderately active Western people, 2600 per day for men and 1900 per day for women. (Actually very sedentary people use about 200 calories less per day than this, but there is no difference between moderately active and very active people.) Apparently human metabolism is tightly constrained to use the about same amount of energy regardless of physical activity, although exactly how that happens is not entirely clear. So indeed, the only way to lose weight is to restrict caloric intake; exercise is beneficial for health but has little effect on weight.
Did his mental capacity also increase? That sometimes happens with children.
Yeah, many people have problems wrapping their heads around the different volumetric size of “appropriate portions” of different things.
My mother gains weight when she measures pasta or rice by eye, loses it when she actually weighs the ingredients. In one particularly epic occasion involving pasta dots, the amount she’d guessed as being “a portion” weighed almost 400g. As it was for soup, it should have had one less zero.
I haven’t read them completely (it’s 3am…) but these two pages on thyroid diseases may be of interest.
If you are someone who diets or has lost a lot of weight in the past, it can slow down your metabolism considerably and probably permanently too.
There was an article in the NY Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-weight-loss.html that followed up contestents on the show “The Biggest Loser” and a few years later most of them had regained all of the weight they lost and more.
"Researchers knew that just about anyone who deliberately loses weight will have a slower metabolism when the diet ends.
What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight."
So it may not be hormones or a disease, but dieting will mess up your metabolism.
You’d think scientists would have found out everything there is to know about nutrition by now. Seems to change every few years. Of course, it doesn’t help that the media and commercial companies exaggerate every small finding.
People are built to get by on any number of different diets. Weight loss is another story. We’re not necessarily built to lose weight easily. If you lower the calories you consume, your metabolism can adjust to this. You need to eat fewer calories than you burn; most people can’t burn enough calories in exercise to make exercise a dominant factor, though it helps.
Most people underestimate calories consumed number of portions and overestimate calories burned by exercise (the treadmill said I burned 900 calories/hr. No.)
If you eat plenty of vegetables and give up sugar, flour and “white powders” while exercising, you may lose weight – especially if minimizing alcohol. The biochemical argument for “sugar toxicity” makes sense.
So far, so nothing. How common is hypothyroidism severe enough to make a big difference to weight? Maybe 5% have hypothyroidism, probably only 3 in 1000 have it bad enough to make much difference. Hormones? Insulin and cortisol make some difference. Genetics plays a bigger role, and eating habits learned during childhood may take effort to change.
If the OP asks “can most people change their diet and increase exercise lose weight”? The answer is yes. And it’s pretty hard to keep it off. And lots of diets have been studied without much superiority. I’d suggest taking up both HIIT and weightlifting while eating plenty of protein and vegetables and timing sugar and heavy carbs within an hour or two of exercise. And trying not to eat starches and sugars (except moderate amounts of whole fruit) outside this window. It worked for me, time to try it again!
I see a fair number of arguments going past one another and missing what I think is the critical piece of the puzzle.
For starters, yes overweight people eat more food than they should. There seem to be only a few very rare cases where that’s not the case (like when you see 20+ pound babies born who look like Buddha at 12 months, etc.). The question is why. Sure anyone can technically eat less, that’s where the will power comes in. The problem is you need a crap ton of will power to do that because there’s millions of years of evolution telling you to “eat this now or you’ll die.” That’s an enormous mental hurdle to get over, because what makes it mental is chemistry. If you’re not hungry, you don’t eat, the problem is feeling hungry even when you don’t need to be, and overcoming that mental/chemical signal is little different than trying to will-power-away the pain from the cut on your finger or the bone you just broke.
Now the real question is, why do some people seem to have no problem with this and others do? What is affecting the chemical balance in our brains that makes some overeat and others maintain a healthy weight? I have a couple personal experiences that make me wonder just how controllable it really is. About 10 years ago after a mostly sedentary youth, I started bicycling seriously, averaging 2,000-3,000 miles per year with no shortage of hills (though not mountains) to climb. I lost 40 pounds in two years an have since put it all back on, plus another 20 pounds, despite consistently riding 2,500 miles a year. It’s like my body readjusted to the new level of activity to store away more calories and/or consume more to make up for what was being burned off. That’s no good.
I have also observed that amphetamines like pseudoephedrine and Adderall would kill my appetite. What the actual process is I don’t know, like is it shifting focus away from being hungry to other things, or blocking receptors that cause hunger, etc.? Either way, that’s a powerful indicator of the chemical component of hunger and overeating, but is there some knowledge from that which can be used to reduce appetite without resorting to drugs? How are the foods we eat sending false signals to the brain, or delaying satiety until long after too many calories have been consumed? It’s generally known that high-protein foods are more satiating than high-carb, and that our overly-sugared foods, especially the high-fructose corn syrup ones, don’t produce the “I’m full” signals they should, and may even make you hungrier.
This is where I think the research focus should be. Not saying “just eat less fatso” because if it were that easy everyone would do it. SpoilerVirgin touched on this upthread, that yes it’s all mental, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy or even possible for a lot of people because it means fighting our own evolutionary instincts.
The last two posts are most on point.
Fat tissue IS a endocrine tissue and has a major role to play in controlling its own levels. So yes it is hormonal. The other big player is the brain and not so much conscious will but the hypothalamus and connected drive centers.
Once someone is an obese adult a variety of mechanisms work to prevent long term fat loss including changing how many calories are burned each day (variety of mechanisms) and how hungry one feels. The body has a drive to return to what is has experienced as its normal. Maintaining major fat loss long term is very difficult. Fortunately the health benefits can be gained with more moderate amounts of fat loss (5 to 10% of body weight) maintained with healthy nutrition habits and regular exercise.
Best to avoid obesity in the first place.
One cynical joke goes:
“Doctor, I just can’t seem to lose weight; is it my glands?”
“Yes! Your saliva glands!”
But actually what I believe is that for some people the only thing that works is a very low-carb diet. At least in my own case it’s always worked when I stayed on it, and nothing else ever has.
I have read both the NY Times article about the greatest losers whose metabolism was permanently depressed after losing lots of weight and the Scientific American article on how exercise really doesn’t matter for weight losing (although valuable on general health grounds) and, honestly, they seem to contradict each other. Since they appeared at more or less the same time, they do not take each other into account and I sure wish somebody could resolve the differences.
As I mentioned above, I have lost about 30% of my highest body weight and kept it off for 5 years. I have also become a good deal more sedentary over the years and it doesn’t seem to matter.
Not understanding why you think those articles contradict each other. Or why you think your personal anecdote informs as to what solid data shows is true for the population overall.
Happy for you that you have lost significant weight and kept it off even while becoming more sedentary. I also appreciate, from your previous posts on the subject, that it was many years process, beginning in 2002, losing about 10% and mostly holding that for years, becoming diabetic and starting metformin and losing another 10%, holding there for years, and then losing more. That is an impressive story and perhaps it suggests that bodies can “reset” to 10% weight loss levels at a time given a couple of years to adapt each time. Or you may just be exceptionally well disciplined or have a different physiology than most. You do I think however appreciate that losing 30% of your body weight in three sets of time over ten plus years inclusive of starting metformin may provoke different physiologic/metabolic/endocrinologic/neurologic responses than losing 30% or more in eight months?
Follow-up question about slower metabolisms. Is there a price to be paid for a slower metabolism?
From the common modern perspective as people trying to lose weight, a slower metabolism is a negative, as it makes it harder to lose it. But from the perspective of someone in an environment where calories were hard to come by, you would think a slower metabolism would be a positive. Which makes me wonder why people aren’t preprogrammed with the slowest, most efficient metabolism that they can get by with (and an appetite calibrated to match).
So I’m thinking perhaps there’s some price to be paid for the slower metabolism, such that the body only goes into this mode when forced to, but otherwise operates at a faster one. But if so, what is it? (A tendency to sluggishness?)
Yes, excess weight is almost entirely a behavioral problem. Behavioral doesn’t mean “you’re a fat lazy SOB”, though, behavioral problems can be incredibly hard to fix, and as you note have nothing to do with willpower. Willpower is how long you can fight against the way your brain works, but if you don’t change the underlying relationship with eating and food no matter how long you white knuckle it, that some underlying issue is still there.
For me, I didn’t go to therapy, but I did consciously choose to change both how and what I ate, to deliberately avoid “highly-palatable” foods. Highly palatable foods tend to be extremely energy dense and flavorful, these are foods that, in the case of processed foods huge research teams have specifically made as flavorful and addictive as possible. In the case of restaurant meals, you have professionals skilled in the preparation of food who have made a meal as tasty as they can. Eating all of that food creates a strong linkage between “the pleasure of taste” and “eating.” As long as that’s the case dieting by itself is just “how long will I deny myself pleasure”, and when you eventually stop, it’s all going to come back.
I had to basically train my mind to view eating as primarily how I “solve” hunger and give my body fuel. “The pleasure of taste” is separate and for a different circumstance. For me, it’s come down to I can satisfy my want for that pleasure by occasionally indulging, but I’ve basically rewired my brain to view that differently than “regular eating.”
Indeed–I think that’s why parents need to be as aggressive as possible at preventing childhood obesity. The reality is using diet and exercise so few people ever “recover” from becoming obese that you can come pretty close to saying that right now, with the interventions available, obesity is largely incurable. Maybe some day we’ll have a pill that people can take that can change our hormonal profile enough to permanently force a reset and permanent weight loss.
I think that is part of why, and I’ve talked about this before, permanent weight loss has been so hard for me. I learned some 6-7 years ago that part of permanent weight loss was permanent weight management. And a recognition that once you’ve let yourself become obese, you will never again have a time when you no longer have to work at it.
So beyond what I said in my last post, it’s not just trying to actively prevent associating eating with “pleasure” (largely by eschewing highly palatable foods for so long that you’ve basically reset your tastes), it’s also recognizing that obesity can go into “remission” but requires life long care. It’s a chronic illness even when it’s under control (i.e. even when you’re not fat any longer), no different than diabetes. Just because you have good blood sugar at the moment doesn’t mean you can stop your insulin. Your pancreas is still not working right. With obesity we don’t have the clear biological understanding we do with pancreas–>insulin–>diabetes but the fact that almost no one ever goes from having been obese to remaining at a healthy weight suggests to me it’s a permanent affliction.
Part of the psychology of managing it is forcing yourself to weigh yourself regularly, forcing yourself to monitor your food forever. Doing that is like a diabetic and their insulin. It’d be nice to stop caring so much about food intake, but if you’ve been obese it’s unlikely you can do that and avoid becoming obese again.
Several people in this thread have said something along the lines of “fat people are fat because they eat too much”. This is wrong. Fat people are fat because they have historically eaten too much. If your weight is stable, your calorie intake is in line with your current caloric needs.
So you can’t just tell fat people to eat a “normal” amount of food. No matter how much food you typically eat, if your calorie budget is balanced, reducing your food intake will cause a caloric deficit; and as discussed in this thread, your body very much does not want to give up its precious fat reserves and has various methods to overcome that deficit.
The basic problem is that the body has a body fat “setpoint”, and wants to maintain body fat at its current setpoint. This goes both ways; if you cause people to acutely increase their food intake, both thin and fat people ramp up caloric expenditure to compensate (through such mechanisms as fidgeting more), and don’t gain as much weight as would be expected (at least over the short term). (Examples: 1, 2 - may be paywalled, sorry)
But as mentioned by other posters, people’s setpoints seem to be on a ratchet; once they go up, it’s hard to get them to go back down. So we need to either 1) figure out how to keep people from gaining weight in the first place, or 2) figure out how to reset the setpoint.
The part I bolded is what I think some people (including myself) probably are talking about, more or less, when they say “willpower.” I mean, the fact that you could DO the very difficult mental work and not just give up, that in itself takes something not everyone has, right? Some of us think of that something as willpower.
I understand what you mean, but I think **Martin Hyde **got more at what I was talking about. When there is say, a big batch of fudge in the office, and everyone is taking some, and I am repeatedly offered a piece only to turn it down, people will start going on about my fabulous willpower, and what discipline I must have to not eat it. My point is that I don’t need discipline to not eat it; I simply am not interested in eating it. It is true though, that I had the discipline to go through therapy and do the mental exercises it took to get me to that point, so in that sense, yes, I did have willpower. But that’s not what people are usually thinking of when they are complimenting me on my willpower.
One of the sad things is that I have stopped even explaining this to people, because nobody wants to hear it. As soon as I suggest that my success is the result of mental change through therapy, rather than from just eating the exact right combination of foods, they lose all interest.
I have Graves disease, which causes hyperthyroidism among other things. I recently ended up in the ER because of a thyroid storm. So, my doc & endocrinologist want to kill my thyroid with radioactive iodine. That’s not news. My chief concern is I will automatically become hypothyroid, and every person I’ve ever known who was hypothyroid was obese. Every singe one. They assure me if I get the synthroid levels adjusted right, that won’t be a problem.
Are they lying their asses off, or are obese people with hypothyroidism just not taking the right dose of synthroid, or are they just blaming their obesity on hypothyroidism they don’t really have, because it’s being treated?
I’m hypothyroid and obese. I wouldn’t have known anything about the thyroid except for the lab test number (which he probably took because I am obese?). I occasionally take the synthroid but I am obese because I eat too much, not because of the thyroid.
I agree with this. I’ve struggled to keep my weight down all my adult life, doing fairly sensible weight managment (not fad diets) and various exercise regimens but my weight continues to increase. I can’t help but look back at the way my parents taught me to clean my plate and sort of laughingly encouraged me to do things like eating three entire stuffed game hens in a sitting. I was only a little heavy then because of my kid’s metabolism. But it caught up with me big time, even years after I stopped eating like a sow.
Over my adult life I’ve tried all the sensible diets (Weight Watchers) and good nutrition. At various times I’ve cut out excess salt, sugar, cut down on meat, cut down on carbs, cut down on alchohol. Stopped consuming sodas permanently and now they taste horrible to me. So what I am eating now is primarily whole foods, cooked at home. And I’m at my heaviest in my life right now and look horrible. Last year I decided to stop listening to armchair nutritionists and went to an actual dietition/nutritionist. She told me that in order to lose weight I just have to be hungry all the time. So that was less than helpful, too, and I haven’t been back.
The difference I think is that if you ignore your insulin levels you’ll get pretty quick feedback by crashing. For people like me it’s just a “boiled frog effect” very slowly gaining weight. I don’t mind weighing myself daily or weekly but what I really hated when I was on Weight Watchers, and why I finally bailed out of it, was that I got sick of thinking about food all the time. It started to feel like a compulsion. How much have I eaten so far today? Write it down. How many point/calories can I use at lunch/dinner? Check my point/calorie diary. How many points in this? Write down the next meal. Can I afford a snack? Look it up. How many points in this? Write it down. Tomorrow, start over. I never could stop thinking about food or calories, my food diary or writing down/looking up the points.
I’m not sure about this.
I actually have a 13 year old daughter who is slightly chubby and could lose a few pounds. But my wife is adamant that based on everyone she knows - both as kids and now children of her friends - aggressively pushing kids to lose weight invariably backfires. It makes food much more tempting, and becomes a control/power issue as well. Bottom line is that kids whose parents pressure them about food get messed up in the head and spend their lives in a losing battle with food and weight.
[I myself am not sure what’s best on balance, but she has time. She’s an extremely social girl, so meanwhile we’ve agreed to hold off and see if peer pressure does it for her.]
My own feeling is that for long term success the general rule is that eating less is successful and eating healthy/dietetic is not.
The reason is that eating less gets easier over time and eating healthy/dietetic gets harder. People who eat less have their stomachs contract and this suppresses their appetites and makes the diet easier. Meanwhile people who eat healthy/dietetic get increasing sick of the bland food they’re eating, which makes sticking to the diet harder and harder over time.
[Disclaimer: I’ve never been more than 10-15 pounds overweight in my life, so the above doesn’t represent any sort of experience that’s directly applicable to obese people. But I do maintain a quasi-diet of sorts - I call it the “X pound diet” (X being my target weight). Every morning I get on a scale, and if I weigh more than X then I’m on a diet that day and don’t eat any snacks or the like, while if I weigh less than X then I’m not on any sort of diet. Seems to be working. :)]