“After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight” (nytimes) reports on a doctor who followed reality TV contestants and concluded that a slowed metabolism accounted for their inability to maintain weight loss.
I wonder if it should make us reconsider our notions of progress in medicine. In the 1950s an overweight person would have been diagnosed for $10 with a slow metabolism and given a $2/month amphetamine prescription to speed up said metabolism. Today the same person could be a $50,000/year customer for weight loss clinics, supplements, surgeries, etc.
Obviously being on amphetamine for years is harmful (see “America’s First Amphetamine Epidemic 1929–1971”), but is it as harmful as weighing 300 lbs?
Readers: What do you think? Should medicine concentrate on speeding up metabolism, possibly with new drugs, or is that also doomed due to the fact that people can just have a second donut?
Apparently some huge number of people are taking amphetamines anyways. http://www.vice.com/read/a-neuroscientist-explains-how-he-found-out-meth-is-almost-identical-to-adderall?utm_source=vicefbus
I think almost all diets are too complicated. Any diet which restricts certain categories of food creates nutritional difficulties and calorie counting is really imprecise.
I had success recently by keeping it as simple as possible. The following diet is guaranteed to lose weight for anybody and be easy to stick to after a short initial adjustment:
1) Don’t eat on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. (You can drink juice or milk though.)
That’s it. Only one step. If some event or occasion or family requirement means it will be difficult on any particular day, just eat that day and shift the fast days forward the rest of the week, because the weekend is two days you will still never have to go 2 days in a row without food.
I lost 14 pounds In 7 weeks in this, then plateaued. To go further, or if you aren’t losing, you add one more step:
2) Don’t eat between meals on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
A meal is defined as food consumed within a 1-hour period. You get three. Munching throughout the day makes it possible to consume enough calories to double your normal intake, negating the previous day’s fast, but you can’t do that with 3 strict meals unless you really make an effort.
Some people object because they say they just can’t go a whole day without eating. However, this is really true only for people with metabolic problems or things like migraine headaches triggered by low blood sugar. Humans are designed to be able to cope with mild deprivation so most people will find after a few days that it’s no big deal to skip eating for a day.
For those who absolutely can’t go a day without eating, here’s an alternative:
1) Monday through Saturday, there’s only one hour in which you are allowed to eat. If you need to cheat on any particular day, you get to do that once a week, or you can make it up on Sunday.
Do NOT expect to lose more than 2 pounds a week on this diet. But it it easy to keep going on it. If you want to lose 3 pounds a week, eat only one meal on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays in addition to the three fast days. Eating even less than that is much more of a strain and you shouldn’t expect to be able to keep it up for long, but losing up to 3 pounds a week can be done without sacrificing necessary nutrients (1000 calories a day of balanced foods will have enough to avoid nutritional deficiencies).
Eat, Fast, Live Longer http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvdbtt_eat-fast-live-longer-hd_shortfilms is a BBC documentary that says Joe (above) is right
How can fasting be the key? People ate their three square meals per day in the 1950s didn’t they? And they there was no an “obesity epidemic” like we have now, right? (but maybe everyone was on speed?) The French are still slender, right? They don’t fast, as far as I know. Maybe the “live longer” part makes sense; people certainly dropped dead at a younger age back in the 1950s (when all of the public employee pension schemes were devised!). But they were comparatively thin when they dropped dead…
I’m not saying fasting explains the obesity epidemic, just that it’s a good way to lose weight compared with more complicated diets, and more maintainable than the kinds of things those “biggest losers” did.
I think the obesity epidemic is due to three things:
1) incredibly cheap calories, for the first time in history the majority of people can afford to eat enough to be obese without any other lifestyle sacrifices
2) much more sugar in everything people eat and stupid government advice getting people to consume a lot more carbs relative to protein and fat
3) speculative, but plausible: a change in gut fauna that has spread infectiously
I should probably have said gut “flora” rather than “fauna” because I mean bacteria not things like tapeworms…. 🙁
The adderall-meth connection also brings up the question of swotting drugs. Apparently rather common in all steps of the university ladder nowadays, except presumably post-tenure.
The best way to diet is probably to consistently do moderately hard manual labour in a household without a refrigerator holding a lot of tasty snacks. For the second part, try buying exactly the shopping list of a 50s housewife and see what happens to the waistline for starters. For the first part, I’m not sure what would trigger labour in modern man.
Joe – on your plan is their a target ceiling of juice or milk permitted so you don’t undermine your efforts by drinking your calories?
Having lived in Europe in the late 1990s, I quickly concluded it’s all about fewer processed foods and walking or bicycling as a means of transport for at least a portion of the day (however, Europeans are emulating our sedentary lifestyle & endless stream of snacks, so aren’t as slender as they used to be). In addition, most of the fresh produce in Geneva was tastier, so your child was satisfied with a peach for a snack more readily than the average peach/plum/nectarine here. We returned from Europe to learn that an overweight neighbor had taken Phen-phen, but when it was recalled due to heart issues, she had to stop (and has gained another 20-30 lbs. in the intervening 20 years). My brilliant economist husband and I were convinced that Big Pharma would invent something safe for weight loss, and we were just hoping to invest in whichever co hit the jackpot. Meantime, in recent years, I have learned that most of the women my age (in their 40s & 50s) who are truly lean were diagnosed with hypothyroidism by their internists, and are permanently taking Synthroid, which boosts their metabolism. I actually inquired with my physician about this, but she said “no go” as my iodine levels were normal (and fortunately I’m always trying to fight those last 5 lbs. rather than major excess weight). So I think in addition to these folks on amphetamines (which I wasn’t aware of), you have millions of women on Synthroid. So we’re eating too many calories, even though gym usage is up vis-a-vis the 20th century. Gluttony is no longer considered a cardinal sin, clearly.
forgot to mention that one of Philip’s nephews played soccer for many years on a team with a chubby boy. All of a sudden, after the summer vacation, he became quite skinny. I asked his mother, who told me that her son was so upset by being overweight that the pediatrician put him on Ritalyn (never mind that he had no attention deficit issues and in fact was the kid reading biographies & history books when the team went to sleepaway soccer camp). These amphetamines aren’t limited to adults.
If the obesity epidemic is a fairly recent phenomenon, there must not have many fewer people who weighed 300 pounds in the 1950s. It would be interesting to see if there any studies indicating whether amphetamines can overcome a lifetime of bad habits.
Leaning out while preserving a high metabolic rate is a solved problem. Talk to fighters/wrestlers, cyclists, and bodybuilders. Ignore doctors.
They use T3, caffeine, steroids, aromatase inhibitors, and even some more obscure stuff like bromocriptine.
Ignoring goofy drug protocols, the real answer here is that fat loss actually has to be pretty slow to be sustainable. If you’re 30 pounds over weight you’re realistically looking at a multi-year project to get fixed up. Under-eat too much or over-exercise too much and you tank the metabolic rate, thwarting the effort. It’s not amenable to reality TV or NYT friendly headlines.
I lived in New Zealand for 6 months. When my parents came to visit I noticed that for the first time I could remember my parents ate more food at meal time than I. Within 2 weeks after I moved back I was eating more again
I think there’s something about the American diet that increases appetite.
Sam
Smoking was a major factor in the ’50’s being “skinny”, and as philg said many actuarial designs were based on smokers being a large fraction of the population. Curtailing smoking was as effective as all other medical advances of the 20th century combined.
Calorie counting is super easy. Eat at McDonalds, add up the calories that they claim it is. Stop eating when you reach 2000 calories in the day. Works every time.
Yes, I am claiming that I could eat only McDonalds food and be lean.
And yes, I am seriously suggesting only eating pre-packaged processed foods if you have trouble counting calories. It is better than being overweight and eating “natural” foods.
A quarterpounder and a coke are good clean food at mcdonalds but the fries are a disaster on account of the polyunsaturated oils, which suppress metabolism.
The BBC has another documentary, “Fat vs Sugar”.
tldr; if you stuff yourself with fat or sugar your body will tell you when you are full, but if you stuff yourself with fat and sugar together your “full” switch gets suppressed and you will overeat.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1amh2t_bbc-horizon-sugar-v-fat-h264-1280×720-aac-rmac_lifestyle
Mike, you don’t need a ceiling on juice or milk because you’re doing the diet because you want to and it’s not at all difficult to limit the juice or milk to a few cups a day–the 500 calories or so that will provide will take the edge off hunger and provide energy when you might need it, without tempting you to start munching food (on the other hand, if you cheat by eating something it’s harder to stop at a few hundred calories).
After a little while you can get pretty good at not overeating during the times when you allow yourself to eat. The trick is to only eat high quality food, so that a normal portion is completely satisfying, and also because if your upcoming meal is going to be really good then it’s easier to hold off on snacking beforehand.
I would never get the fries, or soda for that matter. I was assuming just sandwiches. But thinking about it more, I guess that is not obvious.
After visiting Europe – no readily available snacks, better tasting fruits and vegetables, walking everywhere including stair and hill climbing (into the subway and many cities were built on hills for defense against medieval warfare), smaller refrigerator so found has to be bought daily, apartments are on the 2nd floor or higher in buildings without elevator – so you have to lug food upstairs before you can eat it. Eating is a more social event, so you are talking more and eating less intently.
It certainly was odd to see middle aged women of normal body weight. You could just pick out the Americans.
philg has ridiculed homeowners and their time waste doing yard work. I turn a couple of hours of productive yard work into my work out for that day. That and daily 60 – 90 minutes of stretching, weightlifting, and cardio, and a reasonably healthful diet have kept me w/i ten pounds of my 1981 high school senior year weight.
They do very little for metabolism. What they really do is act as very effective appetite suppressants, and its a bit easier to go for a long jog on a treadmill with them.