In Part 1, I talked about my friend Gregg, who has a simple and entirely logical approach to weight loss: When his weight becomes a problem, he gets back in shape and loses the excess. At that point, he stops thinking about it until it becomes a problem again.
The proposed solution, which Gregg came up with, is to stop thinking of weight loss as a problem to be fixed when something is broken. It’s more useful to think of body weight as an ongoing maintenance issue, akin to cleaning up the kitchen after each meal.
But what if a person’s weight is not just a health problem? What if it’s a solution to an entirely different problem? I’d never thought about this until my friend Lisa Wolfe, a personal trainer, alerted me to this study…
For most of the year, I don’t spend much time thinking about weight loss. I could stand to lose an inch around the middle, but I’ll be honest: the reward wouldn’t match the effort it would take to get significantly leaner than I am right now. I’ve been weight-stable at around 185 pounds for years, and that’s a comfortable weight for me. I can be strong and lean and mobile and feel solid and fit at that weight, and what else do I really need?
But who cares about me (other than me)?
In the past few days I’ve had three conversations with friends that inspired this three-part series. I’ll start with the most recent.
Gregg and I have worked together for years, but had never actually met until we got together for a drink the other night. He mentioned that he only worries…
I’ll give you some insight into my thought process.
I’ve spent most of the morning reading weight-loss studies, learning (among other things) that if you give women at Curves more food than they can burn off, they’ll still lose weight and body fat, and will have reduced waist sizes.
These were obese, sedentary women whose resting energy expenditure was measured at about 1,300 calories a day, on average. They were fed 2,600 calories a day, 55% of which was carbohydrate. And if I’m reading the tables correctly, they still lost, on average, about 7 pounds in 14 weeks … while doing a Curves workout program.
Amazing.
Even more amazing: Some of the other women in the study, who were allegedly eating just 1,200 calories a day, gained weight. (Let’s be adults and admit that it’s hard as hell for anyone to eat 1,200 calories a day for any…
Eating less and exercising more are equally good at helping take off the pounds, U.S. researchers said in a study that challenges many of the popular tenets of the multibillion dollar diet and fitness industry.
Tests on overweight people show that a calorie is just a calorie, whether lost by dieting or by running, they said.
They found there is no way to selectively lose belly fat, for instance, or trim thighs. And their carefully controlled study added to evidence that adding muscle mass does not somehow boost metabolism and help dieters take off even more weight.
I haven’t seen the entire study, so I can only guess at some of the reasons for the statements I just quoted.
Lots of things drive me nuts in my field. I’m predisposed to excitability anyway, so I confess I’m easily worked up. But this is the type of media report that’s worth the cortisol I generate when I criticize it:
Women who are clinically obese don’t need to diet to improve their health, say UK researchers. A programme which encouraged women not to diet but to take part in exercise classes found significant improvements in health and mental well-being.
The women in the study were also taught about good eating habits, such as how to cook, and received social support.
After a year, the women had only lost a little weight but were significantly fitter and happier with themselves.
First off, the question of “diet” vs. “exercise” is a false choice. I understand that the researchers here wanted to see what would happen to their subjects without dietary restriction; that’s a perfectly legitimate scientific…
Rannoch Donald, our linkmaster in Scotland, sent along this article from an Australian newspaper, which profiles a pair of weight-loss researchers in Canada. I’m not great at geography, but I think that’s three continents in two different hemispheres to reveal one simple truth:
Long-term weight loss is more about lifestyle changes, a conference on the Sunshine Coast will be told this weekend. Keynote speakers at The Clinicians Challenge in Treating Obesity will be husband and wife team professors Peter Herman and Janet Polivy.
The couple are psychologists at the University of Toronto, Canada, and world authorities in restraint theory, which holds that if you deny yourself food, you ultimately overeat.
Prof Polivy said most people trying to lose weight had unrealistic expectations and self-defeating behaviour from the start of their diet. When it failed, they were actually likely to gain weight before the next attempt, and so the cycle continued.
Normally, studies about fidgeting drive me up a wall. (Then again, since I’m a natural-born fidgeter, everything drives me up a wall; I couldn’t sit still if my life depended on it.) Each new study seems to show about the same thing: People who fidget are thinner than those who don’t. The first one was interesting, but after that it’s just been more of the same. Since no study has shown that non-fidgeters can become fidgeters, I don’t see the point in giving overweight people yet another unrealistic standard to achieve.
This study is more of the same, performing the semi-useful work of establishing the genetic basis for non-movement:
Lean rats — but not fat rats — are sensitive to a brain signal that makes them restless, find Catherine M. Kotz, PhD, and colleagues at the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Obesity Center.
When I was blogging this morning about the new study showing the dangers of drinking too much water, I almost made a smart-ass remark along the lines of, “Good thing we banned ephedra.”
Meaning: Lots of things in life are more dangerous than the once-popular over-the-counter weight-loss drug.
Including, in some cases, plain old water.
I thought it was a cheap shot, and given that I was already blaming Gatorade for the prevailing myth that American athletes and exercisers are chronically dehydrated, a myth that has proved fatal to several runners, I figured I’d leave well enough alone.
Well now:
A judge in Utah today struck down the FDA’s ban on ephedra:
The judge ruled on Thursday in favor of a Utah company that challenged the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s ban. Utah-based Nutraceutical claimed in its lawsuit that ephedra “has been safely consumed” for hundreds of years.
Most of us could guess that obesity would hold someone back in the business world. Companies today are addicted to young, slim, good-looking spokesmodels, and the effect snowballs.
Good-looking executives want to hob-nob with other good-looking executives, and it all becomes one big daisy chain.
(Major League Baseball has bravely fought this trend; its motto could be, “With a commissioner this ugly, we have to be good!”)
It sucks to be fat in many ways (this story, for example, shows that overweight shoppers are treated rudely, even when the shoppers are really thin people wearing fat suits).
But, as this package of stories and photos from Forbes shows, some fat and formerly fat people are cashing in, and in a major way.
One is plus-size model Emme Aronson, a 190-pounder who banks big bucks both as a model and as a symbol of a large woman who does all…
Reader Rob Siders sent me this email this morning:
One of the things that I find most troubling about [the Terri Schiavo circus] is that she’s now in this state because she is/was bulimic. Heart failure is the number-one cause of death among people with eating disorders, due to electrolyte deficiencies.
Rob goes on to note that eating disorders are the most lethal mental illness of all.
At least one newspaper, the Burlington County Times (based in suburban Philly), picked up on that angle:
Fifteen years ago, her heart, which doctors believe was strained by bulimia, shut down briefly. It was long enough to starve her brain of oxygen.
For Schiavo, a young, attractive woman who was the picture of health, normal life was over.
Experts on eating disorders say the original cause of Schiavo’s medical problems has been obscured by debate on end-of-life issues. And they say the case might raise awareness of…
