‘Biggest Loser’ winners regained weight – a deeper truth about weight loss | Hacker News Reader

‘Biggest Loser’ winners regained weight – a deeper truth about weight loss

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10 pointspaulpauper11 comments

No one should be shocked that a gimmicky reality TV show that had 600lb contestants with lifelong eating disorders shed weight incredibly rapidly while living in a house for a month with fellow contestants didn't provide long term solutions to their underlying mental health and food addiction issues.

The biggest loser was the equivalent of turning drug rehab into a gameshow and putting it on TV.

It's maybe interesting in the context of addictions and disordered eating habits, but not really relevant for general weight loss, weight management or physical health for most people.

I think they gain the weight back because losing fat with a deficit is like paying off a debt with a credit card. It will come back to haunt you. You're lowering your metabolic rate, which is not sustainable long-term.

Can you clarify what you mean by "losing fat with a deficit"? Isn't eating less than you use the only way to lose weight, apart from surgery?

I actually wrote about this recently: https://exfatloss.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-caloric-defic...

Basically you can think of an "external deficit" (what you eat minus what you burn) and an "internal deficit" (what you burn minus what's available to you through the biochemical processes in the body).

The external deficit is the one that describes your weight loss.

But if you run an external deficit and therefore weight loss by running an internal deficit (using more energy than your body can sustain from your body fat) then it won't be sustainable. Your body will increase hunger and start saving energy, thereby driving down your metabolic rate.

E.g. some of the people on The Biggest Loser were measured to only burn 800kcal/day several years after the program. Totally nuts. This is for adults!

It's basically a debt. If you buy a house on your credit card and you can't pay it off it'll come back to haunt you. If you buy a house but you can pay off the mortgage in full every month you're golden and it's an investment.

I think you might be overthinking it? I didn't read your whole rant that you linked, but calories in = calories out (CICO) is simply a tool to teach people that losing weight is not about following complicated fad diets trying to sell you something, it's about not overeating—that's it. Permanent weight loss is primarily a mental issue, and a lot of people have perceptions about "healthy" and "unhealthy" food, that while important for general health, don't really help anyone lose weight.

CICO is about teaching people how to eat when hungry (actually hungry, not just craving a pizza), but no more than is necessary. It boils it down to the essentials, and I would argue that it's not tautological, it's axiomatic.

Well, I strongly disagree with the "that's it" part. The fad diets are what actually works. If it's the right fad ;)

I'd argue permanent weight loss is primary a function of if the diet works, and most don't. Including "not overeating - that's it." There's a reason people overeat and it's not mental. Their satiety/energy system is broken.

Ah, I see why you disagree: if I'd read to the end of the article I would have seen that you are trying to push your own fad diet. Whipped cream for dinner? No thanks. [1]

People overeat because they've developed habits and routines over years or decades that allow them to do so. Permanent weight loss is all about breaking those habits and changing routines so that overeating isn't normal anymore.

[1] You list a daily caloric intake of 2300 calories for your fad diet, which is a normal amount and a good number to aim for. Weight loss will be slow, but slow and consistent is good, as you've discovered.

My weight loss has been 49lbs in ~6 months on this diet. That's slightly better than most reports of Ozempic. Fast and consistent is good :) Why go slow if you know how to go fast?

You're simply wrong about weight loss. That's not how it works.

My point is that you would likely lose the same weight no matter what you ate, as long as you didn't overeat. There's nothing special about whipped cream, ground beef, and tomatoes. If you started at 290 lb (wild assumption) while eating 4000 calories/day, losing 49 lbs in 6 months by only eating 2300 calories/day is slow and consistent. But once you start approaching your target weight, progress will appear to slow down.

I don't think I could've sustained such an enormous caloric deficit (about 1,000kcal/day!) for as long.

"As long as you don't overeat" is like "assume a can opener." If we knew how to not overeat we wouldn't have an obesity epidemic on our hands. That's the whole reason "don't overeat" is not useful dietary advice whereas "eat lots of cream" is.

Obesity is highly heritable because willpower is heritable. Telling people to "work on their weight" makes as much sense as "work on your reaction speed in tennis".

Luckily its now a moot point as there is a miracle drug called Semaglutide that actually works as a weight-loss drug.

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