Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What if weight regulation was as deeply baked into your brain as your sex drive and changing its mechanism was as hard as abstaining from orgasm? Would that be easy for you?
I think the overall lack of success from individual attempts at weight control via diets should tell us something: that we need to find other ways, probably involving changing neurochemistry.
But I fully expect we'll continue the blame game instead, because to do otherwise would admit that we are not necessarily in full control of our actions, and that in turn would threaten our self identities, our egos. It would admit luck and circumstance as a primary factor in where we end up rather than effort and agency.
If you choose to not have desirable food in your household, it is much easier to eat less. You won't have to strain your willpower or lie to yourself.
If everyone went to the grocery store and bought eggs for breakfast and brown rice + tuna for dinner with no oil, they would be just fine.
1. You must feel ashamed for your laziness and greed - anything other than humble capitulation to this is 'making excuses' and maybe you're 'not ready' to make the changes you need.
2. Dieting's easy - just eat less, fatty!
3. Dieting is literally energy in/energy out and weight/BMI is a perfect measure of progress. If you eat X calories a day and log it accurately you will ALWAYS lose weight Y/week and if you keep this up permanently you will keep it off. If anything happens that this model can't explain, it's because you fucked up and are being lazy/greedy again/lying to yourself.
4. I absolutely discount any possibility of this being a psychological crutch that will not be replaced if you lose weight (often the person doing the judging has several of their own that would render them miserable if they gave up, but those are not 'special' topics that are allowed to be brought up in polite conversation.)
5. I am saying all this only because I am concerned for your health, not due to this being a good source of feeling superior or insecurities in this area or just finding fat people amusing.
And I'm sure I could go on.
I should point out that I am very much _not_ in favour of the whole 'fat pride' movement stuff - having digs at people for being fat is not ok, but being significantly overweight is a serious health hazard and extremely bad for you.
What most people miss in this is how incredibly hard it is to actually get your damn body to lose weight and keep it off. A lot of the problem is psychological, and we genuinely do need to look at means of being smarter about how we tackle the problem, instead of using the blame game as an excuse when we are facing an absolute epidemic of obesity. Blaming is not making those numbers any smaller.
That's obviously not true. Assuming slow pace gym session and 200 kcal lost, nobody can keep their weight stable if they spend just 600 kcal per day and have normal activity.
It's funny how much weight loss is an ideological issue to usually quite logical people - don't assume you know this is impossible simply because you have a model in your head that says so.
EDIT: When I say self-delusion here I am referring to the apparent self-delusion of the author that the parent implies - to say you are only consuming 800kcal when there is an assumption that that MUST result in weight loss leaves only self-delusion as an explanation. My point is that there might be other factors (Emphasis on MIGHT...)
The likely issue is, cheating on the diet. Sure, eating limited calories at a meal is a good idea. Its also necessary to avoid adding 300-1000 kC with that fast-food burger after work or that donut at the meeting. Its so easy to do; it explains all the "I limited my calories and didn't lose weight!" claims. Simplest answer is often correct answer.
Yes that is the most likely answer I agree, however it doesn't make it the ONLY one. I have dieted using a 'food diary' and been amazed at how many calories you can eat/drink without realising it, it's really quite something.
HOWEVER, if she's so serious as to exercise that much, and knows the calories and it's at that low a level, it seems the error bars would likely preclude this.
I've noticed weird results when I've dieted where the 'energy equation' just does not match reality when I have dieted STRICTLY using a food diary and known-calorie food/drink. The 'dieting plateau' is famous and encountered by many so maybe there are more factors here.
Factors that might be at play (other than self-delusion):
1. Water/body fluid retention - This can vary quite a bit and is often (apparently) the explanation for dramatic results at the beginning of a diet. Water is dense enough for this to cause there to appear to be no weight change. In this case, the body fat _would_ be being used by the body as an energy source it just wouldn't show up in weight changes.
2. Inaccurate scales - It's surprising how often bathroom scales can be significantly off. Usually they are consistent + their delta, however maybe she measured on 2 different scales before and after (seems unlikely given how often we dieters like to check)
3. Use of muscle mass as an energy source - This can and does happen, though as I understand it usually as a 'last resort' by the body.
4. Reduced body temperature/energy usage - The body is capable of reducing energy used in starvation situations (though it renders you not feeling great often), this could happen here.
5. Change in efficiency of energy extracted from food - The body is complicated, it's not obvious that energy extracted from food will always remain the same.
6. Difference in diet composition - calories aren't the entire answer as some food is more easily digested than other food, and some types of food are more likely to result in weight gain than others.
7. Hormonal changes - Hypo and hyper-thyroidism can change body mass accumulation without ANY change in food intake, so this could easily apply to other hormonal changes.
8. Constipation - It sounds silly, but perhaps more retention of feces in the system could result in apparent lack of weight change.
9. Change in weather - Perhaps a hotter climate requires less heating and hence less energy usage by the body?
My principle point here is that things are just not as simple as energy in -> energy out - yes 'basic physics' holds that has to be an equilibrium, however you might not be measuring what these are correctly. A car must maintain an equilibrium too, but the type of car, its condition and what you do with it significantly varies the energy it requires despite the same distances being traversed.
A dozen former Biggest Loser contestants went into a laboratory for a few days for a study in which they had their metabolism analyzed and it was verified that six years after losing weight on the show, all their metabolic rates were substantially reduced - by an average of 500 calories/day - from what would be normal for someone their weight.
In the context of this study result, a small woman failing to lose weight on an 800-calorie/day diet should not constitute an extraordinary claim.
(Doing the math: imagine her normal metabolism level might previously have required 1200 calories/day. Subtract ~500 due to having dieted, add ~100 for her "hour of exercise", and we're at ~800/day.)
If she can do that, African famines are hoaxes and UN has been fooling us all this time.
Only for several months while (probably) leading an otherwise sedentary lifestyle. Still remarkable, but a far less impossible feat.
She claimed it over 3 months, it might just be errors in measurement, water retention can make a big difference, there might be muscle mass loss (small amount, countered by water retention perhaps), etc. (see my other comment for some other potentials.)
Let's not just assume our model is definitely correct because it correlates to energy conservation - energy conservation assumes we know exactly energy in/out and that weight is a good measurement of the balance of the two and that we are measuring it accurately.
So no, it doesn't seem impossible for her testimony to be accurate at least approximately as given.
um, "changed in behavior ... eating more vegetables" -aka- "diet". So in other words "fad and crash diets" don't work. But "improving your diet" does and always has.
However like you said if you think about your diet like e.g. banning soda, processed food and other unhealthy food, it works wonders. I know the book title sounds cliche but I'm reading "The 6-Pack Checklist: A Step-by-Step Guide to Shredded Abs" by Nate Miyaki and he writes that even if you exercise a lot you cannot or shouldn't eat anything you like.
This wasn't clear to me up until recently because I thought only about calories but not the quality of food like if you are taking enough omega 3 fatty acids etc. I thought as long as I exercise and burn enough calories it doesn't matter what kind of food I eat which is not true.
"If dieting doesn’t work, what should we do instead?
I recommend 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."
di·et - verb - restrict oneself to small amounts
or special kinds of food in order to lose
weight.
What about a huge number of people who did lose weight permanently and successfully through calorie restriction?
Now this article.
There's no solution, then, right?
LOL. What happens is that this article is confusing. At the end it says: "I recommend mindful eating". That's what basically a diet is. I mean, a permanent diet, so to speak. I guess what the author is saying is "if you stop your diet, you will gain weight again", and to that, I reply: thanks Captain Obvious!
That means changing your diet... i.e., dieting...
>If dieting doesn’t work, what should we do instead? I recommend mindful eating
I predict much pseudo-science coming from this Biggest Loser study...
>Exercise reduces abdominal fat
And how does that work? We can now target fat-loss?
>I finally gave up dieting six years ago
What does that even mean? You no longer eat? Oh, you mean you went from one framework of deciding what to eat to a different framework of deciding what to eat.
Personally, I've been working out very regularly for some time but the change hasn't been in my weight, just in my body fat. Going purely on weight, "dieting" (eg: eating healthy and eating less) hasn't changed my weight at all. But I am orders of magnitude fitter and stronger than I was before. These articles only serve to highlight how little we know about how our bodies function.
Stop with the artificial and high sugar and watch it melt away.
And if you're still drinking soda that alone is -10 years of your life IMO. Worth it? not for me, but you decide.
I have been overweight/obese virtually all of my life (my baby fat was immediately replaced with fat fat). Over the years I have been under the care of two separate physicians for weight loss and taken 3 different types of prescription drugs for weight loss (Phentermine, Xenical, and Contrave). The most that I lost under those physicians and medication was about 30 lbs, which I promptly gained back PLUS an additional 30 lbs for my trouble.
Once I took a more mindful/intuative eating approach, the weight came off easily. I follow 4 basic rules that I took from a book called "I Can Make You Thin" by Paul McKenna (the book also includes some hypnosis stuff, but I don't use that).
1) When I am hungry I eat. 2) I eat what I want. 3) I eat consciously. 4) When I am full I stop.
Seems simple enough, but the devil is in the details. For example, regarding rule 1, I ONLY eat when I am hungry, not when I am bored or stressed. Learning when I was actually hungry and not just wanting to eat to change my emotions was HUGE.
Regarding rule 3 (eating consciously), that means no more eating in front of the TV/Computer, or while reading a book, or even thinking a lot about other things. I focus on eating and JUST eating. I eat with as few distractions as possible.
Regarding rule 4, knowing WHEN I was full was a HUGE issue for me. For most of my life, I ate until I was bloated or nauseous. Now as soon as I am satisfied or full I stop.
Because of Rules, 1, 3, 4, the results of rules 2 (eat what I want) were interesting. I still eat what I want, but what I want changed. I have always loved pizza, but now I am also addicted to spinach, either raw or steamed. I can honestly say that I eat more spinach in a given month than I had TOTAL in the 10 year period between 2004-2014. It's nuts. I am absolutely astounded by how few vegetables that I used to eat before this eating plan.
I don't get hungry and I don't have those cravings that everyone who has been on a diet knows so well. The key for me was that I wanted to find something that I KNEW that I could do for the rest of my life, not some diet that I would just stay on until I reached my goal weight, then revert to my old ways.
There's so much information available about losing weight, I doubt all of the articles are true.
That being said, eating 1500 calories a day and running for 30 minutes twice or three times a week have helped me lose 40 pounds in 3 months, and after that, I re-raised the calorie limit to 2000-2500 a day. There's not much science involved, eat the right stuff and work out.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.profes...
Put simply, a 300 calorie cookie is less filling than a 300 calorie lean steak, so you're more likely to want to eat more after the cookie than after the steak.
http://www.eufic.org/article/en/artid/what-makes-us-feel-ful... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16002791
That testimony is quite shaky. At one point in the article she talks about how he was eating 800 calories a day, and mysteriously put the weight back on.
Five paragraphs later she talks a separate incidence when he again managed to lose weight, but put the weight on again after binge eating at 3am, describing this as a 'natural response.'
Also, much much harder for women to lose weight than men.
On the practical side I just banned all sugars from my diet and heavily restricted my carb intake. (No Keto though). Not eating bread alone saved me 600 kcal a day.
'For example, men with severe obesity have only one chance in 1,290 of reaching the normal weight range within a year; severely obese women have one chance in 677. A vast majority of those who beat the odds are likely to end up gaining the weight back over the next five years. In private, even the diet industry agrees that weight loss is rarely sustained. A report for members of the industry stated: “In 2002, 231 million Europeans attempted some form of diet. Of these only 1 percent will achieve permanent weight loss.”'
I'm pretty certain studies generally conclude that people who lose weight are _overwhelmingly_ likely to regain it. Of course you can play the blame/shame game with them and say they're all just lazy, but you're really starting to walk away from the facts and towards the all-too-common ideology that surrounds weight.
Also:
'After several months of eating fewer than 800 calories a day and spending an hour at the gym every morning, I hadn’t lost another ounce.'
So the 'not much science involved' calorie balance really REALLY should have resulted in a loss at this rate, yet it didn't - how do you explain that? I mean that literally entirely contradicts your claim.
I'm overweight. I take full responsibility for my situation and make no excuses. But losing weight is surprisingly, intensely difficult and your body fights you every damn inch of the way and this kind of blaming, sanctimonious 'it's simple' shite you hear so often does NOT fit reality.
Congratulations on your loss, but don't assume you'll sustain it. I lost about the same amount of weight as you with the same calorie limit as you, and despite all this will likely try again and have good results at least initially. But I think longer term you have to think more carefully about how the hell you'll sustain it, it really _isn't_ simple.
>So the 'not much science involved' calorie balance really REALLY should have resulted in a loss at this rate, yet it didn't - how do you explain that? I mean that literally entirely contradicts your claim.
Explanation is simple: The author either lied to herself or she lied to us. Her diet and workout plan did not violate the laws of physics, so she's wrong.
The Base Metabolic Rate in the cited paper is still much higher than that even for people whose metabolism slowed down.
Normally, it's calculated as (9.99 x weight_in_kg) + (6.25 x height_in_cm) – (4.92 x age) – 161 for women.
So for her (assuming she is 5' tall and late 20's), to remain at normal weight and not move at all it would have been (9.99 x 56.699) + (6.25 x 152.4) – (4.92 x 27) – 161 = 1225
This is without any exercise. She must have missed some source of calories.
It really is that simple.
Several months of eating fewer than 800 calories and not going to the gym at all would result in massive weight loss... except for a very tiny person.
It's not sanctimonious.
I am responsible for being overweight it's totally my fault and responsibility, I make no excuses, I just dislike the often seemingly ideological discussions that result.
I gave some thoughts on why you might be wrong on that in a separate reply... yes basic physics apply, but your ideas of what the energy in and energy out is might not be correct. The body is complicated.
This can be observed by anybody who's dieted with a _strict_ food diary eating precisely the same things + quantities with known calories - weight change can vary surprisingly and significantly without the laws of physics being violated.
The grandparent IS _very_ sanctimonious:
'This while article sounds like a justification for the author not losing weight.
...
...there's not much science involved, eat the right stuff and work out.'
I hate this attitude of 'you're just making excuses' vs. overweight people - it's unfalsifiable as you put literally anything down to excuses.
Losing weight is very hard because your body doesn't want you to do it for evolutionary reasons and weird shit happens even when you do everything right.
Sanctimonious blame games are harmful not only because you might just be wrong, but because food is so often a crutch that when dieting you no longer have, and I've found that people tend to come out with the harshest comments when you are dieting and actually trying to fix things, which can be devastating when you literally have no crutch any longer.
Also most of the time the people who make such comments are emphatically _not_ motivated by health concerns, and there's a culture where just being a dick is acceptable in this one area but no others. People don't like you telling them about their personality flaws and how they are just idiots and should stop being such a twat, and it's not socially acceptable, but the exact same approach to overweight-ness is totally acceptable, and does fuck all to help the situation.
TL;DR The VAST majority of dieters fail in the long run, things are more complicated than just dieting and staying at low cals for the long run both physically and psychologically.
I think the most sustainable way for normal people to lose fat and not muscle is to try to stay as strong as you were during a bulk while maintaining a small calorie deficit.
This breaks the HN guidelines in two ways: by calling names ('sanctimonious') and by playing the 'did you read the article' card. Please follow the guidelines, even when someone else is wrong and the topic is personally charged. It's hard, but those are also the times it matters most.
I think it also helps with digesting since you chew longer.
Misinformation was the first big hurdle. I would happen on a promising approach, and then when immediate results were not forthcoming, I'd start questioning my assumptions. In the process of questioning those assumptions, I lost all faith in so-called 'expert' opinions and realized that I was completely on my own.
Instead of looking for someone to give me a plan / approach / strategy, I researched on Wikipedia exactly how metabolism works. How does food turn into fat? What causes that fat to break down?
It was here that I had the realization that what you eat can never have more of an effect on your metabolism than how much you eat. Calories in and out is the rule, everything else is secondary.
I also realized from the research that there are different goals involved in improving health / fitness. I also developed a disdain for the term "healthy". It's entirely too poorly-defined to be a useful term. It's basically a shield against the possibility of failure. You can't fail in your goals if you don't have any goals, and "eating healthy" is not a definable goal.
I decided to frame my goals instead in terms of aesthetics. If my looks are improving, then I am making progress. If not, then I need to go back to the drawing board.
So I started to look a little more carefully at the aesthetic angle. What looks good on people? Muscles look good. So does lack of excess body fat. But with an aesthetics first approach, I realized that losing fat is way way more important than gaining muscle. I used to deadlift 325 and I still looked fat.
So I needed a diet. But just like "healthy" and "losing weight", "diet" is too poorly-defined to be really useful, hiding a lot of complexity. People don't want to have to do their own research and actually understand the problem domain, so they reach for an intuitive solution rather than apply their analytical mind. I've looked at and applied several diet approaches over the years, but realized after I started throwing out 'experts' that there's something more fundamental about dieting that I was missing.
Are you taking a short-term approach or a long-term one? Which one is better? The more I reasoned it out, the more I realized that you need both the short and the long to really be successful. Most people only go one way. They'll pick a long-term approach and won't test it, or they'll pick a short term approach that works for awhile, but long-term they just go right back. You need a plan for losing it, and a plan for keeping it off.
The calories-in-calories-out realization made things a lot easier. What really made it dead simple was when I started researching diets throughout history. A lot of people use the "healthy" heuristic to throw out perfectly good dieting strategies, and especially egregiously, to subconsciously toss out calories-in-calories out. If you don't get CICO right, you will not lose fat. When I read that Roman legionnaires mostly ate vegetables and grains, all thoughts of controlling 'what' I ate left my mind and I focused only on 'how much'.
Finally that leaves habits. Intermittent fasting held the most appeal to me, that seemed like the most sustainable approach considering my lifestyle and and history. But how to deal with hunger? Being committed to the goal, having a simple-enough approach made it really easy to adjust to once-a-day eating. I simply looked at all the barriers to eating once a day and devised practical solutions for each of these in turn, giving myself permission to make mistakes and also to relax, this is a lifestyle change and I'm going to be doing this for the rest of my life.
So I'd structure everything in terms of tweaking knobs. I would get hungry and so I'd eat a small something, resolving myself to snack less in the future. so long as the amount of snack foods is decreasing over time then I'm on track. Eventually I mastered hunger and was able to mostly stop snacking. People would bring in food and it would make me really hungry, so I'd eat earlier to pre-empt it. Eventually the smell of food started holding less power over me, and I'd pick a later meal time, as that afforded me greater social flexibility.
Long term was all about monitoring and awareness. Once I was happy with how I looked, I'd stay strict on most of my 'knobs' and just start tweaking one at a time back up to give me more pleasure. I'd watch myself closely to see how I felt and looked. I found remarkably easy, and I've been able to dial back monitoring and transfer more control over my eating back to my subconscious. I realized that if you're not happy with how you look, you should not listen to your body, but if you are, then you should, as the body is a selfish two-year old who is terrified of losing anything and will do anything to you to maintain the status quo.
Reading this article, I can tell that it means well, but is going to be just as ineffective as all the other 'expert' advice. It doesn't focus on the right level and instead perpetuates poorly-defined, 'intuitive' concepts that do nothing but obscure true effectiveness.
I used to hold HN to a higher standard than say YT comments, and I hate to say it but yeah it's really not what it was.
I'll reply to the actual point to the more civil commenter above.
Anyway, I meant the alleged self-delusion of the author. Maybe I wasn't clear in how I put it, but I wasn't accusing anybody of it, I was saying that the implication is the author is self-deluded since she claims 800kcal/day + 1hr gym and yet didn't lose weight.
I should not have made the 'smart arsed comments' comment which was rather ironic also, so sorry for that as I distracted from my point and deservedly got karma-hammered...
EOF
Re your argument.. fill up your car on petrol and then check the weight in the specs in the manual to see if they have changed.
Your comment downthread ('You are delusional') was even worse.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11653769 and marked it off-topic.