"some cases in the hospital where you see people doing diet as they should and not lossing weight at all"
would love a link if you have one handy. it seems impossible?
would love a link if you have one handy. it seems impossible?
(edit: note that I'm responding to the 'impossible' comment.)
As an example in the other direction. I gained significant weight after getting a foot of my intestines removed while eating the same diet. In this case it was a very good thing as calories out balanced due to incomplete digestion.
PS: Albumin levels are not something you generally hear about, but it's very bad when they get low.
Tldr: It has to do with resting metabolism, which determines how many calories a person burns when at rest. When the show began, the contestants, though hugely overweight, had normal metabolisms for their size, meaning they were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight. When it ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies were not burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.
First article about the study: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/health/biggest-loser-we...
Step 2: Lose a bunch of weight
Step 3: Go off diet
Step 4: Regain a bunch of weight.
I'm not trying to be a dick, but I don't think there's a lot going on here that doesn't make sense. None of the contestants were particularly thin at the end of the study. Danny Cahill still weighed 191, which is actually pretty significantly overweight for someone not carrying a lot of muscle mass, which he wouldn't be at the end of a 7 month crash diet. If you get your body very very good at using its fat stores you will lower your BMR. The data doesn't suggest this is permanent or significantly impacted Danny's weight gain, the data suggests that Danny Cahill did not stick to the diet.
The Biggest Loser is frequently held up as the gold standard for how not to do things. The weight change is too fast, there is absolutely no support after its over and they frequently optimize for cardio and fat burning over muscle building, which in the short term is effective but in the long term contributes to lowering BMR and making the weight hard to keep off.
But ultimately you have to consider that Danny Cahill was still pretty unhealthy at the end of the show. None of this is starvation mode, in which major parts of your life are hugely effected (ie: you would not have the energy to leave the house).
> What shocked the researchers was what happened next: As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.
> Mr. Cahill was one of the worst off. As he regained more than 100 pounds, his metabolism slowed so much that, just to maintain his current weight of 295 pounds, he now has to eat 800 calories a day less than a typical man his size. Anything more turns to fat.
That does suggest there's something more than just "calories in < calories burned" - that our bodies are willing to adapt to keep metabolic rates low.
It does not suggest there's something more complicated than calories in < calories burned, it suggests there's something that is causing him to burn fewer calories. My explanation is that Cahill had an inactive lifestyle, poor body composition and was overweight, even after the massive cut. On top of this, no one is claiming he stuck to the diet, so it makes sense he regained the weight.
I'm not disputing that your metabolism can down regulate. I am absolutely disputing that it's a mystery and unfixable. For Cahill he needed to stay on the diet longer, and he needed to build muscle mass.
The little contributions don't matter. If you don't consume enough calories, you will not increase body fat and tissue mass. Full stop.
You can retain fluid because of certain conditions that you have (I lost 30 pounds in one hour! Ask me how) but you will not be increasing fatty body mass.
What? If you eat the amount of calories that you are expending every day, you'll operate just fine. That's the way your body was designed to work.
As long as your caloric intake sort of averages out to your calorie expenditure, you're fine. You don't have to balance every minute and every hour.
We're designed to operate at a caloric deficit for hours, if not days at a time. We obviously don't spend all of our time sleeping.
Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
Citation? Are you saying that some people are unable to turn fat into glycogen? Unless you're undergoing ketosis, or have a vanishingly rare metabolic disorder, that's just not true.
> Perhaps what you are explaining is how it works with people who have an efficient/non-defective metabolic system. But hey, those people are not overweight.
Most overweight people have efficient/non-defective metabolic systems, as evinced by the increase in obesity rates in the developed world over the past fifty years.
I've since gotten to the point where I can eat one meal a day most days if I want, but hunger headaches are a thing. (I'd still expect to get them if I were to do a multiday fast.)