Shocking news for those on strict diets
Here’s some terrifying news for people who have lost massive amounts of weight through a strict diet over a long time – your body will find a way to regain that weight. Demoralising or what? This has been highlighted by Danny Cahill, winner of US TV show The Biggest Loser. In December 2009, he’d lost 239lb, weighing in at 191lb, down from 430lb.
But since then, he’s gained 100lb, despite arduous efforts to keep the weight off.
He has been tracked by scientist Kevin Hall, an expert on metabolism at the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, who said: “It is frightening and amazing. I am just blown away.”
It’s all down to resting metabolism – the number of calories you burn when at rest. At the start of the TV series, the hugely overweight contestants were burning a normal number of calories for people of their weight.
But when the series ended, their metabolisms had slowed radically and their bodies weren’t burning enough calories to maintain their thinner sizes.
We know that when anyone loses weight their metabolism will be slower when they stop. So it wasn’t surprising that The Biggest Loser contestants had slow metabolisms by the end of the series.
But what happened next was shocking. As time went on, contestants’ metabolisms became even slower, and the pounds piled on. It was as if their bodies were trying ever harder to get them to regain their original weight. The lesson seems to be that it’s useless to spend money on weight-loss drugs and dieting programmes because you’re working against your own biology.
And the research shows that the body will fight back for years. And that, says Professor Michael Schwartz, an obesity and diabetes specialist at Washington University, US, is “new and important”.
He said: “The key point is that you can be on TV, you can lose enormous amounts of weight, you can go on for six years, but you can’t get away from a basic biological reality. As long as you are below your initial weight, your body is going to try to get you back.”
But this doesnt mean that trying to lose weight is hopeless and everyone responds differently to changing their diet and upping their exercise.
This specific research is looking at the super obese so there is more than one message to take from it:
Don’t let yourself get massively overweight because you’re programming your metabolism to keep you fat.
Don’t go on very strict diets where you lose tons of weight quickly because your body will try to regain it.
It is much better to lose weight slowly ie 1-2lbs a week over a long time.
OOO