Of course they regained their weight!
The New York Times article titled, “After the Biggest Loser, their bodies fought to regain the weight,” highlighted the challenges of morbidly obese people who lose weight quickly to maintain the weight loss. Specifically they detailed science showing slower metabolic processes among who have lost significant weight that the contestant’s bodies were literally fighting them to return to their heavier steady state. Slower metabolisms were not the only reason the contestants regained weight. Contestants constantly battled hunger, cravings and binges.
The Biggest Loser is a contest that rewards maximal weight loss as fast as possible. The winners are those who lose the most. Bootcamp style exercise regimens combined with restrictive caloric intake in a peer-pressure style high energy show are the order of the day. The end result is a set of behaviors that are never intended to be sustainable.
The idea behind this extreme version of dieting, but is still at its core the same approach. Contestants engage in a series of painful, short term behaviors while losing weight — once they reach their weight loss goal, they will magically be able to switch to a healthy, normal lifestyle in a weight maintenance regimen. In that sense, the contestants almost form a perfect straw man argument for my central thesis advocating for a gradual approach toward getting healthy. I’ve lost over 100 pounds this way. The body can only recover at its own pace. Rushing its recovery results in a “rubber-band” effect, where all the weight lost is gained back and more.
“This is a subset of the most successful” dieters, he said. “If they don’t show a return to normal in metabolism, what hope is there for the rest of us?”
This was a comment by Dr. David Ludwig, who conducted the study with the contestants. The problem is the subset — they’re all dieters. The most successful dieters, once they reach their goal — which in this case is to win the show—they have no experience in developing sustainable, patterns of living that incorporate healthy and enjoyable food, lifestyle and movement behaviors that they can rely on to maintain their weight. Once they stop dieting, their weight increases, due to the body’s drive to return to its former weight, and because all of the behaviors that led the contestants to morbid obesity are still present. Rapid change is rarely if ever sustained.
Weight lost through non-sustainable means will come back
The weight loss isn’t the root of the issue, its how the weight was lost. Dieting causes the weight gain. When you diet, you have literally agreed to create your own self-imposed psychic prison for your mind — you force yourself to reject your immediate desires for specific food choices. This causes you to assume contradictory roles of both jailer and inmate. Your “jailer self” is responsible for policing your activity, but like all who are incarcerated, your “inmate self” feels the intense longing, and eventually craving for what you cannot have — so much so that intense and constant food cravings are at the core of your dieting existence. Implicit is the belief that your behavior and eating habits are the root cause — you have done wrong and deserve the punishment that “Phase I” of your current diet plan meters out.
This dynamic of the jailer and inmate creates perpetual internal conflict which, over time, endlessly fuels your weight gain. At some point, your “inmate self” makes a jailbreak — the diet finally becomes unbearable and you snap. It might be triggered by a life event, or just daily stress, but inevitably culminates in late night binge involving pizza, ice-cream, bacon and Oreos. You wake up in the morning, feeling miserable, filled with loathing over your late night failure. You go back to your self-imposed psychic prison, and, over the years, do it all over again, and again, and again.
“Some scientists say weight maintenance has to be treated as an issue separate from weight loss. Only when that challenge is solved, they say, can progress truly be made against obesity.”
This advice is the root of the problem. If the weight is lost through non-sustainable means — wait for it — the weight loss will NOT be sustainable! In the case of the contestants, the behaviors are simply not in place for their to be any expectation of a steady state weight. Once the dieting stops, all the short-term coping strategies the contestants had in place for dealing with life events like birthdays and weddings, stressful encounters, and travel disappear. Now they eat that slice of cake because they “deserve it,” and it goes from there.
The approach used is more important than the weight lost
“What people don’t understand is that a treat is like a drug,” said Ms. Egbert, who went from 263 pounds to just under 176 on the show, and now weighs between 152 and 157. “Two treats can turn into a binge over a three-day period. That is what I struggle with.”
Ms. Egbert wonderfully highlights the problem — if the behavior resembles inmate-style “diet prison” behavior, such as working hard for a reward, the inmate will use that as an excuse for a mini-jail brake, which of course turns into the three-day binge. The approach applied in this case — dieting — leads to a dynamic that virtually ensures craving with accompanying binges. This is baked in to dieting as a concept. The core of dieting as approach is simply flawed and needs to be discarded.
“The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time. We desperately need agents that will suppress hunger and that are safe with long-term use.”
Yes to the first part — the body does put multiple mechanism in place to maintain a certain weight — but most definitely “No” to hunger suppressants as the only answer. Reducing the craving through drugs adds new crap to your body that changes an already complex set of interactions, but most importantly, it does not stop the craving. A far better and I would suggest more obvious answer is to get rid of the craving. At its core, this means removing the inmate behavior.
Throughout my weight loss journey, I have continually told myself, “I can anything I want, whenever I want, in whatever quantities I want.” This is absolute truth — I will not go back to diet prison. It just so happens that in my case, the food I’m most often interested in has chocolate in it. If I’m dieting, I regulate my chocolate and use it as a reward. That’s not what I’ve done as I’ve gone about losing 100 pounds. Instead, I surround myself 24x7 with chocolate. My advice on this point is clear — stop the craving, not the chocolate!
Do NOT settle. Choose alternatives you enjoy!
The difference between my approach and most dieters is I’ve gradually, over time, changed my desires — changed my tastes. I used to want — crave in fact — high sugar/fatty/salty things most often found in processed foods. I never used to want to order salad — I hated them unless they had fried chicken on them. Now I really enjoy salads, and actually look forward to reading the salad options on the menu. I still absolutely love hamburgers — now I have one, it will be a high quality grassfed beef burgers, most likely in the middle of the day. This didn’t happen over night. I never successfully “tried” to like salads. Over time, my tastes have shifted, not through my sheer force of willpower, as I have none, at least no more than anyone else.
Gradual change for food involves finding healthier alternatives (or times) for foods you really enjoy! Do not settle for crappy alternatives. This “phase II diet approach” leads directly to craving. Only switch if you really enjoy the new choice. This approach is low intensity and involves endless experimentation, but it starts with a clear belief that you won’t be a different person tomorrow, except for potentially, in a very small way. Perhaps that small change is sustainable — something you lock in place and build on.
Gradual Change is a lifestyle
Gradual change is towards getting healthy is not a short term activity. It is a no-stress, long term process for using experimentation of small, potential changes in food, lifestyle and movement that are either integrated in your life permanently or discarded. There are a number of concepts associated with gradualism:
- Clear direction, but no clear, measurable end point: You know the overall direction you need to go in (better food choices, movement integrated into your life, etc.), but you really don’t know the specific course you will take. There is no 3 step process, because you start in a unique place — your body’s current state is should drive your path. This impacts how you measure success. There is no “weight loss goal” or expected timeframe. Those are artificial goals in the sense they aren’t connected with your body’s current state, or its modified state as you start making changes. The only goal that matters to me is to be healthy, which implies being normal weight. Short term weight loss goals are fool’s gold (but see my health journey for how you can gamify your weight loss!).
- Heal at your body’s pace: Your body should determine the pace of your healing. If you pay attention to it, you’ll become aware of what’s possible. You can push your system a little, but attempting to lose weight faster — or going for “maximum weight loss” as its called in Dietland — may lead to short term weight losses, but almost always ends up as long term gains.
- Experiment before deciding: Integrating a new behavior, lifestyle alteration, new stretch or exercise is a seemingly small change, but is monumental if you make it stick. This is nontrivial and may require multiple attempts before you can do it consistently.
- Changes must be enjoyable: Changes that become permanently integrated into your life will be enjoyable ones. If it’s something you dread, you will eventually stop. This means replacing bad food choices with healthier ones that you enjoy! If you don’t enjoy it, keep looking for other alternatives. Same with exercise — it must be something you get satisfaction from if you expect to continue it.
- No restrictions, just better decisions: I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want. If I force food restrictions on myself, I will dream, than fantasize, then fixate on accomplishing the health goal to get the restrictions removed. We can almost predict the impending binge. Instead of giving up all junk food at once to go “cold turkey,” I gradually and deliberately found ways to improve my eating habits and activity level.
Your body’s needs in the here and now matter!
“We eat about 900,000 to a million calories a year, and burn them all except those annoying 3,000 to 5,000 calories that result in an average annual weight gain of about one to two pounds,” he said. “These very small differences between intake and output average out to only about 10 to 20 calories per day — less than one Starburst candy — but the cumulative consequences over time can be devastating.”
This comes from Dr. Michael Rosenbaum, and I’m sure is based on sound research, but honestly, it just sounds like bullshit to me. I am have no qualifications for making this claim other than my own experience. The whole approach of calorie counting omits the most important issue — timing matters. If my focus is increasing my metabolism, its all that matters. Simply instilling a daily calorie counter as your measure of choice completely misses this.
Your body is an organic, living system. This means it doesn’t operate in “per day” increments. Your body operates in the here and now. Whether not you pay attention, your body continually regulates itself in real-time. Diets are designed as if your body was an engineered machine that requires a set amount of fuel per day. But your body is constantly adjusting to a whole series of internal and external perturbations — this implies caloric goals quickly lose their utility. There is a tenuous connection at best between what the prescribed daily totals for someone like you “should be” and what your body actually requires at this very moment.
Your body’s actual functioning in the present and next few hours are critical, but daily totals at the end of the day are near meaningless. I’m suggesting that like most skinny people, it is important for the rest of us current or former morbidly obese folk to develop a deeper awareness of our body’s functioning — one that will inform our decisions on food and movement choices far more effectively than any professional health plan.
So my advice is to continue to all you can to get healthy. That includes weight loss. But give up dieting. It doesn’t work — at all. Instead, try embarking on a life long journey toward gradual healthy change.
last thing…
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