It’s really hard to lose weight just by doing more exercise. But you can lose weight if you just modify your diet, especially in the short term.

That’s the conclusion from a review of 43 weight loss studies done by an Australian team headed by Dr. Kelly Shaw and published in the current issue of the journal The Cochrane Library.

So let’s see, is it easier to cut your intake by 500 calories or to walk/run six or seven or so miles? And of course, pushing weights around or doing body weight training doesn’t use many calories at all. If one is overweight and also hasn’t been exercising for a while, there really isn’t a big chance s/he is going for a six mile run on day one of her/his weightloss program, would you think?

But what happens to your body when you try to lose weight just by cutting your food intake?

Your body adapts to the spartan regimen. You’re hungry ALL the time but you stop losing weight or lose it at a slow rate. Since you aren’t doing anything to shape your body, your skin sort of hangs loose, like an oversized plastic bag. Now that’s attractive. The local plastic surgeon starts eyeing you hungrily. You may not be taking in all the nutrients you need, so your skin and hair are dull, you have sores that heal slowly, and you feel really tired most of the time.

If you are successful on this starvation program, you can become a skinny fat person.  A happy thought.

Then, once you reach the vicinity of your target weight, you will have felt so deprived for so long, you will really enjoy all those things you couldn’t have when you were on the dreaded diet. So you will eat a bit more or them. Since your metabolism is suppressed, your weight will shoot right back up. You won’t have any muscle to burn calories while you sleep, so you’ll be on the up cycle of the yo-yo pronto, unless you watch those scales like a hawk.

Better, much better, just to cut the junk calories out of your life and take up some activity by yourself or with friends that gets you up and moving and that you enjoy. Much better to eat 250 calories less of potato chips and cookies and work in 45 minutes or so of rapid (a relative term, depending on your state) footwork, whether it be walking, running, dancing, racketball, cycling, or whatever. And it doesn’t have to be all at once, though it’s better if it is.

Just between us, I think it does a major disservice to encourage people to starve themselves to make pounds go away, with or without pills. That kind of thinking has contributed hugely to the current prevalence of people with weight problems. There are a multitude of factors involved here, including massive advertising campaigns aimed at increasing fatty food consumption, hectic lifestyles that don’t include time for proper meals, ever-increasing perssure to work, work, work with no time for sports or traveling by shank’s mare, and so on.

But we are long past the day when any reputable source would recommend calorie-cutting alone as a healthful, effective method for losing weight and keeping it off.  –Di

Healthy Diets Beat Exercise for Weight Loss - Healthy Living: Living a healthy lifestyle for disease prevention on MedicineNet.com

technorati tags:weightloss, dieting, exercise, diets

Are your children getting enough sleep at night? If not, they are at risk for obesity. A British scientist has reported that sleep deprivation causes hormonal changes, well-documented in adults, that can lead to weight gain. Adults, for instance, who get less than four hours of sleep per night, have a 73% risk of being obese. At six hours, the risk is still 23%, with seven to nine hours being the range for sufficient sleep depending on the individual.

Two of the hormones that influence obesity the seem to be affected by sleep are leptin, which reduces appetite, and ghrelin, which makes you hungry. Sort of a double whammy to loosen your resolve to eat small, healthful portions.

Dr. Taheri points out the sleep is not the only factor in obesity but that it should be taken seriously. You need a healthy diet, physical activity and adequate sleep.

He suggests getting rid of all distractions at bedtime. Get the TV, the computer, and the cell phone out of the children's rooms. Set a strict scedule and make sure they get enough physical activity, an excellent sleep promoter.

Besides, getting enough sleep could have terrific side effects like better temper, better academic or job performance, and just feeling better. And you might lose some weight.

Worth giving it a try, don't you think? –Di

Child obesity in sleep loss link (BBC News)

A leading UK expert in childhood obesity says there is now clear evidence a lack of sleep could be partly to blame.

technorati tags:weight, loss, childhood, obesity, sleep, deprivation, leptim, ghrelin

Did you think losing weight meant going on a diet that is about giving up everything you like? So do many people. But it's not. It's about giving yourself a fair chance to enjoy foods that actually help the body and learning to associate those clean fresh tastes with an energetic slimming body.

For instance, I recently undertook a highly restricted diet in the name of research for my readers. (See review of Fat Loss 4 Idiots in "Reviews" category.) It wasn't totally unhealthful but was sorely short in the veggie department. By the end of the 11-day computer-generated restrictive diet part of it I was really craving just about anything green and all kinds of beans. Just goes to show you what several months of balanced "Zone-ish" meals according to the Burn the Fat regimen can do.

Turns out others have the same kind of reaction. In the link below, some folks from Kansas report on their experiences in the midst of their weight loss efforts. They find that the good habits they have been developing are becoming ingrained and they actually now prefer to eat smaller portions at a time including lots of fruits and vegetables. Good on them!

Good on us, too, if we can just keep the image of the body we would like to have in our minds at all times and then make the adjustments towards healthful eating a matter of habit. –Di

New food habits are becoming second nature (The Wichita Eagle)

technorati tags:weight, loss, diet, lose, weight, dieting

Update after one complete round of this diet: 

After the 11 days of eating what the computer told me to, no more and no less, I had lost exactly five pounds and had neither lost nor gained in fat percentage. I did the recommended 2 x 35 minutes of walking (about 4.5 miles for me) every weekday and about 50 minutes on Saturday and Sunday mornings.

At that point, I was bored out of my mind with the very limited selections, got hungry between meals, and had that deep down "ghost hunger" that comes when you stay on a restrictive diet plan too many days in a row. I craved everything, even things I hadn't even thought about for year, but especially vegetables. Perhaps I was missing some essential nutrient(s) or maybe my body was just trying to find that 5 pounds I had "lost."

The second part of this diet is three days of "normal" eating after the 11-day computer-generated menu. During that period I made sure I didn't binge on anything, although I did eat some low carb bread products and had a good-sized piece of cake with ice cream at a family birthday party. Two of the five pounds reappeared, making my net loss for those two weeks three pounds. So this diet does sort of work, but others work as well, are less painful to go through, teach you how to make healthful and yummy menus, have built-in mechanisms for elevating the metabolism and give you a plan you can live with very well for the rest of your life .

Final score: two stars for ease of use and at least some effectiveness.

Be well. –Di

technorati tags:Weight, loss, fat, loss, 4, idiots, lose, weight, diet

In a post a few days ago I talked about how important it is to keep daily records of what and when you eat, your weight and measurements, and what and how much you do to get some exercise.

Well, in the new New England Journal of Medicine (link to abstract of acticle below) there’s a report about a study on 314 people who had lost weight, actually, an average of 42.5 pounds over two years. They were divided into three groups. One group got a quarterly newsletter. One group got online advice to check their weight every day and regulate their intake and exercise accordingly. The third group got up close and personal face to face meetings every day with the same advice. This went on for 18 months.

At the end of that time, the group that only got the newsletter had gained back over 10 of the pounds they had lost, on average, as did the group that only had online advice. The group that got live meetings gained about 5.5 pounds back, on average. Of course the variation between people was certainly noticeable, but the difference between the face-to-face group and the newsletter group was statistically significant.

Similarly, the proportion of people who gained back at least five pounds was highest in the newsletter group at 72.4%, lower in the daily online advice group at 54.8%, and lowest in the daily face-to-face advice group at 45.7%.

So having somebody remind you to check your weight (or inches) every day helps and it’s most helpful if that advice comes from a live person right next to you.

I often see advice to enlist the support of one’s family members or living partners or friends in one’s quest for a slimmer and more healthful lifestyle and I would say this study’s results support that, as well as the importance of checking one’s weight/inches often. 

It’s also interesting to note that these former dieters did indeed know how to adjust their weight, but not without the aid of an external source of information. They had not learned to judge how their bodies were responding just from their own senses. Seems to me that would be a very valuable skill to learn and practice. Think I’ll go see what I can find. Any ideas?  -Di

A Self-Regulation Program for Maintenance of Weight Loss - New England Journal of Medicine (subscription)

technorati tags:weight, loss, keep, weight, off, weighing, weight, loss, support

One of the biggest helps in losing weight is keeping a diary of everything you eat and all your exercise and other strenuous activity. Before you start to change anything, keep track of what you are currently doing for a week or so. If you write down EVERYTHING that goes into your mouth and exactly what, if anything, you did in terms of exercise, you have a foundation on which to build. Little things DO count. That one grape, one potato chip, ten minute walk to the corner store, big bag of kitty litter you carried to your car and then into the house - all of those count over the long haul. Write down your weight, your measurements, and your body fat percentage if you have a way of determining it. Write down your overall outlook on the day and any major events that might have impacted your mood or physical well-being in positive or less positive ways.

I can’t overemphasize how helpful this will be to your putting yourself in control of your life in general, not to mention your weight loss campaign.

The writer from the Mayo Clinic website at the link below recommends keeping an extremely extensive diary for a few days only.

Support weight loss with a food and exercise diary

I think it is far better to keep track of certain essentials both
before and, especially, after you have decided to modify your lifestyle
to a healthier one.

Write down the diet plan and exercise program you have decided to follow in there and check yourself against your weekly plan. Decide on the important things to track and keep it going. One reason is that you will be amazed at the
progress you have made if you keep going and look back after every ten weeks
or so. Another very important thing is that it’s all too easy to slide
back into your old, less-healthful habits. Writing it all down helps
remind you to stay on track.

Some people recommend keeping two separate
records: one for intake and one for energy expenditures. That makes two
things to carry around so I write everything down in a small spiral
notebook. To me, it’s all one big package anyway. We are one person and what we eat, what we do, how we think, how we feel, everything, all interact to make us the person we are. So best to have it all in one place. But that just my take on it.

So go get a notebook that looks nice. Doesn’t have to be expensive but it’s your life you’re going to record in there so make it one you’ll be pleased to have a long-standing relationship with. I’ll be spilling the beans about exactly what I keep in my daily diary in a few days so stay tuned.  –Di

technorati tags:weight, loss, diary, lose, weight, diet, plan, exercise, program

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just pop a pill in your mouth every morning and just watch the pounds melt away? Actually, if you just lost weight and didn’t do exercise to build muscle, you would pretty soon look like a saggy plastic sack with a lot of loose skin hanging around. That’s what actually happens with all the quick weight loss programs in which people actually lose weight, including surgery. But I digress.

Anyway, our best pharmaceutical scientists, as well as disreputable quacks, have been hard a work looking for the magic pills that reduce appetite and increase metabolism. The latest candidate in the string of appetite killers is MK-0557. It actually blocks the receptors for the hunger factor called neuropeptide Y right in the brain. It takes away the appetite. But it didn’t help obese people lose weight much more than taking a sugar pill. Similarly, there was a big hope a couple of years ago that leptin, a hormone that signals the brain about available energy stores, and which makes mice really fat if they don’t have the gene for it, would be the great hope for painless weight loss. It turned out that obese people have plenty of leptin. They just don’t respond to it.

Key behavioral studies from years ago have shown that physiological imbalances are not that common as causes of obesity. People don’t eat too much because they’re hungry. They eat too much because they eat even when they aren’t hungry. One of the biggest keys is to train the mind to take the time to check and see if one is actually hungry or not and then to stop eating the second one isn’t truly hungry anymore. There are other keys having to do with level of activity, but learning to recognize and respond to satiety signals is hugely important in the battle of the bulge.

Here are some more details on the actual clinical study on MK-0557. Of course, it would have to have a cuter name than that if it were to be commercially successful but now they don’t need to bother.

Promising Anti obesity Drug Fails To Produce Clinically Meaningful Weight Loss (Science Daily)

A drug designed to target a powerful hunger-stimulating factor that has long been considered a prime target for anti obesity therapy failed to produce clinically meaningful weight loss in obese people in a long-term clinical trial. People taking the drug known as MK-0557 for a year consistently lost only about three pounds more than those taking a placebo, researchers reported in the October issue of

technorati tags:weight, loss, drugs, pills, leptin, MK-0557, obesity, hunger