Another Reason as to Why You Shouldn't Give Up on No S

[Blithe Morning]

An article published in yesterday's NEJM purported to show why weight loss was so hard to maintain. Personally, I think the findings should have been refined to why weight loss from a crash diet is so hard to maintain.

My main quibble with this study is how they had participants lose weight. Participants were put on extremely calorie restricted diets of 500 - 550 calories per day. This extreme form of dieting reduced an already small sample size from 50 to 34 which says something right there about that particular method of weight loss.

For those of you who have crash dieted, this study may explain why you weren't able to maintain your weight loss. The impacts from a drastic weight loss on your hormones can be felt up to a year later. A year!

It may also explain why you aren't seeing immediate results on No S.

If there was ever compelling evidence that there is no quick but long term fix for weight loss, this is it.

I'm skeptical about applying the findings on leptin levels to a gradual weight loss per No S, especially if it is coupled with exercise including weight training (i.e. Urban Ranger and Shovel Glove).

Study Shows Why It's Hard to Keep Off Weight

For years, studies of obesity have found that soon after fat people lost weight, their metabolism slowed and they experienced hormonal changes that increased their appetites. Scientists hypothesized that these biological changes could explain why most obese dieters quickly gained back much of what they had so painfully lost.

But now a group of Australian researchers have taken those investigations a step further to see if the changes persist over a longer time frame. They recruited healthy people who were either overweight or obese and put them on a highly restricted diet that led them to lose at least 10 percent of their body weight. They then kept them on a diet to maintain that weight loss. A year later, the researchers found that the participants’ metabolism and hormone levels had not returned to the levels before the study started.

[oolala53]

I thought the same thing. Has anyone ever studied people who gradually reduced what they ate, say, over the course of a year? For some obese people, or even not obese people, dropping to even 3 hefty meals wouldn't be gradual. The biggest problem there is that weight loss might not show up for awhile and most people alter their eating because they want to lose weight, no matter what they say about just wanting to be healthier. It usually takes a lot of frustration before people give in and accept that they have to focus on habits, sustainability, and feeling better. But moderation might never get them to the really low weights so many people long to weigh. Yet it will get most of us pretty close.

[Graham]

It seems likely the way the caloric deficit is created influences how the body responds - both the manner and the rapidity with which the deficit are produced may be crucial.

Wansink's work suggests dietary adjustments creating a consistent but small caloric deficit may cause long-term weight loss without the body noticing or resisting.

I'm personally curious about how the body reacts to a long-term consistent increase in calories expended in exercise. It has been suggested that the body sees drastic diets as like famines, for which it therefore tries compensate by building up an even bigger store of fat. Suitable exercise, however, might cause a different reaction.

Exercise which suggested to the body that the extra fat was a burden, not an asset, (walking or running, for example) might be expected to provoke fat-loss. (NB short term weight-gain may follow an increase in exercise - but it would be a combination of an increase in stored glycogen dissolved in water and increased muscle - neither is harmful to health)

[BrightAngel]

Unfortunately, whether by crash diet, or by slightly reduced calorie diet,
a reduced obese person's body wants to put the weight back on.

In my own case, I've been maintaining a large weight loss for almost 6 years,
In order to lose the weight, I ran about a 500 calorie deficit,
for a weight loss averaging approx 1 lb per week.
It took 16 months to lose 75 lbs.
This was not a crash diet,
although because of my height, age, and activity level,
the amount of calories I consumed would be considered low
for larger, younger women.

My symptoms are the same as described in the crash dieting article,
AND, during the past 6 years I've met many people with that similarity.

Based on my own exerience and personal knowledge of others,
I believe that the crash dieting was not a determinative factor of the results in that study

[oolala53]

I saw this article on a maintainers' thread on another board, so I asked if those who had maintained for more than two years experienced those symptoms and felt they had to be so vigilant. Many still track, but most did not talk as if they felt actual hunger plaguing them, but that the thoughts to overeat stay around even after years. Is that hunger?


In any case, I probably shouldn't let myself get too concerned as I don't think I can use the same excuses. I am not hungry all the time by any means and rarely was. I ate all the time when I wasn't hungry. I do that a lot less now and plan on decreasing it more as time goes on.