barrydeutsch:

szhmidty:

barrydeutsch:

chloekittymtfposting:

barrydeutsch:

chloekittymtfposting:

ok2befat:

“This isn’t breaking news; doctors know the holy trinity of obesity treatments—diet, exercise, and medication—don’t work. They know yo-yo dieting is linked to heart disease, insulin resistance, higher blood pressure, inflammation, and, ironically, long-term weight gain. Still, they push the same ineffective treatments, insisting they’ll make you not just thinner but healthier.

In reality, 97 percent of dieters regain everything they lost and then some within three years. Obesity research fails to reflect this truth because it rarely follows people for more than 18 months. This makes most weight-loss studies disingenuous at best and downright deceptive at worst.”

Diets do not work because they are temporary. Permanent lifestyle changes have a 100% success rate, however.

There is no “lifestyle change” method of weight loss which has been shown to reliably make obese people non-obese over the long term. And by “shown,” I mean someone documented it in a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal.

If I’m mistaken, then please show me my mistake with a citation to a peer-reviewed paper.

You dont need a citation to adhere to the laws of physics, unless you are going to imply that fat bodies can produce fat from nothing?

That would require a citation and an update to textbooks globally.

It’s not about the laws of physics; it’s about whether any “lifestyle change” has been shown, in a peer-reviewed study, to reliably make obese people non-obese over the long term.

You’re correct, of course, that if I were to eat literally nothing, I would lose weight. But that approach is not viable or healthy in the long term.

Too many diet advocates still believe in the myth and that weight is a simple matter of input and output. But real human bodies are far more complex systems.

If you and I eat the identical calories, and then do the identical exercise routine, it doesn’t follow that we’re going to retain exactly identical calories at the end of the process. It’s possible that my body will store some of the calories your body will decide to burn (or vice versa), for example.

From an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine (emphasis added):

   Many people cannot lose much weight no matter how hard they try, and promptly regain whatever they do lose…

   Why is it that people cannot seem to lose weight, despite the social pressures, the urging of their doctors, and the investment of staggering amounts of time, energy, and money? The old view that body weight is a function of only two variables – the intake of calories and the expenditure of energy – has given way to a much more complex formulation involving a fairly stable set point for a person’s weight that is resistant over short periods to either gain or loss, but that may move with age. …Of course, the set point can be overridden and large losses can be induced by severe caloric restriction in conjunction with vigorous, sustained exercise, but when these extreme measures are discontinued, body weight generally returns to its preexisting level.

So I think either you have to conclude that the doctor editing the weight issue of one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world is an idiot who has no clue about how bodies regulate weight (and ditto for the many medical researchers who’d agree with his statement); or you have to admit that your view of how weight loss works is not, in fact, the only view that a reasonable, educated person could hold.

Question tangential to the topic: is there research on lifestyle changes that don’t necessarily reduce weight long term, but do have a measurable impact on more objective measures of health (things like lifespan, etc)?

It seems obvious to me that weight is at best a measure of health that’s a step or two removed from the health of the patient, but I feel like everyone is focused on weight to the excusion of the actually directly important measurable variables.

There’s definitely research showing that exercise is linked to a longer lifespan. Someone who’s very sedentary will gain (on average) about 4 years of life if they start walking or biking 20 minutes a day. However, there are diminishing returns on adding more exercise, so if someone is already exercising five hours a week, they might not gain that much by increasing that to ten.

I haven’t looked up the research on diet and lifespan, so can’t speak to that.

A couple of refs:

Does Physical Activity Increase Life Expectancy? A Review of the Literature.

Leisure Time Physical Activity of Moderate to Vigorous Intensity and Mortality: A Large Pooled Cohort Analysis

I recently made some posts about “non-exercise activity” (stuff like pacing around and standing as opposed to sitting), which has been linked directly to a bunch of health outcomes besides weight, and may also shed some light on the mysteries of weight loss.  Here’s my main post and there are follow-up posts in this tag.

(via barrydeutsch)

perversesheaf:

perversesheaf:

nostalgebraist:

On the other hand, changing the amount of fat in your body is famously difficult. It’s hard to get people to lose nontrivial amounts of weight (or gain nontrivial amounts of weight, through methods other than muscle-building exercises) even if you’re running…

I agree that modifying your weight – and especially body fat – through diet alone can be tricky. But that seems to be the only viable way to do it. (And that’s what I meant when I said that weight and body fat are mostly functions of diet.) For example, most sources seem to agree that steady-state running is an ineffective weight loss method. (Interval training appears to be slightly more effective, but I’m not sure how much more.)

Oh, yes, I agree – or at least that is a thing I have read in a number of places.  (My impression of interval training is “some studies say it might be really effective, but there’s a lot of variance within the studies and more research is needed.”  Steady-state aerobic exercise is definitely ineffective.)

This is cynical, but a part of me feels like the “it’s diet, not exercise” idea is out there largely because people who want to sell weight loss methods find diet an easier sell.  There are a wider range of possible diets that don’t sound totally implausible (Seth Roberts’ ”the secret to losing weight is drinking olive oil at specific times” seems bizarre, but less prima facie unpromising than “the secret to losing weight is doing this obscure gluteal workout”), and many diets are relatively easy or fun to try.

(The ones that involve starving yourself aren’t fun or easy, but the various Atkins-like ones are for some people, and the “weird tricks” like Roberts’ can be even easier.  While I was in middle school, a school administrator lost a large amount of weight and attributed it to either “not eating white-colored foods” or “eating only white-colored foods” – I literally can’t remember which.  There are endless variations possible here, and people will buy into them)

(via perversesheaf-deactivated201508)