Thread: Why You Can't Lose Weight on a Diet

The problem isn't willpower. It's neuroscience.
You can't — and shouldn't — fight back.

SIX years after dropping an average of 129 pounds on the TV program "The Biggest Loser," a new study reports, the participants were burning about 500 fewer calories a day than other people their age and size. This helps explain why they had regained 70 percent of their lost weight since the show's finale. The diet industry reacted defensively, arguing that the participants had lost weight too fast or ate the wrong kinds of food — that diets do work, if you pick the right one.

But this study is just the latest example of research showing that in the long run dieting is rarely effective, doesn't reliably improve health and does more harm than good. There is a better way to eat.

The root of the problem is not willpower but neuroscience. Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters' weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding.

The brain's weight-regulation system considers your set point to be the correct weight for you, whether or not your doctor agrees. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. The same thing happens to someone who starts at 300 pounds and diets down to 200, as the "Biggest Loser" participants discovered.

This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. 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."

The specific "Biggest Loser" diet plan is probably not to blame. A previous study found similar metabolic suppression in people who had lost weight and kept it off for up to six years. Whether weight is lost slowly or quickly has no effect on later regain. Likewise — despite endless debate about the relative value of different approaches — in head-to-head comparisons, diet plans that provide the same calories through different types of food lead to similar weight loss and regain.

As a neuroscientist, I've read hundreds of studies on the brain's ability to fight weight loss. I also know about it from experience. For three decades, starting at age 13, I lost and regained the same 10 or 15 pounds almost every year. On my most serious diet, in my late 20s, I got down to 125 pounds, 30 pounds below my normal weight. I wanted (unwisely) to lose more, but I got stuck. 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. When I gave up on losing and switched my goal to maintaining that weight, I started gaining instead...

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/op...diet.html?_r=0

The article is very negative. The simplest rule is to get down to a target weight then start dieting again when the weight has increased again to a certain level. And so on. 250-180-200-180-200-etc. If the target weight isnt something ridiculous like in her example then that is possible to do.

Excellent and informative article. Thanks.

A trick the article does not discuss is how to kickstart ones metabolism. When trying to go from slightly overweight to lean, the body will slow its metabolism as a counter measure. Eating a lot for one day will kickstart the metabolism again. It takes much longer for the body to slow it down again than it takes for it to kickstart it. I know from experience that this works and I'm talking about going from a bmi of 24.5 to 23.5. Only ten pounds but the body resists that harder than it does getting down from obesity.

Originally Posted by fuego

The root of the problem is not willpower but neuroscience. Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. When dieters’ weight drops below it, they not only burn fewer calories but also produce more hunger-inducing hormones and find eating more rewarding...

Originally Posted by Colonel

A trick the article does not discuss is how to kickstart ones metabolism. When trying to go from slightly overweight to lean, the body will slow its metabolism as a counter measure. Eating a lot for one day will kickstart the metabolism again. It takes much longer for the body to slow it down again than it takes for it to kickstart it...

Which is why intermittent fasting works so well...you only 'starve' for a day or two a week then eat normally or even more the rest of the week that way your metabolism never drops.