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The findings support obesity researchers' long-held belief that dieters who regain weight aren't just reverting back to old habits.
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Old habits, of course, refers to overeating. And how much did these dieters overeat exactly, 20 kcals per day for 20 years? (that's 41 lbs of calories) And they call that gluttony? 20 kcals is literally 2g of fat. Who the heck can be so accurate in their habits? Maybe it's not the uber accurate gluttony, but the sloth instead. Yeah, 1 kcals per hour of sloth every hour of every day for 20 years. That's beyond uber accurate sloth. Or maybe it's a combination of the two. Uber gluttony of 10 kcals per day + uber sloth of 10 kcals per day. And I didn't need a study to figure that one out.
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Many previous studies have shown that when overweight people slim down, their bodies respond vigorously, by undergoing changes in hormones that affect hunger and satiety — "multiple compensatory mechanisms encouraging weight gain," as the authors put it.
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Like the Minnesota Semi-Starvation study for example. But in this case, it wasn't overweight people, it was healthy young men of normal weight who became emaciated. The same mechanisms that make a previously overweight person regain weight also make a previously normal weight person regain weight. We call this mechanism homeostasis.
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It's an evolutionary survival tactic. "These mechanisms would be advantageous for a lean person in an environment where food was scarce," write the authors, from the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University, in Australia, "but in an environment in which energy-dense food is abundant and physical activity is largely unnecessary, the high rate of relapse after weight loss is not surprising."
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Homeostasis is indeed an evolutionary tactic. However, it does not solely apply to weight regain, it also applies to weight re-loss. It is equally difficult to gain weight as it is to lose weight. The same hormones that keep us at a heavier weight, also keep us at a lighter weight, as the case may be.
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As a testament to how hard weight loss is, 11 participants dropped out during this early phase — they either quit or failed to lose the required 10% of body weight to continue.
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Correction, as a testament to how hard it is to eat a semi-starvation diet. Losing weight is easy. In fact, losing weight requires no conscious effort on our part, it's all done by hormones you see. Incidentally, gaining weight requires no conscious effort on our part either, it's all done by hormones as well. To illustrate, a growing child does not
will himself to grow taller. He grows taller in spite of all his efforts to remain small.
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What is clear, however, is that obesity is not merely a problem of failed willpower or an unhealthy food environment.
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Not merely?!? Obesity is not a problem of failed willpower at all.
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"Indeed, the most difficult part of the weight loss program is the maintenance phase, which may be indefinite."
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It is indefinite. Whatever we had to do to reach this new lower weight, we must continue to do to maintain it. If we had to eat 500 kcals per day for 6 months, then that's what we gotta keep doing for the rest of our lives. The very idea of eating this way for the rest of one's life is absurd. Anybody would immediately see a problem with the whole thing. There are more effective alternatives and ironically those better alternatives are also easier to stick to.