"What You Don't Know About Fat" - New scientific understandings about body fat

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

You are correct that with few exceptions, the responsibility is on the person who is overweight. The thing that people without weight problems don’t see is that it can be very difficult to even see where the problem lies. I was very thin into my early twenties. I started working out 45 minutes/day, 6 days a week around age 22, when I started putting on weight (around 130 lbs, which was a perfectly healthy size 8 for me). In seven years, I gained over sixty pounds, most of it fat. I couldn’t figure it out, because I was eating low fat and ate very little meat (about one serving a day). So I was eating the type of diet that was supposed to make the pounds melt off and working out about twice what was recommended. And my weight was going up instead of down.

I was so depressed. I was ready to give up, say “fuck it,” and decide to just eat whatever I want and quit worrying about it.

When I decided on my diet (and lifestyle change), I did a lot of research on it. Because it’s considered controversial by many (Atkins, if you’re wondering), I wanted to find out the pros and cons. I finally decided to give it a shot, figuring that it wasn’t going to hurt me to try it for a few weeks. I’ve lost 30 lbs since then, but most importantly, I’ve learned the proper way to eat. My diet isn’t low fat, but it’s high in vegetables. I don’t eat or crave potato chips, cookies, wheat thins, crackers, or other foods like that. When I do eat sweets, they’re sugar free. I have to make myself eat lunch because I’d otherwise skip it (and do so too often for my own good). I actually crave fresh vegetables. If I go more than a couple of days without them, I start to feel peaky.

You may think, “Well, duh. Eating more vegetables and fewer sweets is good for everyone.” But it just wasn’t that simple. It sounds like it should be, but it’s not. It was more than that. There’s more to being overweight than just not eating right or exercising enough.

I guess this missive is to point out that dismissing our frustration with six words doesn’t do anyone any good. Losing weight is HARD. Damn hard. And even if you think you’re doing everything right, you may not get the results you’re expecting.

42

I’m doing the same. Atkins, that is. And it’s the best thing I’ve found for me. There have been lots of Atkins-bashing threads lately, and some nutritionists would find probably find fault with the way I eat, but it works for me. I eat lots of lean meats and lots of veggies. I keep carbs to a bare minimum. I don’t follow the food guide pyramid at all, which IIRC, calls for 8-11 servings of grains a day.
As Deadly Accurate said, lots of people say, “Well, duh, you just stopped eating sweets and started exercising!” but it was a lot more than that. I don’t eat pasta or cereal, I don’t drink soda, I don’t eat potatoes or crackers, and keep the bread to maybe 2 slices a week.

And, yes, I take full responsibility for getting fat in the first place.

43

I read this thread for the first time yesterday, and swore that I wasn’t going to reply, but after much thought, I decided that I am going to say a few things.
First off, I know all about weight issues, I was a skinny little kid, who became a fat little kid, who became a rather healthy young man, who became a fat man, who became obese, and finally became morbidly obese, and decided to something about it. I am now down to just being fat (WHOOT! I’m fat!) So I think I am qualified to comment on a few things that have been said here.

This reminds me of a joke that was popular among parents when my kids were little. We would buy toys that had “simple assembly required”. The joke was that the instructions read:
[ol]
[li]Get a master degree in mechanical engineering[/li][li] Assemble toy[/li](Please note: We said simple not easy) :slight_smile:
[/ol]

Were these instructions simple? Sure, only two steps. Were they easy? Hell no. :smiley:

Again like Zyada I understand that

But allow me to ramble on for a few minutes about my life and weight issues.
When I was a little kid I was the skinny kid. Then in about the 3rd grade I had my tonsils out. After that all of a sudden food tasted wonderful. I started eating more of it than ever before, and I became the both the short kid and the fat kid. Kind of a double whammy. As the fat kid I had to wear “husky” pants, and had trouble finding clothes to fit. (To this fucking day I hate the word husky) By the time I got to high school, I had started into sports, and while my weight did not drop, it did become muscle, and my height increased to where I actually wasn’t in bad shape. 5’8" 150 lbs 32"waist with a 42" chest, in the 11th grade. From all of my past experiences with “husky pants” I had a bad self-image and still thought of myself as fat. :smack: :smack: :smack: (If anyone could invent a time machine I would like to go back to talk to a very dumb teenager, about that and the girl that got away.) By the time I graduated, I was 165, and very solid muscle.
After graduation I worked in construction for 8 months before going to college. By the end of the summer I was ripped, and about 180 of solid muscle. My waist was about 33", my chest still about 42, my biceps where huge! :cool:
While in college I had two downfalls, first off was I still ate like I was working construction (big breakfast, large morning snack, big lunch, big dinner) but I did not have the activity to support it. The second problem is that the dorm served food buffet style. I don’t what it is about me and buffets, but I get this hunter killer instinct, and I want to eat it all. My sister is the same way, and neither of us has a clue. :confused:
Anyway, by the time I left college I was 195-200. Got married, and slowly the pounds came on. I was 220 for many years, and then about 15 years ago I was 235. When I got this job my activity level dropped again, and my weight started up. In 98 I was 265. A very dumb individual bet me that I could not loose 50 lbs in a year ($500!). I stopped eating and lost 65 Lbs and took his money. Of course when the bet was over I started eating again, and the weight came back on again, first back to 235, then up and up and up. Buy this last January I was 275, and could see myself hitting 300 in very short order. :eek: I knew I had to make some lifestyle changes, or I was not going to be happy with the rest of my life. Notice I did not say diet, I said lifestyle choices.
So what prompted me to come to this decision? A couple of things, first off in January I had to buy some size 48 pants. Do you know how hard it is to find size 48 pants? Secondly, when I flew on an airplane, I had the seatbelt all the way out, and I could barely fasten it. I was
>| |< This far from having to ask for a seatbelt extender. Thirdly when I rode my bike, it was getting harder and harder to climb the hills. It was getting to the point where either I had to lose weight or trade my mountain bike in for a Harley; hell, I already had the beer gut. :slight_smile: Lastly I scheduled a family vacation to Hawaii this coming Christmas and I swore I am not going to Hawaii as a fat bastard. So to be blunt vanity is what drove me to lose weight. I was embarrassed to have to buy size 48 pants, embarrassed that I might have to ask for a seatbelt extender, embarrassed that I was always the last guy up the hill, and embarrassed that I would look like a blob in the family pics from vacation.

In my mind, a diet is what you go on to lose 10 lbs. If you want to lose more weight and keep it off, you need to make a lifestyle change
I looked around a various eating plans, and looked back at the diets I had used in the past. What had always worked for me was a high protein diet. (As Long as I stayed on it that is) I picked up Dr. Atkins book, and read it. Twice. What he said made sense for me in my situation. One of the points he makes in the book is that his eating plan is a lifestyle change, not a diet. If you want to keep weight off, you can’t think of diet, you must think lifestyle change. (I am not trying to hijack this thread into a pro/con Atkins thing, just relating my experiences m’k?) Also I travel 2-3 weeks a month, so I needed an eating plan that I can follow while on the road. (Pop quiz. What is the best diet / eating plan to lose weight? Answer, the one you can stick too) I can do a high protein/ lo carb lifestyle while on the road quite easily.

So On Jan 15 I went on a low carb/ high protein lifestyle @ 275 lbs. Today 7 months later I am 60 Lbs lighter @ 215. MY body fat percentage is now 25.8% fat, but no longer obese. :cool: Night before last I went to try on some jeans. I tried on a pair of size 36 jeans. They were very tight, in maybe another 2-3 weeks, and they will be just tight and I will buy them. That will mean I have lost a foot, 12 freaking inches from around my waist.

So now that I have explained about how I got here, how did I do it?
Well first off, eating high protein foods, I eat less, because I feel full sooner. I have also learned to eat for a few minutes and sit and wait and let my body catch up with what I have ingested. This prevents me from just stuffing my face until I start to feel full, then by the time my body catches up, I am stuffed to the point of nausea. By limiting the carbs in my diet, my blood sugar doesn’t spike, and crash causing hunger pangs long before my next meal. Both of these are good things.
So I eat less, and I have cut out bread, pasta and other refined grains from my lifestyle. No refined sugar, or high fructose corn syrup. I have also severely limited my intake of carbonated drinks My personal feeling is that the CO2 causes you stomach to stretch, and then it will take more food to fill that stretched cavity. I am amazed at how little food it takes to fill me up now, compared to 7 months ago.
Exercise. Yes, you can’t get enough. I have spent 3 hours in the hotel gym in the last 2 days. According to my heart rate monitor I have burned 2800 Calories in those 2 days. Did I work out that hard when I started? Of course not! I was physically able to. Last January I would walk on the treadmill at 2 mph, and if I wanted to spike my heart rate to above the training zone, kick it up to whopping 2.5 mph! Now if I walk at below 3.2 mph my heart rate falls below the training zone, and to kick it up I will run at 5.6 mph.
Is exercise fun? I guess the answer to that is yes and no. In many ways I love to work out and I miss it when I don’t. However when I do 1.5-2 hours hard, and my feet hurt, and my arthritic ankle starts throb and swell the answer is no. However when I take a shower afterward, and feel great, and wake up after sleeping like a dead man for the entire night, the answer is yes, you bet I like exercise.
So after all this rambling let’s compare my lifestyle to what Crafter_Man posted
1. Eat less. Eat less, check. I eat less than half of what I used to. I do not starve myself, when I am actually hungry I eat. But I am careful about what I do put in my mouth. Which brings us to
2. Eat better. Again check. Lean meat, fresh veggies. No bread, pasta or refined sugars. No high fructose corn syrup. Very limited carbonated beverages.
3. Exercise. Double check. Besides working out, I do things like park at the far end of the lot, and take stairs whenever possible.
So is it simple to lose weight? Yes three simple steps.
Is it easy? God no it is a pain in the ass.
But when you see an old friend that you have not seen in 6 months and they rave over how good you look, or your doctor mentions that your beer gut is almost gone, or you can walk into a store and buy fashionable clothes, it is well worth it.
I will close with a phrase that has become my mantra over these last seven months:

If anyone is still awake after reading this very long post, and would care to read about what I eat in an average day, I would be happy to post a sample day’s food menu.

44

I thought that was pretty interesting Rick.

I used to be a pretty in-shape fellow. After knee surgery a couple years ago, though, sloth took over. I was getting pretty chunky and some of my “quick fixes” weren’t really working.

typical diet:
Granola & yogurt for breakfast. Black coffee.

Sandwich & Chips & Diet soda for lunch, or leftovers.

Supper: meat, starch, veggie, beer.
Dessert: beer(s)

Exercise: two or three times a week, but pretty vigorous for 20+ minutes.

Me today:

Typical diet.
Granola & yogurt for breakfast. Black coffee. (same)

Sandwich & Diet soda for lunch, or leftovers (cut out the chips)

Supper: meat, starch, veggie, wine. (really cut down on beer)
Dessert: none

Exercise: 4-5 days a week. More vigorous than before, for 45+ minutes.

I’ve really cut way down on beer (I was easily drinking 12+ per week) and tried to avoid the chips with lunch (one of the few junk foods I indulged).

Anyway, the upshot is that even though what I was doing 6 months ago was not BAD, I was starting to look pretty slovenly. I never snack. I don’t get too many added sugars. And I exercised regularly, but I wasn’t losing any weight, and was probably putting a little on.

I just really wasn’t exercising enough and had a couple bad habits.

Part of the problem was that I kept trying to force myself to run. I couldn’t run because my knee would hurt. My knee hurt because I weighed too much. So, I started biking. I’m doing almost 100 miles/week now with hill workouts and sprints thrown in.

It’s easy for weight gain to creep up on you throughout your 20’s. It’s also easy to get into a mindset of “I guess this is just my natural build, and I’m also just naturally supposed to drink multiple beers each day.”

What’s also funny is that you can be at the same weight for a long time. You think, “oh, if I just exercise ONCE more every two weeks” or “If i just have 2 less beers per week” that you should then DROP weight. But it doesn’t really work that way. A few hundred calories every other week just gets lost in the noise.

It’s also frustrating because for at least the first 6 weeks after making some eating changes, and really exercising again, I didn’t notice a bit of a difference. You think, “I could get back on a regiment of beer again” or “my body just doesn’t want to budge.”

I don’t weigh myself so I can’t even say if I’ve shed any weight, but I’m up a couple of notches on the belt and I can see a couple of ribs and stomach muscles again.

My knees haven’t felt so good since the surgery. No swelling. No pain which was unheard of previously.

I don’t know if this story is typical reality. What it is, is someone who ate a little less, ate a little better, and exercised a lot more.

45

Thanks. I try.

Me before:
Breakfast: Omelet with stuff (whatever looked good), hash browns, meat, and toast. Finish off mine, and look to see if wife left any
Lunch big sandwich, fries, and diet soda
Late afternoon snack Something cause I would be starving, Big Gulp of diet Coke
Dinner, whatever with 2nds, salad, veggies, and zert if served
Late night, wine, or mixed drink, maybe snack if I felt like it.
Now:
Breakfast
2 eggs either scrambled, over easy, or made into a small cheese omelet
2 strips of bacon, or maybe 2 sausage links
Coffee
Lunch: either burger patty or a turkey sandwich sans bread. lettuce, tomato, and pickles, mustard, and a little mayo. Or if I am busy a lo carb “power bar” type thing.
Late afternoon snack 1 oz of macadamia nuts. I buy the big package at Trader Joes and weigh them into 1 oz portions and place into zip lock bags. Really kills that late afternoon hunger pangs
Dinner: A serving of meat (Turkey, Chicken, Beef or Pork) plus veggies. On the road, it might be a 7oz Filet mingion with blue cheese on top with steamed veggies, a Ceaser salad (no croutons) or a cheese burger no bun, sliced tomatoes no fries side of mustard, and a little mayo. Typically I will leave some of my dinner on the plate, since it is still too much food! (believe me this never used to happen!)

I also took up biking for similar reasons, my legs are very short, and I don’t have a very long stride. For me to keep up with somebody with long legs, I have to work way to hard. I also have a bad ankle from breaking my heel many years ago and yes it does hurt. Now one turn of the pedals is the same for me or a guy 6’4". All I have to do is keep up. A level playing field.

Amen to that brother. You have hit the nail exactly on the head. Two less beers or one extra workout session does get lost in the noise. And you tend to fall into the trap that I worked out, so I can have a piece of cake. :smack:

Atkins mentions this in his book. Don’t look at the scale, look in the mirror. After only 10 lbs on Atkins, I had already gone in at least 3 notches on my belt, and people were telling me I was losing weight. :slight_smile:

Yeah buddy! I think most people overweigh themselves when on a diet. I only weigh myself once a week, at the same time under the same conditions every time. I also keep track of my weight over time.

Same with my ankle. Before it hurt every day, now it only hurts when I stress it, and I can stress it more and more, before it hurts.

Same here.

46

It IS simple. It’s just not very **easy ** for some people. Easy and simple don’t mean the same thing.

47

I think part of the key to keeping off too much fat would be to not follow the seemingly wonderful solutions that society presents to us. Remember the good ol’ food pyramid? Schools taught it to ya. Doctors told you to follow it. Now, decades later, they discover that, whoops! this guide is basically a recipe for a stroke! So now it’s defunct.

Every time society comes out with information for your health that they just KNOW is right, I try not to believe everything I hear and remember that humans are basically just nearly-bald apes, so what do we really know, anyway?

I try avoid candy and processed foods as much as possible. I think nature’s own home-grown goodies are better for you than anything we can fabricate.

48

I’ll have to disagree with you on that point. The opposite of “easy” is “difficult.” The opposite of “simple” is “complex” (or alternately, “complicated”). Pursuing a master’s degree in mechanical engineering is by no means simple, since it involves a great many intermediate steps which can vary tremendously, and which require a great deal of original, personal input. (Selecting a thesis topic, for example, is a non-trivial step. Determining the nature of one’s intellectual input into that thesis topic is another non-trivial matter which requires a great deal of personal customaization, based on one’s background and the nature of that topic.)

I don’t see this as being analogous to fat loss by any means. Sure, there is some degree of personal variation and customization required–deciding which meals to cook, for example. By and large though, these are fine points–relatively minor details, akin to choosing what type of paper to use on today’s lab report. The challenge lies in sticking to one’s plan, rather than any inherent complexity in the plan itself.

49

This is problematic in that one does not have to ingest alcoholic beverages in order to sustain life . . . one does have to eat.

50

I guess in this thread folks have generally acknowledged that the simple plan can still be monumentally difficult, but I’d like to offer some of my own recent experiences to highlight an aspect of the difficulty.

I’m very intelligent and persistent. Generally if I decide to do something, I can do it. But I’ve been trying to lose weight for over ten years, and instead I’ve only gained. Right now I weigh about 215 pounds (I’m a 5’5" woman).

Why have my efforts failed? The answer is that my problem is not overeating. My problem is a tangled array of psychological issues, and eating is a result of, or sometimes an *ad hoc * solution, to these problems. For a decade I’ve been trying to treat the symptoms (overeating and weight gain) without even realizing what the problem was.

So the mantra, “just eat less and exercise more” was really disheartening to me. If I couldn’t even do that, what the hell was wrong with me? Add to it the notion **Philster ** addressed, that somehow fatness is a moral failure, and I felt like a pretty worthless person. Oh and guess what? One of my problems is that my reaction to stress and depression is to binge, so my constant self-flagellation only made me fatter in the end.

Now I’m in cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses on concrete tools for fixing problems (as opposed to lying on a couch talking about your mother, which is the image I used to have of therapy), and I can feel the difference already. I will always have the same challenges everyone else does: a supersized culture, a hectic schedule, fattening foods are often really yummy; but I won’t be dealing with an overwhelming, pathological compulsion to overeat in response to emotions.

The last time I got that compulsion, I decided to resist it. I hadn’t yet worked out what was going on in my head, nor did I have any alternative coping tools in place yet. I just white-knuckled it. And I can tell you, if I had to feel that way every day, or otherwise be fat, I’d pick fat every day of the week and twice on Sunday. If I felt that way every day, and didn’t have a recourse (such as food or my cognitive therapy methods), I would probably kill myself.

I suspect that an awful lot of people who are fat, or alcoholics, or drug addicts, are essentially self-medicating for a sub-rosa psychological problem. And if they try to change their behavior by sheer force of will, they probably feel a similar level of suffering. No wonder the recovery rate for both obesity and addiction is about 5%!

Once I have a handle on all this mental crap, it should help me adhere to the old reliable “eat less, exercise more,” which is indeed the solution to obesity. But I could never get to that solution until I solved other problems first.

51

:::Sigh::: Trying to explain a joke to the humor imparied is like trying to teach a pig to sing. :smack:

A simple set of instructions contains 1, 2 or 3 steps
A complex set of instructions contains 137 steps

An easy step is "Insert tab A into slot B”
A complex step might be Get a masters degree in mechanical engineering.

So with that let’s look at my set of instructions

[ol]
[li]Get a master degree in mechanical engineering[/li][li]Assemble toy[/li][/ol]

Is the list simple? Yes, 2 steps

Is step one easy? No, of course not.

Is the joke funny? It is to a parent trying to assemble a toy on Christmas Eve with instructions that were written Chinese and translated out of a dictionary. To you I guess not.

Is it analogous to loosing weight? Well the list posted by Crafter_Man is simple, however it is not easy. If weight loss was easy, there would not be so many fat people in the US today.
As Cajun Man noted, unlike alcohol, you cannot quit food cold turkey. Speaking just for myself, I have to fight urges every day to avoid overeating. I have to eat some, but I can’t eat too much. A damn difficult task IMHO.
A quick look around the local mall tends to back up this assessment. Losing weight is simple, but it is not easy.

52

[slight hijack]

I feel your pain AerynSun, going through the same thing, maybe a little further along the path. You might find this place helpful http://www.something-fishy.org. I especially like the forums…maybe I’ll see you there!

[/slight hijack]

The rest of the folks saying “Eat fewer calories, Expend more calories”…okay, you got me despite my previous protests. It is that simple, but (as others are saying) it can be very complicated to actually execute it. And I’d say to quantify it as well…you can track what’s going in, but we never really know for sure how much we’re burning.

Anyway, all I can say is I’m still fighting the good fight (you know, trying to be thinner so that I can fit in with society’s beauty standards [kidding, kidding, I know I have to lose weight for my health :rolleyes: ]), but trying to do it in a more thorough way through addressing the core issues rather than trying to quick-fix it, as seems to work for a small percent of the population. Maybe the solution for some people is: 1. Eat Less, 2. Exercise More; the rest of us is: 1. Get Therapy, 2. Exercise More, 3. Eat Less. :slight_smile:

Anyway, Peace & Love, all

53

Calm down, Rick. I’m not saying it wasn’t a joke. What I am saying is that this joke doesn’t, by any means, refute the tenet that losing fat is simple, albeit not easy.

The humor of your joke rests on a misrepresentation of the word “simple.” There’s nothing wrong with that; in fact, that’s part of the beauty of your joke. For the purposes of this particular discussion though, it’s does tend to muddle the issue, since a great many people here apparently equate “simple” with “easy.”

54

JThunder ???
My joke was not supposed to reufte the tenet that losing weight was simple, but not easy. It was desgined to support that position.

55

As a person who has been both very thin and very fat as an adult, I don’t have any hangups about it. I take a pragmatic point of view. It is very evident that, Crafter Man’s post notwithstanding, we human beings really do not know how to effectively control our weights. Because if we did know that, we would all be the weight we want to be.

Think about it. When we thoroughly understand a medical problem, we can fix it most of the time. Frex, diabetes we can control with insulin. We know what the mechanism is, we can deal with it, even if we can’t get rid of entirely as yet.

There are quite a few diseases we have eradicated almost completely because we know how they’re transmitted and how to block them. Think smallpox. Think polio.

Right now, I’d say we’re about at the “lets put leeches on 'em to suck out the bad humors” stage of controlling weight, which is about what this business of “eat less, eat better, exercise less” mantra amounts to. As a matter of simple observation, it doesn’t work for most people. It’s about a hair away from being quackery.

We’re learning more every day and sooner or later we’ll get the mechanisms figure out and then … bye bye fat, for most of us.

56

The reason that diseases like polio and smallpox were virtually wiped out is because the solution was forced on people by OTHER people. It never would have happed if the vaccines were optional. Many people are just screwed up that way. Even if the vaccine were free and offered everywhere, some people would just not do it and put themselves and the whole population at risk for another epidemic.

Likewise, ask any doctor what one of the biggest avoidable factors is in the prevention of any given treatable disease. The answer will be non-compliance with medication. People on medication for chronic illnesses are notorious for quitting taking their meds as soon as they feel better, run out and don’t bother to get etc. Left to their own devices, many people will simply make choices that are detrimental to their health even when the treatment is something as simple as taking 1 pill, once a day. Even educated people stop taking their antibiotics as soon as they get over their illness even though the doctor warns to take all the doses.

That is what we have here, a noncompliance with the best, most basic, and most intuitive solution and delusional thoughts that tell the person that there just must be another way for them.

57

The way that most overweight people got the way they are is by following the “eat more, eat poorly, excercise less” weight gain plan. Simple algebra tells us the formula for backing that out.

As for the “quackery” comment, most people on these boards are fairly intelligent so we will just let that one be telling all by itself.

58

I will post cites if I can, but a general theme that develops when tracking people and their eating/exercise routines every day:

People** under report ** the calories they consumer, and they **over estimate ** the calories the expend everday.

I say this alot, but the body is brutally efficient when it comes to using calories. If you create a deficit of roughly 3500 cals between what you eat and what you burn, you can kiss a pound goodbye. That is alot off work versus alot of curtailed consumption. If you cheat, exercise doesn’t stand to help you offset the cheating. You could gulp down 1,000 cals of cheesecake and to off set it you would need some serious days in the gym.

Making things harder is the false weight you lose from water and just from the absence of food in your digestive track. When you drop 5-8 pouinds in the first 10 days, it is hard to comprehend that your battle to lose 50 lbs might take an entire year after things level off and after you rebound when you stop the loss plan and adopt a maintenance plan.

59

We’re probably a little beyond that but not by much. While most people will admit that you can cure obesity by eating less, eating better and exercising more most people will not follow that routine. You can also eliminate the deficit by doubling taxes and eliminating social security. You can eliminate poverty by having everyone go to college (theoretically). You can eliminate crime by telling people to stop breaking the law. Just because that solution works on paper doesn’t mean it is pragmatic. Its not really pragmatic in my view to spend the rest of your life ignoring your internal hormones when it comes to appetite. You can’t fight biology forever and if you do you have to be damn dedicated. Thats like expecting people to maintain an artificial sex life for the rest of their lives. Even monks have trouble with that.

I’d give it 15 years before maintenance at an artificially low weight is doable for most of the population.

Example: Things like dairy and orlistat can make maintenance at a lower weight easier.

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NAH/is_1_34/ai_111896951

“A diet that included dairy prevented about 50 percent of weight regain and 80 percent of fat regain after the animals had lost weight and were allowed to eat at will, compared to those on the low-calcium, dairy-free diet”

During year 2, patients who continued with orlistat regained, on average, half as much weight as those patients switched to placebo
After about 8 or 9 moderate lifestyle changes and pharmacological advances like these are found I think weight maintenance will be doable for most people. Its easier to take a pill and drink milk than to ignore your internal hormones.

60

One thing I’ve noticed is that it is always easier not to gain weight in the first place than it is to take it off. It takes twice the discipline to loose the pound than it does to just not put it on in the first place.

To me, maintaining weight has been about realizing:

A can of soda is about 10% of my daily calorie requirement. Tastes good. Not 10% of my days food good.

My sweet tooth can be appeased by a small piece of good chocolate - rather than six chocolate chip cookies.

Two (and often three) meals a day can be light. I don’t need to have an egg mcmuffin for breakfast, a huge burrito for lunch and then steak and potatoes for dinner. A small bowl of oatmeal, a bowl of soup or a salad, and a lighter dinner is just fine.

I don’t LIKE french fries. I’m not big on potato chips either. Why do I put these things in my mouth!

Now, the most I’ve ever weighed (not pregnant) is 153 lbs as a 5’7" woman - I’ve never been technically overweight. Which makes it ALOT easier for me to maintain not being overweight. But that doesn’t mean its been easy.