This is an article I wrote about seven years ago that was originally published at www.kuzora.com. My ideas on nutrition and exercise have evolved since then, and I thought it'd be fun to critique my old work. Comments are in blue. Enjoy!
Are you looking for an easy way to lose weight? You are not alone. According to the Food and Drug Administration, an estimated 50 million people went on diets in a recent year. While some may lose weight, less than 5% of dieters maintain their goal weight.
I don't think anyone in any industry would be happy with a 5% success rate. As a trainer I've had a number of success stories who followed the high carb, low fat diet coupled with cardio to achieve and maintain permanent weight loss of 100 pounds or more, but I've had many others who have failed with this approach. Although I could have blamed their failures on "non-compliance" I'd rather look for alternate approaches.
As a result, many of these people will turn to fad diet pill and products whose sales are driven by unproven claims and clever marketing. The Federal Trade Commission estimated that 37 billion dollars was spent last year on diet pills, products, and programs. The sad truth is that most of these products don’t work.
Still true seven years later.
Many products will promise fast weight loss without diet or exercise. One popular product suggests that by fasting on their special weight loss product you can lose ten pounds in a weekend. While it is possible to loss that much weight in a weekend, you will be losing predominately water – not fat.
The only way to burn fat is to take in less calories through eating than you expend through daily activity.
The body has systems in place to regulate blood pH, core temperature, blood glucose levels, and liver glycogen stores, within very small windows. So why doesn't your body have systems to maintain stored body-fat within those same tight parameters? The truth is it does. There is more and more research that supports the theory of an "adipostat," which acts as a thermostat for body-fat levels. Researchers have identified a hormone called leptin which is released in direct proportion to body-fat stores in the body. This hormone seems to regulate food intake AND energy expenditure. As a result, your body will maintain it's weight by proportionally increasing its energy usage. Similarly, if you shave off a few calories for a short period of time, you won't lose significant amounts of fat.
In obese people this system seems to break down. Over time, the brain becomes resistant to leptin, needing higher and higher levels of the hormone to cause the same effect. This concept, called "leptin resistance," may help to explain why many obese people have trouble losing weight, even when they reduce calories and increase exercise.
Calories in minus calories out can still work - but when it doesn't there is likely more to it than just "willpower."
To give you some perspective, running a marathon will only burn about a pound of fat. So to actually lose 10 pounds of fat in a 48 hour period the typical 150 pound person would need to run 240 miles while not eating anything!
Another weight loss claims is made by a popular home gym equipment manufacturer. They suggest that you can do twice the work in one effortless motion. Unfortunately, you can’t do “work” without “effort”. Just type work into your word processor – they are actually synonyms.
So how do we lose those unwanted pounds? And more importantly, how do we keep them off?
Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh founded The National Weight Control Registry to find answers to these questions. And those answers were not found in a bottle of pills.
The National Weight Control Registry surveyed people who had lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least a year. What they found was that moderation, determination, and exercise were the real keys to long term success.
Almost all participants went on a balanced diet. Sorry carb cutters, but less then 10% used a fad diet that eliminated one or more type of food completely. In fact, most of the participants found that eliminating foods completely led to failure – not success.
More people likely succeeded on the "calories in, calories out" model because more people follow that approach. This statistic tells us nothing about the success rate of either diet. And at this point I would no longer call low carbohydrate approaches "fad" diets. I also think it is important to point out that there are many different low carb approaches and they are not all equal.
Very few participants reported using a fat loss supplement. In contrast, over 75% of participants exercised more than two and a half hours per week.
What these successful dieters had learned was that to maintain weight loss, they had to make changes they could live with forever.
If you have tried unsuccessfully to lose weight in the past, don’t get down on yourself. Most of the study registrants had failed at several previous attempts towards weight loss.
One more interesting note: A follow up study of registry participants compared the low carb dieters to the traditional approach dieters. The low carb dieters consumed more calories, burned less calories from weekly physical activity, and ate more saturated fat. But they actually had more success maintaining their weight loss than those who followed a more traditional approach!
In summary, the human body is extremely complex and a simple "calories in, calories out" model does not fully explain metabolism. What you eat may be equally as important as how much you eat.
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