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Neuroscience Explains Why Dieters Rarely Lose Weight (nytimes.com)
HughPickens.com writes: According to a new study, the chance of an obese person attaining normal body weight is 1 in 210 for men and 1 in 124 for women, increasing to 1 in 1,290 for men and 1 in 677 for women with severe obesity, suggesting that current weight management programs focused on dieting and exercise are not effective in tackling obesity. Now neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt writes in the New York Times that "in the long run dieting is rarely effective, doesn't reliably improve health and does more harm than good". And according to Aamodt, the root of the problem is not willpower but neuroscience.
Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters' weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. According to Aamodt dieting can actually lead to weight gain because dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight.... Aamodt recommends mindful eating -- paying attention to signals of hunger and fullness, without judgment, to relearn how to eat only as much as the brain's weight-regulation system commands.
Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters' weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. According to Aamodt dieting can actually lead to weight gain because dieting is stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones, which act on fat cells to increase the amount of abdominal fat. Such fat is associated with medical problems like diabetes and heart disease, regardless of overall weight.... Aamodt recommends mindful eating -- paying attention to signals of hunger and fullness, without judgment, to relearn how to eat only as much as the brain's weight-regulation system commands.
There are several whole industries devoted to convincing people that it's as simple as a bit of diet and exercise and if you or someone you know can't lose weight it's because they're fat and lazy. "Health" food, diet plans, pills and potions, exercise machines, surgery. All waiting to grab a dollar. And billions of people too scared or too stupid to know that if they're thin it's their good fortune, not a reason to put others down. Fat shaming is more socially accepted than any other form of discrimination on the planet.
It's trying to justify you're going to be stuck at your unhealthy weight whether you like it or not so you should just accept it fatty mclardbucket.
Yeah, like my high school science teacher. Gained 100 lbs in 3 years, got diagnosed with a thyroid problem. Went on medication, lost 100 lbs in 5 years. No changes to diet or habit in those 6 years. All her fault for being lazy.
Learn to love Alaska
I think the main issue here is that HEAS and fat acceptance people are overdoing it. Some people can be slightly overweight but everything can be fine health wise and try to force them to a normal weight is more likely to make things worse. There are also some complaints against "fat shaming" that are justified. Obesity is a significant lifestyle-based health issue, but there are many others such as smoking, lack of sleep, drug abuse, risky sexual behavior or being underweight. Shaming should to be fair: If people ignore smoking but are shaming slightly overweight people and claim that shaming is based on health concerns instead of aesthetics that is just bigotry or bad information.
A little big of overweight (BMI 25-27), especially with low levels of abdominal fat is not a big health issue, it might even be slightly more healthy than normal weight. Something like BMI 27 to 30 is unhealthy most of the time, but on average still causes smaller health issues than smoking. But many people are significantly fatter than that. They almost always have health issues caused by their weight and should really lose weight and could easily do so by swapping some high calorie count items in their diet with vegetables.
Jan
Sure they are, they just don't race as fast as thin people unless you drop them from an airplane.
Idiocy is more of a problem than obesity will ever be - as evidenced by the fact that you think more weight would make someone fall faster.
Where did he say that? He said "as fast as", not "faster than".
When did they stop talking about how gravity works in public schools?
Ironic.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Whole fucking thread full of fat shaming.
I am currently up early and not sure if I can go into work today because you fat shamers have pushed somebody I care about to near suicide. I have literally no fucking clue if I can leave them alone in the house right now.
When somebody eats 300-600 calories per day and still gains weight, there is something else going on.
On the other hand, look at me! I'm only a few lbs overweight, and I eat like shit and drink all the time! I must be morally superior! I have no fucking clue how many calories I eat each day. My fucking body burns somewhere around 1500 calories at fucking rest last time I checked!
So what's my fucking secret? Nuclear hot wings? Is that what keeps my metabolism going while somebody I care about abso-fucking-lutely cannot control their weight? Eating McDonalds and Speedway shit every other day? Is that my fucking secret when somebody eating nothing but beans and rice in measured portions can't lose a single fucking pound?
Ah, it must be the smoking! Is 10-12 fucking cigarettes per day my fucking secret?! You tell me, asshole.
God, can we get past this period of history before science figures out what my fucking secret is and gives it to all the beautiful, talented people in the world whose body is their own worst enemy already?
If there is a hell, I hope you and all the other fat shaming ACs here burn in it. You have blood on your hands. If swear, if I fucking knew how to raise or lower somebody's metabolism, I'd set yours to fucking ZERO just to laugh at you while you ballooned up. Don't expect me to watch over you when you become suicidal. You deserve to feel anguish and total fucking despair.
i've never bought into any of the dieting fads nor tried them because they blamed random things without the science to back it up. one fateful day last summer i watched a documentary that claimed sugars in our food were to blame but it actually had the science to back it up.
Sugar is a drug, addictive and causes food cravings. This begs the question of why we aren't going through withdraw and the answer is that sugar has been added to all your foods specifically so you do not go through withdraw. Look at your raw pasta which has zero reason to have sugar added, it has about 3g of sugar added for every 56g (2 oz).
To make matters worse, food makers started using High Fructose Corn Syrup in products because it's inexpensive because corn is subsidized. Fructose is processed by your liver and it gets stored as fat unless you have low blood sugar. so products with High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) are most likely to make you fat.
After removing sugar from my diet (not easy to find products without sugar!) I went through a few days of withdraw. After that, I actually felt like I more energy to do things, so much so that I wanted to exercise (that was never my goal). I started walking regularly and losing weight without any crazy diet, just not eating things with sugar added. Apples are a great source of sugar that have the fiber to balance it out so that it's absorbed slowly avoiding a traffic jam in your liver.
In the last year I have lost 65 lbs of fat and gained 15 lbs of muscle without ever having to go hungry or restrain myself from eating. I'm still overweight (for now) but I'm no longer obese.
The food supply is being drugged to increase profits.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Seriously: You fat? Eat less. It's that simple.
Science says you;re wrong.
Your experience of being a few pounds overweight is not the same experience as someone who is seriously obese.
Let me point at all your mistakes. Because I know how to, and because it's fun.
Since when is eating 300-600 calories per day too fucking much?
It isn't. But saying one can be fat eating "300-600" kcal per day, is false. And trivial to prove so.
I want to know why there are people who can't lose weight without literally fucking starving themselves to death.
There aren't. Nobody dies of starvation on a 1500kcal diet and overweight. Insisting in that fantasy as fact won't make it true. Insisting that there are documented cases, won't make them real. It is a lie.
When you're providing somebody all their food, it's sort of fucking difficult for them to cheat.
Nobody ever told it's easy. There are lots of "Fucking difficult" things people achieve every day.
measurable reality doesn't fucking agree with you.
That's a lie. Often repeated, but still a lie. Measurable reality clearly shows how weight is lost. It's been proven fact for decades.
Everyone agrees but fat people looking for an excuse and snake-oil sellers looking for a way to lie to fat people.
Your waist measurement is irrelevant. Your soul is an ugly, filthy waste of time and energy. The lives you destroy will weigh you down after you shuffle the mortal coil. It won't surprise me one bit when all the negativity and destruction and human misery you're out there causing day-in day-out drags you to fucking hell.
Being a beautiful person bears no relation with factual knowledge. Great advances in rocket science were made by nazi monsters. Rockets still flew quite beautifully.
Establishing a link between science and the beauty of a person's soul is useless. You must learn to separate fact from feelings. You must understand facts are facts. Science doesn't mind how sad it makes you.
The real world doesn't care whether it makes everyone miserable or otherwise.
There are two options:
- Understanding and applying the science, and doing the "Fucking difficult".
- Blaming everyone and everything else.
You seem to have chosen the latter. Unwisely.
This article is a load of crap that contradicts the study's conclusion:
"those subjects maintaining greater weight loss at 6 years also experienced greater concurrent metabolic slowing." ...
"Metabolic adaptation persists over time and is likely a proportional, but incomplete, response to contemporaneous efforts to reduce body weight."
What they're saying is that the body will adapt to the change in calorie intake such that the person can maintain the weight loss. The NYT article makes wild and incompatible conclusions based on this very simple and narrow study.
Is it just too fucking hard for you to use your imagination a little bit and imagine what it must be like to be somebody who can't stop gaining weight even while eating 300-600 calories per day?
Ok. Once more.
That is not possible. You may not understand why, but it's as if you told me that some people can move objects with their mind alone, or levitate, or cast spells. Not possible. As in "never going to happen". As in "magic". Just impossible. Really. I'm not trying to lie to you. It is truly completely and absolutely impossible. Everything we know about basic chemistry would have to be false for that to happen.
Calories are not an invented unit for you to play with. Calories have a meaning. A human brain alone consumes that many calories per day even in a comma.
For someone to gain weight on such a diet, he would have to be paralyzed, inside an artificial lung, kept at 37C, and have no brain.
I must admit that, after reading your posts, that last condition seems to be possible.
Very well said. Be careful though .. I used to be able to eat whatever I wanted. Then I got married and had kids, and it all changed.
I've taken a different approach to losing weight that is slowly working, averaging 2 1/2 pounds a month over the last 2 years. And no set point in sight. Rather than waster hours at the gym or the idiotic exercise of jogging, I do what came naturally a hundreds years ago ... work. It's amazing how much weight I have lost doing simple things like watching what I eat (i.e. stop buying chips, and eating Oreos in moderation), and laying pavers. Or mixing and pouring concrete by hand. Or using an ax and saw to cut down a tree and cut it to length instead of a chain saw. Installing my own flooring and kitchen cabinets instead of paying someone to do it.
And instead of a huge gym bill or bad feet or large payments to contractors, I have a beautiful house and yard. That I can point to with pride and say 'Yes .. I did that. No, I didn't have any training, I just googled it.;
It's been quite interesting to watch as my wife and I continue to eat less and less .. and realize, we are still satisfied. By listening to what our body tells us instead of some fad on the Internet, we have both reduced both our food intake and what we spend on food. We don't shun fast food restaurants, but we eat there less and less. And, to your point, enjoy what we do eat more and more.
I just bought a used sail boat that will need a fair amount of work. That should keep me busy for the rest of my life, it takes a bit of work to sail a boat instead of motoring around.
I may never reach the weight I was in high school, but that's a ridiculous goal. As long as I can get rid of the pills, I'll be fine.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
You're an AC, so I don't expect too much here. But, you're apparently the kind of idiot that cannot grasp that humans are a complex biological organism. To say people have a choice in their diet is all well and good. To ignore the fact that physiological processes in the body will affect the choices made is just willful idiocy. The point of these studies isn't to remove blame from fat people that just like to eat. It's to help understand the why and how of the way the body does its thing. With that information, people can take steps to improve their gains when trying to lose weight.