The reason this usually ends up turning into a hate-fest is because people are tired of hearing the same old thing from people who are overweight. People who have lost weight often have even less patience than those who have never been fat, because they were in the same situation and yet somehow managed to do something about it. Some of the points raised are legitimate, but an awful lot of the research out there has little to do with the average person. In addition, I’d like to point out that there’s no research out there, that I’m aware of anyway, on why a lot of people can, in fact, lose weight and keep it off. There’s no funding or interest in learning about why healthy, in-shape people are the way they are. All the focus is on people who are abnormally overweight. Of course you’re going to find tons of citations for reasons people are fat; there aren’t any studies on reasons people aren’t fat.
A side note, really, but hunter-gatherers are rarely on the edge of starvation. Even those living on crappy marginal land like desert and tundra (the only places they’ve got left now) manage to get more protein, a better balanced diet, and a better variety of food than urban poor in affluent countries. That’s not to say famines never affect them, but the reason they’re skinny is not because they’re starving, it’s because they have good diets and get lots of exercise. Agricultural societies are the ones who get hit with famines that kill millions. Hunter-gatherers simply move to where there’s more food.
That does sound pretty reasonable. It also sounds like a recommendation that is conducive to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. In the studies you cited, did they track whether or not people were actually exercising and eating a healthy diet? I kind of doubt that they were. They may have given excuses for lapsing, blaming it on biology or unchangeable behavior, but I’ll bet that the participants stopped exercising or started giving themselves leeway in their diet and that’s what led to the renewed weight gain. An excuse or reason for lapsing is not a cause, the change in diet or activity is the cause.
Also, any athlete knows that you go through stages where changes slow down or stop and they need to change their routine to keep making progress. The same thing is almost certainly true of weight loss. Maintaining a set routine will result in no further losses. Cutting calories too drastically will result in a protective response from the person’s body, resulting in rapid weight gain if either the exercise level decreases or caloric intake increases. Weight loss must be slow, steady, and the regimen continually adjusted if you want to have sustainable progress or even if you want to maintain the loss.
This is not my experience, nor that of most athletes. I saw a dramatic difference when I started doing a specific kind of exercise: weight training with heavy weights and low reps. I dropped 2-3kg in two weeks, exercising only 3 days a week, without a change in diet. The weight loss slowly tapered off after that, but to date I have lost about 10kg without a significant change in diet. Dieting is not the only component, nor is it more important than exercise.
Fit individuals eventually end up consuming more calories than they did when they were overweight because they need to maintain the muscle mass. I will eventually have to change my diet a bit if I want to get down to around 10-12% body fat, which is my goal for spring, but I have had little problem with losing weight through exercise alone. And, I had little problem packing on the fat when I was inactive yet eating a reasonably healthy diet with no bingeing and only a minor caloric surplus. I didn’t exercise, I got fat. I started to exercise semi-regularly, I lost it.
To those who cite Pima Indian studies and talk about thyroid problems: if you’re not a Pima Indian, those studies are probably 10-20 years away from having any application to your life, and maybe they will not have relevance even then. If you don’t have a thyroid problem, you have no business even bringing that up. There are legitimate medical reasons for a very small part of the population’s problem with weight loss, but it’s very doubtful that most of you have a medical condition. If you do, that excludes you from the “most people” part of the discussion. I’m sorry you have that problem, but it doesn’t mean the rest of the population who is overweight has the same condition or some other medical excuse.
That the problem is one of lifestyle is fairly clear. Other countries with population compositions similar to ours have a lower rate of obesity. Canada and most of the European countries don’t have anywhere close to the numbers of fat people the US does. The problem is endemic to First World countries. Even in non-First World countries where most of the population has little problem meeting their nutritive needs, but which are not primarily industrial or information economies, there are few who are obese. Genetic or other medical abnormalities cannot account for the widespread absence of an obesity problem in most of the rest of the world.
Americans are fat because they eat too much, eat the wrong foods, eat on a schedule that is conducive to fat gain, don’t exercise enough, and spend too much time working at sedentary jobs.
