[Thor]

Originally Posted by To Be Quite Honest

So Thor, are you not a fan of Ketogenic diets anymore?

I am a fan, if it works for you as a lifestyle. Carb nite is great for people who are active and workout, atkins is stricter and has no cheat days which works for some.

Honestly if you are eating healthy, you don't feel like your miserable with your relationship with food then whatever works I can't be against. I just know with myself that low carb eating works far best for me, I have no problem with sweets and sugars, but carbs are deadly for me.

Originally Posted by Red

I think it's reasonable to see where one person has a harder time to burn calories than another. Body chemistry and all...I can see that. But for most part eat less move more is successful.
Heck, even the BL show in question is the perfect example. These very large people are probably the ones that are most likely to gain weight, that's how they got on the show in the first place. They are the ones with bad body chemistry. But even then when you put them on a good diet and exercise plan they loose insane amount of weight.
Problem is when they go home they no longer exercise as much and they don't have a team of chefs cooking for them. With our busy lives it's easy to find yourself at a pizza joint.

I really hate to keep harping on this, but what people are missing is that these contestants did not have chefs, they cooked their own meals. The problem is yes sometimes you just fall back in to old routines, but the drivers for this are not laziness, but powerful biologic drivers like the drop in leptin, the lowered metabolic rate, powerful triggers, hunger...

All this does not mean that modest weight loss is hopeless, experts say. Individuals respond differently to diet manipulations — low-carbohydrate or low-calorie diets, for example — and to exercise and weight-loss drugs, among other interventions.

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.

I have to keep harping on this because this is the message science is telling us, and is not reaching the masses because its more gratifying to just blame the people for not having enough willpower and determination, which no one is denying are key factors in the few that keep it off.

But the blaming is a problem, we need to realize this is a biological problem that we have yet to find a good medical way to treat, until we do we can at least go after fad dieting, calorie restrictive diets and fast weight loss.

Just think about this, your body does a number of coordinated things to return you to your starting point, powerful hormones, slower metabolism, powerful cravings, and we are just starting to understand some of these things such as the hormones like leptin and others in the stomach.

Slower metabolisms were not the only reason the contestants regained weight, though. They constantly battled hunger, cravings and binges. The investigators found at least one reason: plummeting levels of leptin. The contestants started out with normal levels of leptin. By the season’s finale, they had almost no leptin at all, which would have made them ravenous all the time. As their weight returned, their leptin levels drifted up again, but only to about half of what they had been when the season began, the researchers found, thus helping to explain their urges to eat.

Leptin is just one of a cluster of hormones that control hunger, and although Dr. Hall and his colleagues did not measure the rest of them, another group of researchers, in a different project, did. In a one-year study funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council, Dr. Joseph Proietto of the University of Melbourne and his colleagues recruited 50 overweight people who agreed to consume just 550 calories a day for eight or nine weeks. They lost an average of nearly 30 pounds, but over the next year, the pounds started coming back.

Dr. Proietto and his colleagues looked at leptin and four other hormones that satiate people. Levels of most of them fell in their study subjects. They also looked at a hormone that makes people want to eat. Its level rose.

“What was surprising was what a coordinated effect it is,” Dr. Proietto said. “The body puts multiple mechanisms in place to get you back to your weight. The only way to maintain weight loss is to be hungry all the time. We desperately need agents that will suppress hunger and that are safe with long-term use.”

While its depressing to hear this stuff, its still positive we are starting to understand more precisely what is happening, and thus medical intervention and treatments in the future can counteract what the body is doing, or trick it to even not react to weight loss, which would be a huge step.