Why it's hard to lose weight
To find out why, I read through more than 60 studies on exercise and weight loss. com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. In the dry, open terrain, they found study subjects among several Hadza families. A previous study found similar metabolic suppression in people who had lost weight and kept it off for up to six years. On several trips in 2009 and 2010, he and his colleagues headed into the middle of the savanna, packing up a Land Rover with camping supplies, computers, solar panels, liquid nitrogen to freeze urine samples, and respirometry units to measure respiration. If someone starts at 120 pounds and drops to 80, her brain rightfully declares a starvation state of emergency, using every method available to get that weight back up to normal. For three decades, starting at age 13, I lost and regained the same 10 or 15 pounds almost every year. Whether weight is lost slowly or quickly has no effect on later regain. In private, even the diet industry agrees that weight loss is rarely sustained. This coordinated brain response is a major reason that dieters find weight loss so hard to achieve and maintain. I wanted (unwisely) to lose more, but I got stuck. Welcome to Show Me the Evidence, where we go beyond the frenzy of daily headlines to take a deeper look at the state of science around the most pressing health questions of the day. At the end of the 45-minute workout, my body was dripping with sweat. While the hunter-gatherers were physically active and lean, they actually burned the same amount of calories every day as the average American or European, even after the researchers controlled for body size. And according to my bike, I had burned more than 700 calories. When anthropologist Herman Pontzer set off from Hunter College in New York to Tanzania to study one of the few remaining hunter-gatherer tribes on the planet, he expected to find a group of calorie burning machines.
I was lucky to end up back at my starting weight instead of above it. The diet industry reacted defensively, arguing that the participants had lost weight too fast or ate the wrong kinds of food — that diets do work, if you pick the right one. Unlike Westerners, who increasingly spend their waking hours glued to chairs, the Hadza are on the move most of the time. Likewise — despite endless debate about the relative value of different approaches — in head-to-head comparisons, diet plans that provide the same calories through different types of food lead to similar weight loss and regain. Metabolic suppression is one of several powerful tools that the brain uses to keep the body within a certain weight range, called the set point. For 11 days, they tracked the movements and energy burn of 13 men and 17 women ages 18 to 75, using a technique called doubly-labeled water — the best known way to measure the carbon dioxide we expel as we burn energy. NYTimes. The root of the problem is not willpower but neuroscience. I also spoke to nine leading exercise, nutrition, and obesity researchers. On my most serious diet, in my late 20s, I got down to 125 pounds, 30 pounds below my normal weight. The range, which varies from person to person, is determined by genes and life experience. Countless gym memberships, fitness tracking devices, sports drinks, and workout videos have been sold on this promise. When I gave up on losing and switched my goal to maintaining that weight, I started gaining instead. Men typically go off and hunt — chasing and killing animals, climbing trees in search of wild honey. A vast majority of those who beat the odds are likely to end up gaining the weight back over the next five years. When they crunched the numbers, the results were astonishing.
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Why it's hard to lose weight
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