Obesity research confirms long-term weight loss almost impossible
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
This over looks some important facts. Basal Metabolic Rate; Thyroid Function; Adrenal Function; Sex hormone balance; Epigenetics; Neurohormonal response[1]. Without addressing the whole person weight loss is likely to be a losing battle.
So long as your diet is predominately: fruit & veg; nuts, seeds, legumes, and whole grains; fish, eggs, and animal flesh, then you're eating relatively well. Avoid whatever doesn't agree with you, or as your beliefs dictate. Learn to eat intuitively: 'I feel like a carrot' is intuitive eating, 'I feel like a Mars Bar' isn't.
1. The Nurohormonal response or axis is about the understanding of how the mental / emotional sphere of life impacts hormonal / neurotransmitter activity in the body / brain.
Edit: speeling and gramur
40 years ago the majority of the population of the US or North Europe was thin. This has been so for the entire evolution of the human species.
People 40 years ago did not starve. They just ate things that refrigerators and mass industrial production do not preserve well, like vitamins, or fiber, or natural fat(like butter).
Now, when most people eat mass-processed foods, odd things happen, and unless people change their food habits, nothing is going to change, but that is not "impossible".
To be more precise: I know there are animal species that changed their natural colors to grey-ish tones nearby the cities in less than 100 years, but that seems to me more a result of selective breeding: the non-grey individuals were eaten/killed, so in a relatively short span only those with the grey gene survived. However, given that we are not killing those that are born without the obesity gene, there shouldn't be any reason for such change at a genetic level in such a short timespan at a big scale (unless the obese were over-breeding the non-obese by at least one order of magnitude, which is nonsense).
However, I think the article is saying, "In the long run, for whatever reason, statistically speaking, 95% of people revert to their high water mark of weight, nullifying their previous efforts at weight loss." This strikes me as utterly uncontroversial, aside from our widespread want to be among the 5%.
And my personal take: willpower can win battles, but our central tendencies usually win the war.
Mother obesity affects The brain and metabolism of the baby. This includes the way fat is managed. This is even before birth.
> In 2010, H:MC21 organised a lobby of over 250 homeopaths and patients, and handed in to No. 10 Downing Street a letter and the declaration "Homeopathy Worked for Me" signed by 28,112 people.
The difference that keeps IF sustainable long term is the freedom to eat, and on fasting days there's the hope for tomorrow.
There are lots of health benefits to IF as well: Dietary restriction has been shown to have several health benefits including increased insulin sensitivity, stress resistance, reduced morbidity, and increased life span
More recent studies involving low carb diets are encouraging. There is also encouraging research directly relating the number of servings of fresh fruit and vegetables to mortality. This article is more properly referenced and based on more resent research.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-weight-f...
Change is hard. But the people who already did change one thing in their life are very able to change their health/obesity as well.
It says nothing about whether an obese individual will lose weight if they do choose to eat less. Clearly they can - gravity is not causing food to fly into their mouth whether they want it or not.
'Traci Mann says the emphasis should be on measuring health, not weight. "You should still eat right, you should still exercise, doing healthy stuff is still healthy," she said. "It just doesn't make you thin."'
So even if you do eat well and exercise, you still won't lose weight because we have evolved to put weight on, not to lose it.
What I take from this is that there is more of a biological component to this. If you take two people one who used to be obese and one who has never been obese, feed them exactly the same food, put them on exactly the same exercise - the ex-obese person will put more weight on than the always skinny person.
The article gives no indication that there is evidence for this.
I'm not suggesting that all causes of obesity are related to a disease, but things are definitely not so cut and dry as expend more energy than you consume and you will lose weight. The body is an exceedingly complex system of chemical reactions which are fairly tightly regulated (see topics around MCA - Metabolic Control Analysis, to understand how systems of reactions don't behave intuitively). Changing one input variable does not always yield the result you are looking for when you simplify the entire human metabalome down to an equation of calories in, fat storage and calories out
antibiotics might have some responsability as well [0] by destroying parts of the gut flora
[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/opinion/sunday/the-fat-dru.... reply
Not really. "Calories" is just a physical quantity. It measures the energy that the combustion of something produces after putting it on a calorimeter. This needs a lot of energy.
So for example, you put sugar on a calorimeter, you give it (lots of) energy(making temp go up hundreds of Celsius degrees or pressure of several atmospheres) that you measure with precision to initialize the combustion and then you measure the energy the reaction produces.
So, according to the formula: "calories" of sugar = energy out - energy in [of burning].
Note that in a calorimeter you don't care about the residue.
This is completely different to what metabolism does, in fact the living organism do not raise metabolites hundred of Celsius degrees, they use enzimes, and the byproducts and waste are completely different because living organisms have to get rid of them, so the byproducts have to be something the blood could carry.
So calories are just the UPPER LIMIT of what a metabolic reaction could give the body if the byproduct were to be the same, that are not.
Living organism break molecules link one by one in a series of chained reactions, which is itself called "methabolic reaction".
Every methabolic reaction is DIFFERENT. The human beings do not process pentose sugar the same as glucose sugar or methanol or an oil.
Some process require double or triple the steps of others, some are poisonous to your body(very acidic, or neuro transmitters, like alcohol or whatever) so the body tries to get rid of them as fast as he can.
Industrial processes completely disrupted the food we eat. Omega 6 oil replaced natural Omega 3 intake(as the animals we eat eat fodder), palm and hidrogenated oils anywhere and corn syrup sugar with no fiber(difficult to preserve in the fridge).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD003817...
Keeping low body-fat % while maintaining decent amount of muscle is what is really challenging.
Enter human psychology, "real life" (stress, kids, a job, social life, etc), and the fact that maybe you have 80lbs to lose. That, at a healthy pace, can take a full year to lose. Or 80 weeks (nearly a year and a half) if you go one pound a week. That's a long time to stick to a "diet."
That's why most people need to focus on a lifestyle change. A Diet implies short term in most people's mind, and that's why most people revert. Yay, I lost 80lbs, now let's start eating donuts for breakfast, McDonalds for lunch, and pizza for dinner again. It's trivial to gain weight. It's harder, much harder, to lose it.
FWIW, I'm a weightlifter. I've been as much as 50lbs overweight, lost that weight and kept it off for many years. I've also gone through the bodybuilding "bulking/cutting" cycle that was popular for so long (and maybe still is, I don't do that anymore), so I'm quite familiar with gaining 20-30lbs and cutting down again in cycles. So I know weightloss is straightforward and simple, but I totally disagree that it's easy.
See my post above. I have experience both in weightlifting and losing weight (not a whole lot, but 50lbs, which isn't something to sneeze at).
If you actually have experience losing significant weight and you think it's a cakewalk, I think I'd accuse you of being disingenuous.
Consider the following:
-The ideal client for a health-club or gym is someone who signs up for a full year on January 2nd and then never returns.
-Expensive state-of-the-art exercise machines are actually inferior to cheap, old-fashioned free weights.
-A diet conducive to health loss typically consists of precisely the kind of foods that can't be pre-packaged and advertized on TV. I suppose I don't watch TV much these days, but if raw kale and spinach are getting superbowl ads, I haven't seen them.
-Personal trainers, diet coaches, etc. are all service providers, and repeat customers are the life blood of the service industry. Succeeding in teaching clients how to achieve their goals permanently and independently is the one sure-fire way to shrink the client base.
Fat people aren't a problem for the economy. They're a wonderful new growth industry! It's highly profitable to sell "light" TV dinners, diet shakes, diet soda, ab machines, balance ball workout lessons, miracle herbs, etc.. There's relatively little profit in pig iron and kale.
The successful 5% aren't endowed with superhuman willpower. They just figured out how to reconfigure their lives to make physical activity and a healthy diet the easy default. Unfortunately, just being in the 5% doesn't make it easy to teach others to be that way too. Consider sports. Say you're an expert skier, snowboarder, etc.. You might have had some lessons a long time ago, but you probably got really good just by doing it a lot. You can do stuff that awes the instructors at the local bunny hill, but odds are that a newbie is going to learn a lot more in a lesson from the instructors than they would from you! Teaching uses a different skill-set, and it's hard to do well.
The current situation in weight-loss land is this: The 5%'ers mostly figured things out on their own. Their ability to teach others is variable and, on average, not that great. The professional teachers are almost entirely people who aren't a part of the 5%. Even those who are 5%ers are financially disincentivized to actually teach people to become a part of the 5%. Becoming a 5%'er is like learning to ski at a hill populated by daredevil experts who suck at teaching and instructors who only get paid if you flunk their class and have to take it again. It really shouldn't surprise anyone that your chances of becoming a good skier are awful.
End Result: Should you find yourself unsatisfied with being in the 95%, you really ought to examine the profit motives of the people you're paying to help you. If your success would hurt their bottom line, they might not really be helping you.
I recently discussed with a friend getting them some exercise equipment as a gift; at first we were targeting specifically "training that might help with keyboard RSI," but I soon realized that the biomechanics of RSI meant that a really comprehensive solution would have to involve exploring all over the body and figuring out where the real weak points are and training those, not just "around the wrist" - so grip trainer type equipment wouldn't be sufficient. It would have to be seen as an "overall fitness" type of problem.
This led me, of course, towards free weights and a training program of general experimentation. But a small free weight set in the home can be a frustrating experience with no space or supporting equipment like benches and racks, plus the chore of reloading dumbbells with light weight constantly. My friend was rightly concerned about whether it would work out for her.
So I reconsidered and landed on resistance bands. They're kind of unfashionable now - and for certain things having barbells and dumbbells and plates would be a lot better. But they store and transport easily, have essentially zero setup time, and there's plenty of exercises for them, many of which are straight-up adaptations of free weight movements. The more expensive Bodylastics set that I ended up buying, which was still only $70, allows for an enormous amount of resistance too. After doing that shopping, I kind of want to get some for myself too.
My friend probably would have been lost at the first step because it's not like anyone marketing fitness actually tells you what you really need to begin addressing a problem. Neither will they explore whether the thing you buy is going to fit into your lifestyle. It's pretty gratifying to realize that some cheap rubber is best for the job.
I tend to disagree with this definition.
The function of a body might look like a 'machine', but that machine is made of trillions of small living beings (cells), all having the same properties as the larger organism - they need to breathe, eat and drink, they age and they multiply and each cell is a very specialised 'machine' in itself. So if you want to call the body a 'machine', then call it a 'machine of machines'.
But there's more. Our bodies cannot exist outside of what we call 'nature'. We need to eat other living beings in order to live. The living beings in turn need to eat the remains of other living beings and so on.
The circle of life is the flow of water, energy and a couple percent of other stuff (like minerals and proteins) through all living things. One thing is transformed into another and so on, forever.
From that angle, living beings (including our bodies) are a process, a flow through the matrix of Life, rather than a static object or mechanism.
This flow has continued since life first appeared and it has tuned itself to perfection. Until recently, when we started intervening.
The obesity epidemic (and also cancers, cardiovascular diseases and many many other 'modern' health issues) are the consequence of humans tinkering with nature and our bodies.
From this perspective I agree with the OP, it is probably impossible to have a healthy body in our society, until everybody becomes 'enlightened' about the nature of reality around them. But we have other issues, like which political party should win or what piece of land we need to grab.
All this while eating millions of tons of synthetic pills (prescribed by doctors), consuming incredible amounts of meat grown in insane conditions and fed with synthetic foods mixed with drugs watered down with lots of alcohol, while breathing toxic air and drinking synthetic drinks.
The only way to be healthy is to be part of the circle of life, but we are doing everything we can to disconnect ourselves from it and suffering the consequences.
Cancers, cardiovascular diseases etc. are the consequence of humans living long enough to develop them, thanks to modern medicine (tinkering with nature and our bodies).
The advancement in medicine is remarkable - the elimination of most infectious diseases, the ER capabilities, etc, but we are taking medicine too far.
Medicine is brilliant at 'fixing' things, but now we have fixes for every possible unpleasant feeling in our bodies and that is taking it too far. I don't have the statistics now, but my guess is that most of the pills taken by people are taken to relieve symptoms (like headaches or fever) and they are usually totally unnecessary.
The fundamental problem is the abundance of overly calorific food in many societies which the final comment hints at, ever so gently. People want a quick fix but there is no quick fix for the problem of over consumption except eat less.
I'm sorry, there is no easy path. It's all up to you. Deal with it.
What about, god forbid, taking a 5 km. run twice a week? How about never again drinking a bottled coke/soda/pop, only teas without sugar (good teas are much better without sugar)?
Almost everything is possible to some extent only via changing ones habits because, in some sense, everything, including our ability to stand straight, is a habit.)