This article has really gotten widely shared and discussed, and for that I'm very glad. The danger of such rapid weight loss in a calorie reduced, high intense workout regime kills the contestants metabolism making it very hard for them not to return to their starting weight (set point.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/he...loss.html?_r=0
Take a look not at the image showing the weight loss and gain on the contestants they followed, but the the metabolic damage they have gone through.
This is so damning, and more and more research is showing us how utterly brutal the odds are against obese losing and keeping weight off, I often cite a study that followed over 1200 obese people who lost weight and were followed for a 5 year period.
1 of them succeeded in keeping the weight off, the rest returned to their previous weight, gained more than their start point or had returned significant weight in the 5 years since a serious weight loss.
The joy for me is that co-sponsor of this study was Dr H, the Biggest loser Doc who has been widely blasted for standing by the show, his own study ended up showing how wrong he was and that gives me some pleasure.
Biggest loser needs to stop, and we need to rethink lots of things about the health and fitness industry which has massively failed us. The complexity of the obesity epidemic makes this a tough nut to crack but at least we are getting somewhere in the fields of gene splicing and the most promising area of recent research, the brain-gut connection.
Quote:
But Dr. Ludwig said that simply cutting calories was not the answer. “There are no doubt exceptional individuals who can ignore primal biological signals and maintain weight loss for the long term by restricting calories,” he said, but he added that “for most people, the combination of incessant hunger and slowing metabolism is a recipe for weight regain — explaining why so few individuals can maintain weight loss for more than a few months.”
Dr. Rosenbaum agreed. “The difficulty in keeping weight off reflects biology, not a pathological lack of willpower affecting two-thirds of the U.S.A.,” he said.
Mr. Cahill knows that now. And with his report from Dr. Hall’s group showing just how much his metabolism had slowed, he stopped blaming himself for his weight gain.
“That shame that was on my shoulders went off,” he said.
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