To think that 'eat less move more', everything in moderation and CICO is total bollox?

[Honestopinion23]

CICO stands for calories in vs calories out by the way.
I often read the weight loss section on here. Every day there are people embarking on any number of diets and body overhauls and I reckon about 95% of them are unsuccessful. Calorie counting, shake diets, you name it, people always gain the weight back before long. Even celebrities who seem to have done well with weight loss eventually gain it back, e.g. Pauline Quirke. I am watching that new amazon show with Melissa McCarthy and she is also back to being around the same size she was before starting her weight loss. Lisa Riley is another one who lost a lot of weight and most of it is back now. Clearly it's not working and people are making money out of telling fat people that they can be thin if only they want it bad enough or try hard enough. The scientific research shows that once you are morbidly obese, you have an absolutely miniscule chance of getting to and maintaining a normal BMI without surgery. Yes, there will no doubt be people popping up here saying they did just that but you are the exception.

The idea that if you just eat less than you burn is also flawed when a) your body adapts to lower amounts. For instance, those who have gastric bypass and eat v low calories forever still tend to be overweight/mildly obese because their bodies just can't get to a low BMI and b) you're fighting against intense hunger urges that someone who has always been normal weight just can't imagine dealing with.

If I was morbidly obese, I would ditch all the dieting crap, admit that I couldn't fix it and have surgery. I see so many dieting plans just blame the dieter for 'failure' when they're trying to do something impossible. If I was stage 1 obese or overweight, I'd go low carb no-processed for life because I think that is the only thing that switches off the hunger signals in the brain.

@AmorFati

I have been cleaning up my act food-wise and recently went no processed, low carb, no dairy and pretty much just one meal a day - meat and vegetables, stir fried - for four weeks. When I experimented with carbs again, WOW! The sudden drops in mood, the cravings, the 'hangover' feelings were so noticeable - and that had been just ordinary life before. It's hard to acknowledge, but it is a sort of form of self-poisoning.

I'm a big believer in building and maintaining muscle, especially for women, for so many reasons, keeping your metabolism burning sweetly is just one of them. I hardly ever see it recommended by diet 'experts' though.

Yes, me too with the carbs. I used to have crippling low moods and really bad PMS which has gone since I ditched the grains and processed food. You’re right with self-poisoning. It’s so bad for us. Eating cereal for breakfast means you’ll want a snack bar at 11, then a sandwich for lunch, biscuits in the afternoon, pasta dinner then more snacks. I just don’t think this is how we were designed to eat - not all of us anyway.

This is a very interesting study on what happens to metabolisms of formerly obese people after significant weight loss, using Biggest Loser contestants

Essentially, being obese fucks up your metabolism so to maintain your low weight, you need to eat a lot less than someone who has never been obese

The answer is to not let people get to that overweight in the first place because once the damage is done, it’s incredibly difficult to reverse

The effort needs to be put into interventions for people who are overweight and heading towards obesity, rather than waiting until they are already there and beyond help

www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the-biggest-loser-metabolism-is-slower-and-weight-is-back-up/

Couldn't agree more. The evidence is strong that a tendency to obesity is mostly genetic. When people with the right set of genes lecture those who struggle with the "eat less move more" nonsense it's cruel and insulting. Calories in/calories out may be true at one level but they are not independent of each other. When advice has a 95% failure rate it's bad advice!

I always recommend Jason Fung (mentioned above) on these threads. Seriously, look at his aetiology of obesity videos on YouTube. Honestly changed my life. Learning it's not my fault I'd got to a BMI of 45ish was an incredible thing. Then I was able to find what works for me. Down to BMI 30 now after 18 months. Weight loss is now slow and steady but I feel it's completely sustainable. No calorie counting. For me it's hormonal and I've needed to learn that my body cannot do snacking or refined carbs. My skinny husband can eat whatever and whenever the hell he likes and not gain a pound!

Previously when I did the dreaded calorie counting I'd follow the traditional yo-yo route. Initial loss which then plateaus, feel hungry and miserable, followed by regain to above my start weight.

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a-thorough-examination-with-drs-chris-and-xand/id1574101748?i=1000527920782

Low carb (as in @BIWI method) works for me but I think much of it is that I no longer eat UPF

CICO absolutely does work if you want to lose weight. There is no human body on this planet which can defy the laws of physics. You can only put weight on if you're consuming more energy than you are expending, and you can only lose weight if you're consuming less than you're expending.

How you do that - fasting, gastric bypasses, calorie counting, keto - whatever you want to call it, it all adds up to the same thing.

Sticking to the lower calorie diet / increased activity and then maintaining that and not slipping back into bad heating habits is an intensely complex psychological problem.

But the physics of actually losing weight is not.

I read once that once fat cells have been laid down then it is always easier to put weight back on because those cells don't go away they are always there. This is why it is so important that children aren't over weight because the chances are they will then struggle with their weight forever.

To be honest though everyone I know that is over weight eats huge portions. I think people are quite unaware of what is a normal amount to eat.

[quote SW1amp]This is a very interesting study on what happens to metabolisms of formerly obese people after significant weight loss, using Biggest Loser contestants

Essentially, being obese fucks up your metabolism so to maintain your low weight, you need to eat a lot less than someone who has never been obese

The answer is to not let people get to that overweight in the first place because once the damage is done, it’s incredibly difficult to reverse

The effort needs to be put into interventions for people who are overweight and heading towards obesity, rather than waiting until they are already there and beyond help

www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the-biggest-loser-metabolism-is-slower-and-weight-is-back-up/[/quote]
Yes, agree totally. And when I have watched the Biggest Loser, they put them on low calorie, low fat and high carb diets and make them work out for hours each day. So so unsustainable. And they are sponsored by companies like Subway, who push them to eat low fat sandwiches made from white bread, which just sends blood sugars soaring. Their bodies are totally screwed up.

I was 19 stone. I’ve shifted a good 3.5stone and I’m in maintenance right now. Planned maintenance with strength training and muscle building and haven’t gained fat in 3 months (fat percentage is the same but muscle mass has increased so weight has increased) Im about to embark on weight loss round two and will do that for a couple of months then go into maintenance.

I do think too many people try to lose weight too quickly (most of it in a year) , don’t plan maintenance stages through out. Don’t do strength and muscle training. Focus entirely on weight loss. Don’t allow their minds to catch up with their changing bodies either, which maintenance stages will help with.

Or give their wider circle of family friends the catch up either. I think this is a bigger issue than diet tbf.

I know that’s an odd one but people around me still see me as the fat one even though I’m smaller than half of them now.

I do think I need to shake up my friends as some of them are not helping my ability to change and have noticed they’re adopting ‘feeder’ personalities trying to get me to eat cake and stuff I don’t want to eat. We hardly ever discuss the friends who consciously or subconsciously try to sabotage us either and it’s extremely common too.

One of the things I personally have done is grow my own food. It’s forcing me to eat more vegetables, stay active and get outside most days. I eat what I grow and that’s helped immensely.

As has introducing new people to my life that are also active. I have friends now that are happy too come help me dig over a bed and natter than sit in the house with tea and biscuits and I go to visit them and do the same.

It does work, where or not it's maintainable long term is a different story.

@MrsHood

So what’s the answer then?

For those for whom it is too late because they are morbidly obese ( me included ) - Acceptance ,kindness and help to keep active and exercise just because it is good for you without them feeling like failures because it doesn't lead to permanent weight loss.

More available information bout the fact that if you get very fat there is no effective way back but if you just put on a bit of weight it is easy to manage if addresses early on

Less obsession with BMI and more focus on how the person seems, how active be they are , muscle tone etc

For young people research and help not to join the very obese in the first place .

Money for research into ways to improve things that actually work

Overhaul of the food industry including banning of certain foods that are effectively poison and strict advertising rules on other foods .

More fiction on TV to incorporate stories of effective ways to avoid becoming very fat , at the same time fewer stories that treat fat people as less than human

Yes
Great physiological pressure to regain after loss
We have varying physiology
Its a kind of flawed evolutionary adaptation imo
Dieting feels good when our lives are out of control.
Body turns the pilot flame up and down so it messes up cico
I grew up with a yoyo dieter and she is still doing that cycle at age 77. We learn, sadly, from her fucked metabolism and eroded self esteem. Saying that she has minimal health complications despite being morbidly obese and now over 75, which I think is remarkable. Maybe the dieting has been protective.

I agree with you OP.

I do think CICO works though, however weightloss is not a diet change it's a lifestyle change and sometimes it needs mechanical changes too, such as surgery, and is only really successful with proper therapy too.

I spoke to my therapist about my weight, as I've struggled with anxiety and depression and when I'm depressed I can't even bring myself to cook so it's takeaways after takeaways just to make sure we're fed, and lots of snacking, because no one wants to feel hungry and shit when they're already feeling shit.

My therapist, who should have been trained in this area according to her profile, didn't understand the angle I was coming from. I was coming from an addiction point of view. She said food addiction isn't the same as other addictions so really I should just stop putting less in my mouth. If only it were that simple.

I forgot for the very overweight , a focus on maintaining the weight they are and not putting on more

.

The book recommended by @SerenadeOfTheSchoolRun is a really good read and something that many on this thread would benefit from reading!

CICO works in the short term - long term it fucks up your metabolism, and creates a weight set point invariably higher than you want it to be. Plus, of course, that a seriously calorie-restricted diet is difficult to sustain, which means that it's almost inevitable that people end up reverting to their previous eating habits, thus regaining all the weight.

And it's never as simple as 'eat less/move more'. There's an awful lot more to weight gain (and loss) than that.

This from the CDC suggesting while genes may be linked to obesity they only have a small effect. People just don't like to accept it's generally down to the amount they're eating IMO :

In most obese people, no single genetic cause can be identified. Since 2006, genome-wide association studies have found more than 50 genes associated with obesity, most with very small effects.

@Lockheart

CICO absolutely does work if you want to lose weight. There is no human body on this planet which can defy the laws of physics. You can only put weight on if you're consuming more energy than you are expending, and you can only lose weight if you're consuming less than you're expending.

How you do that - fasting, gastric bypasses, calorie counting, keto - whatever you want to call it, it all adds up to the same thing.

Sticking to the lower calorie diet / increased activity and then maintaining that and not slipping back into bad heating habits is an intensely complex psychological problem.

But the physics of actually losing weight is not.

That doesn't explain it and is far too simplistic because they body can adapt to exist on levels that are below what someone could maintain. So yeah, the 'laws of physics' theory works great if you have a normal body that maintains at 1900 calories or something. Not so much if your body has adapted itself so that you could eat 700 calories and still not lose anything. Also, it's kinda like saying 'a human can hold their breath for half an hour - all they need to do is not breathe'. Well, yeah, except your body will take over and make you take a breath before you pass out. You can try to resist that bodily urge if you like but chances are you won't manage it for long.

Surgery should be the very last resort. People do gain their weight back because they start eating more again. With the exception of a very small number of medical issues eating less and moving more is the right answer. Perhaps not just eating less but eating better too.
My own mother is very overweight. I personally couldn't care less about aesthetic side of it, but it caused her to have medical issues. She swears she doesn't understand why she gains weight as she eats less than everyone else. It is simply not true. Just like her many people are just in denial how much they really eat.

I would never want to have the surgery.

The people I know who have managed to lose weight and keep it off are those who exercise a lot. I mean people who got into running or cycling and go pretty much every day. It seems to make a bigger difference than what you eat.

But it’s only in the last 30 years that people have got really fat. Look at any newsreels from the 70’s and ordinary people were much slimmer.
So what is making people fat if not eating too much? Is there some chemicals that affect our body chemistry?

It's all about habits. Calories in being lower than calories out will definitely produce weight loss. The trouble is that most fat people prefer the type of foods which create weight gain, and have emotional feelings around food.

So once the diet is over, they go back to eating a nice big dinner, with a slab of strawberry cheesecake as a reward because they've been so good, losing all that weight.

Starving people in famine-stricken countries (where yummy fattening foods in large quantities are simply not available) never find that the weight magically piles back on, no matter how hard they try.

Availability of calories in UPFs.

Sure, the laws of physics aren't being broken. Where it becomes complicated though is as illustrated in the biggest loser study above. If your body responds to you eating less calories by reducing energy expenditure and increasing hunger hormones it's not quite so straightforward is it?

Another interesting study was into energy expenditure comparing an active hunter gatherer tribe with office workers. Total energy expenditure was similar for both groups despite huge variation in amounts of exercise. It appears that increased activity causes the body to decrease expenditure elsewhere.

www.aarp.org/health/healthy-living/info-2018/metabolism-myths-weight-loss.html

@FreeBritnee

The only way I lose weight is fasting. I am low carb. No sugar at all. Mainly vegetable for carbs. No alcohol. If I fast the weight falls off me.

What kind of fasting do you do?

Absolutely. The Obesity code explains this very well (Jason Fung).
I lost a lot of weight eating more calories than ever and zero exercise. It completely changed my appetite and hunger. Liberating.