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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.
Worrying. Ms. Aamodt has links to the Healthy at Every Size (HAES) obesity apologists. HAES are as insane as anti-vaxxers, only they believe medical science is a worldwide racist conspiracy against fat people. Oh, and if you don't want to buy into their excuses, you're literally oppressing them.
In short, I'm worried that she appears to be peddling snake oil to people who are very, very desperate to avoid having to take personal responsibility for their unhealthy lifestyles. Diet and Exercise work -- as part of a lifestyle change. We know this, we have known this for years.
The problem is that humans are extremely, extremely poor at making judgements about food, and we have an entire industry ("Big Food") dedicated into manipulating people into overeating and eating cheaply produced unhealthy garbage.
For one, it does not say that at all and two, this article very much fits what I've experienced.
Since you're not going to believe ANY of my conclusions anyway, I'm not going to waste my time writing them down.
Let's just say I'm losing weight now steadily and all I did was I started to chew my food thoroughly... and I mean thoroughly. I counted 60 to 100 chews per bite.
I immediately started eating way less food because there is now a point, pretty soon, where I find the thought of eating more becomes uncomfortable. I stop eating automatically now.
So on one side, eating less actually is a viable option IF you eat less because you feel sated. If you eat less just because the scale says so, you WILL get cravings and your body WILL go into starvation mode and you definitely WILL NOT permanently lose weight.
Fat people aren't a "race"
Sure they are, they just don't race as fast as thin people unless you drop them from an airplane.
Just another day in Paradise
As someone who has successfully lost over 50 lbs and had kept it off for years. Who goes to the Gym 5 days a week, and watches my food intake carefully, However I am still over the recommended BMI. Sure I can run faster than most people, and I am stronger, and have much better insurance, I have the pulse and blood pressure of an athlete but medically I am still obease.
I have dedicated a lot of time to this, and I am well aware how hard it is to lose weight, and I am not tolerating trolls to make it harder for others to choose a healthy lifestyle because they are afraid of such judgmental people. Who hide behind their trolling as (Giving them a kick to change) helpful. Overweight people are well aware of their looks, and health concerns far more than you are. And you know what the biggest excuse not to join a gym is? It is I will need to lose some weight first before I can join a Gym otherwise they are afraid of getting mocked by dumb ass comments like that.
Fat Acceptance isn't gluttony acceptance, but treating people of different sizes like normal human beings, and not some underclass that you can insult.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It wasn't that she was lazy, it's that you were. Students that stay in high school for eight years will do that to a teacher. :)
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
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.
As a neuroscientist, I always feel a bit bad when I see headlines like "neuroscience explains X". It usually doesn't and here also it doesn't really (although that's not say the work is without merit, the blurb in the summary seems reasonable). However, neuroscience obviously doesn't tell us why people are getting so fat in the first place. This matters because it affects how to handle weight loss. I accept that different people may have different "natural weights", but this doesn't explain the steadily increasing obesity levels. Something is clearly changing with our relationship to food. Maybe it's increasing sugar levels. Maybe it's that fewer people cook and that encourages over-eating. Maybe it's increasing portion sizes. Perhaps all of those. The point is that there is a driving force to increasing obesity in the population at large, and as an overweight individual you are fighting against it (whatever it is). So if you want people to start losing weight then I reckon you need to understand very well why they're gaining it at such unprecedented levels. The food industry is, in general, not helping to clarify the issue.
soylentnews.org
I wasn't sure if I saw that story posted here or on the other site. Must have been the other site. It was a fascinating read at the very least.
I also found that it seemed to be somewhat fatalistic and depressing. Humans want to fight against nature and remake the world as they think it should be. It seems like in the ultimate "joke's on you" moment, the very nature of people's bodies has started turning against them all over the developed world. At least this human still wants to fight against nature, to figure out what the answer must be, confident there must be an answer to be had. I don't have funding, and I doubt I'd have the first clue of what to do to figure it out. Debuggers are my thing, not microscopes.
I'm one of the lucky ones--that person everybody seems to know who can eat whatever they want and never gain a pound. Well, not so much as when I was younger and every weekend meant a trip to the arcade to play DDR. I wish I knew why or even how. There are better people in the world who deserve whatever it is about my body that would make gaining a hundred lbs or so if I need to for some reason seem as daunting to me as losing a hundred lbs and keeping it off is for many people I know. One person in particular whose struggles with their weight has turned into a full blown mental illness and utter despair, compounding the problem by wrecking the best tool they have to work through the problem: their brain. Damn shame. And here I am helplessly posting to Slashdot and cussing out ACs like that'll make a difference.
It's not to say that exercise isn't a factor, but I begin to wonder if the mentality of "head to the gym, stress the body to its breaking point for an hour or two, then back in the chair" isn't part of the larger problem. Maybe that works for cheetahs, just not so well for humans.
I think the best thing that people could work towards is a slower, more relaxed pace of life. Everybody is so tense and constantly on edge. Every little problem that comes up is the zomg sky is falling end of the damned world. We seem so completely detached from the essence of living, at least in an agricultural sense: preparing for the growing season, working the earth when plants will grow, harvesting in fall (along with the requisite fall feast), and spending the time of year when little if anything grows with loved ones, safe and confident that enough wood has been gathered and chopped and enough food has been stored away to last until the cycle is complete when spring returns.
In a hunter-gatherer sense: the Earth provides. There will always be enough. Don't horde and don't be greedy. Don't take more than you need.
I feel we've created a culture where everybody is driven like they're being chased down by a lion day after day after day after day. It's not really about the act of eating--that's not what I mean by don't take more than you need--, but it's about the endless 24/7 life-and-death brink-of-the-edge reality that is life in the "developed" world.
First world problems. Literally.
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.
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.