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  #1   ^
Old Tue, Oct-31-17, 10:07
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
Posts: 26,664
 
Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160 Female 5'10"
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Location: UK
Default A Lesson From the Biggest Losers: Exercise Keeps Off the Weight

Quote:
From The NYTimes
October 31, 2017

A Lesson From the Biggest Losers: Exercise Keeps Off the Weight

by Gina Kolata


It is a question that plagues all who struggle with weight: Why do some of us manage to keep off lost pounds, while others regain them?

Now, a study of 14 participants from the “Biggest Loser” television show provides an answer: physical activity — and much more of it than public health guidelines suggest.

On average, those who managed to maintain a significant weight loss had 80 minutes a day of moderate activity, like walking, or 35 minutes a day of vigorous exercise, like running.

The researchers conducting the new study did not distinguish between purposeful exercise, like going to the gym and working out, and exercise done over the course of the day, like walking to work or taking the stairs.

Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, by comparison, call for at least 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise, or 75 minutes a week of vigorous exercise for healthy adults.

The study was published on Tuesday in the journal Obesity. The lead author, Kevin Hall, chief of the Integrative Physiology Section at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and his colleagues also presented their work at the Obesity Society’s annual meeting.

Although the study is very small and must be replicated, Dr. Hall said, it is the first to assess obese people years after they lost weight with state-of-the-art methods to measure the calories they had consumed and the amount of exercise they had done.

The researchers did their measurements when the contestants were chosen, and again at six weeks, thirty weeks and six years after the contest began.
“The findings here are important,” said Rena Wing, a psychiatry professor at Brown University and a founder of the National Weight Control Registry, which includes more than 10,000 people.

The food eaten “is the key determinant of initial weight loss. And physical activity is the key to maintenance,” she said.

The study also helps explain why that might be. One consequence of weight loss among the Biggest Loser participants was a greatly slowed metabolism.

The subjects were burning an average of 500 fewer calories a day than would be expected, Dr. Hall and his colleagues found. In essence, their bodies were fighting against weight loss.

Those who kept the weight off “are countering the drop in metabolism with physical activity,” Dr. Hall said.

During the initial weight loss, the equation was different. Then, the difference between how much weight “Biggest Loser” contestants lost could be explained by the number of calories they cut from their diets. The amount of exercise did not distinguish those who lost more from those who lost less.
The contestants competed for six months to see who could lose the most weight. Participants followed a grueling diet and an exhausting exercise program.

Contestants’ average weight at the start of the show was 329 pounds. At the end, it was 200 pounds, a 129-pound loss. But six years after the study ended, their average weight rebounded to 290 pounds, just 38 pounds less than when they started.

That average, though, hid wide variations.

To learn more, Dr. Hall and his colleagues divided the group of 14 into two. There were the “regainers,” the seven participants who ended up after six years weighing five pounds more on average than they had at the start.
And there were the “maintainers,” the seven who maintained an average weight loss of 81 pounds.

To measure the amount of calories the contestants burned, the researchers asked the subjects to drink “doubly labeled water,” in which hydrogen and oxygen atoms are at least partially replaced by stable isotopes, which have a different atomic mass.

The isotopes appear in carbon dioxide exhaled by subjects, which allowed the researchers to estimate the average amount exhaled each day. The more calories burned, the more carbon dioxide exhaled.

Some “Biggest Loser” contestants — including the first author, Dr. Jennifer Kerns, now an obesity specialist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington — said the conclusions of the new study confirmed their own experiences.

Dr. Kerns, a contestant in Season 3 of the show, says she has managed to keep off 100 pounds only by tracking everything she eats and by exercising on an elliptical cross-trainer for 35 to 40 minutes a day. In addition, her job requires her to walk around the hospital seeing patients.

She has learned that she cannot relax this regimen if she wants to maintain her weight. “My natural tendency is to regain,” she said.

Erinn Egbert was a candidate for Season 8 of the “Biggest Loser” but ultimately did not make the cut. So she went home “to figure it out on my own.”

She hired two trainers and followed a diet and exercise program while she finished her senior year at Ohio State University. She weighed 237 pounds when the show began and lost about 120 pounds.

She has maintained a weight that is just eight pounds more. She does it with rigid portion control and regular, intense exercise — 45 minutes to an hour a day, Monday through Saturday, doing the Beachbody programs, a challenging combination of strength training and cardiovascular exercise.
Ms. Egbert, who is 30 and lives in Lexington, Ky., says she learned the importance of working consistently to stay thin, even with a slowed metabolism.

“You have got to keep at it every single day,” she said.

It’s a difficult task for virtually anyone, Dr. Kerns said: “The amount of time and dedication it takes to manage one’s food intake and prioritize exercise every day can be an untenable burden for many people.”

“It’s totally unfair to judge those who can’t do it,” she added.

Dr. Hall agreed. “The idea that people who regain lost weight are necessarily slothful and gluttonous is an unfortunate stigmatization that is not based in fact,” he said.

Danny Cahill, who is 47 and lives in Tulsa, Okla., is among those who found it increasingly difficult to keep up the sort of regimen he needed to avoid gaining weight.

He won the “Biggest Loser” competition in Season 8. He weighed 430 pounds when the show began, and lost 239 of them.

For the four years after the show, he exercised more than two and half hours a day and gained back just 40 pounds.

Then the injuries began, forcing him to cut back his workouts to one and half hours a day. His weight crept up to 235 pounds.

The next year, “my body just started breaking down,” he said. “I had a foot injury, a wrist injury. I couldn’t keep it up.” And he was exhausted.

His weight went up to 300 pounds. For the past two years, his weight has remained stable at about 340 to 350 pounds, “but only because I am eating as very little as I can,” he said.

“That’s the disheartening part,” Mr. Cahill said. Losing the pounds is one thing. Keeping them off?

“I am still struggling with it,” he said.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/...eight-loss.html
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  #2   ^
Old Fri, Dec-08-17, 12:41
teaser's Avatar
teaser teaser is offline
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Posts: 15,075
 
Plan: mostly milkfat
Stats: 190/152.4/154 Male 67inches
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Location: Ontario
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Guess we were all too busy ruining other people's children's teeth to see this.

Quote:
Dr. Hall agreed. “The idea that people who regain lost weight are necessarily slothful and gluttonous is an unfortunate stigmatization that is not based in fact,” he said.


Interesting take on this. There's calories in/calories out as a simple thing where failure is overindulgence and lack of diligence in exercise, lots of people do mean this. Then there's Hall's take, acknowledging that tackling calories in and out head on can be extremely difficult for some people--what looks like failure to try to a judgemental stranger can be the result of a downright heroic effort. Sometimes CICO advocates get unfairly accused of blame the vicim.

Activity is seen as a cause here rather than an effect. Pour two cups of water into a 250 ml glass and a 500 ml glass. I guess you could say overflow caused the 250 ml glass to hold less water. But it's pretty clear the lesser capacity of the cup caused the overflow.

Quote:
Those who kept the weight off “are countering the drop in metabolism with physical activity,” Dr. Hall said.


The drive to be active is as much subject to a drop after weightloss as other things that go into overall metabolic rate. It's not universal. Some rat strains, given access to a running wheel, will do themselves real damage, quicken starvation on a reduced calorie diet with excessive running. Others will become less active with calorie restriction.

My most recent day's food makes a big difference to how long I want my workouts to be. Many people get antsy if they sit too long, two people could be at the same body composition/weight, same basal metabolic rate, but one gets twitchy if they sit long enough, the other doesn't.
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  #3   ^
Old Fri, Dec-08-17, 13:46
khrussva's Avatar
khrussva khrussva is offline
Say NO to Diabetes!
Posts: 8,671
 
Plan: My own - < 30 net carbs
Stats: 440/228/210 Male 5' 11"
BF:Energy Unleashed
Progress: 92%
Location: Central Virginia - USA
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I am in maintenance (if that is what you want to call it). According to my phone fitness app I've done over 90 minutes of moderate activity for 10 out of the last 12 months. I do lots of walking, both structured and just normal daily activity. My best month was July where I averaged a 156 minutes of moderate activity each day. My worst months were August & September where I averaged 84 minutes and 80 minutes respectively. Over July and August I decided I would try taking a break from tracking my meals for the first time in a long time. I'd just eat my normal low carb/high fat foods and let satiety rule the day. It didn't work out too well. I gained a few pounds each month. In August and early September my eating was up and my walking routine got a little inconsistent. I didn't like the trend with the weight, so in September I started tracking my food again. I lost some weight in September, even though it was my lowest month for exercise volume.

I think that my exercise allows me to eat how much I eat and maintain reasonable weight stability. When I cut down on the exercise I tend to want to continue to eat about the same. If I do that I will gain. But what seems to rule the day for me is tracking and limiting my food. That was stated as a key for a couple of 'successful maintainers' in the article above, but the headline and conclusions of this study appear to overlook that.

Eating low carb makes it possible for me to eat less. It keeps my blood sugar under control and turns me into a fat burner. If I went back to eating carbs, I'm pretty sure that my insulin would rise sufficiently to shut down my fat burning machine. I'd probably stop walking shortly thereafter. That is how it has always worked out in the past. Every time I went on a low carb diet for any length of time I would start to exercise. I even enjoyed the exercise. Every time I went back to eating a junky diet, the exercise would stop. Why would I stop something that I enjoyed doing?

So my 2 cents on this is that they are getting it backwards. When I continue to eat right I want to exercise and therefore I do a better job at maintenance. I've been in maintenance for 16 months now. On most other diet attempts where I fell off the wagon and returned to eating SAD I'd have regained all of the weight loss and more by now. I'd be eating poorly, over-eating, and not exercising. For me DIET is the key to maintenance - specifically a low carb diet. Enjoying exercise and an active lifestyle is a welcome perk that appears to go hand in hand with how well I am eating.

Last edited by khrussva : Fri, Dec-08-17 at 13:54.
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  #4   ^
Old Fri, Dec-08-17, 14:19
Nrracing Nrracing is offline
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Posts: 747
 
Plan: Custom 22/2 Clean Fast
Stats: 290/258/210 Male 72.5
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Progress: 40%
Location: Missouri
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Its sad to see what theBL guy is going through. my dad was his size and bigger. Before my dada pasted, he told me he did notwant me to end up like him. I will horror the promise for life.

Also As you all know I had a heart transplant (It's borrowed time), So I can not go back to eating carby junk. Plus I love bacon, and baked wings. lol
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