The latest thinking on obesity and eating, actually, which has obviously not filtered its way down to the masses yet, is that we eat more because we are obese, not that we are obese because we eat more. The body needs time to re-adjust after losing mass in a weight loss program because it’s accustomed to feeding more of itself than actually exists.

The other angle is hyperinsulinism. Most, if not all, obese people are afflicted with it. It is undoubtedly founded in metabolic/endocrine injury of some kind. That underlying cause is still there even if you lower your insulin and lose the weight, so all it takes is going back to your old way of eating and bam, you’re fat again.

If more weight loss candidates understood that a complete change in eating habits is required for long-term success, you’d see fewer people failing at dieting. Of course it would help if 99 percent of the diet plans out there were realistic about human nutritional needs. Most people attempting weight loss are going around undernourished and fat-starved. No wonder they fail.

I think I have the paragraph tags turned on now. I had HTML disabled, but I turned it back on. It doesn’t seem to show up when you hit “Preview” but still posts okay.

I wonder why the speaker’s notes differ from the slide, unless the slide was meant to illustrate one set of the “conflicting data.” At any rate 10% means if a normal person can eat 2,000 calories, a reduced obese would eat 1,800 calories. Hardly an explanation for the 3FC commenters who are claiming 1,200 calories (or for Seth Roberts, who says he eats 1,200 calories).

“An important clinical question is whether weight loss in obese persons causes an abnormal decline in energy expenditure, which could become an obstacle to long-term successful weight management. The answer to this question is not entirely clear because of conflicting data from different studies. However, the results from most studies support the notion that resting energy expenditure (REE) and total daily energy expenditure (TEE) in reduced-obese subjects are normal for their new body size and composition.”

( http://www.obesityonline.org/slides/slide01.cfm?tk=34&dpg=9 )

For instance, let’s say that a woman at her ideal weight would be 130 pounds: she’d need about 1,400 calories (at the rate of 11 calories per pound) for her resting metabolism. Then let’s say she has a sedentary job with 7 hours of office work and one hour of walking, she cooks dinner for an hour, she watches TV at night, and gets in 30 minutes of moderate calisthenics every day: this adds to about 600 calories, for a total of 2,000 calories a day. —–

If her overall metabolism is supposedly 15-20% more efficient, she’d only be using 1,600-1,700 calories compared to what a never-fat person would use. But that gap of 300-400 calories would come completely from the 600 non-resting calories, according to that theory. —–

In other words, the muscles would be 50-67% more efficient than normal muscles of the never-overweight person. That seems like we’re starting to get into the realm of perpetual motion machine claims or cold fusion or the like. —–

The doctor quoted was going off into discussions of cavemen and the mastodons and the like, so obviously he was mixing speculation with fact. It’s too bad he wasn’t clearly distinguishing which was which. —–

I think there are plenty of other explanations for yo-yo’ing, including the fact that the overweight have hard-to-break habits and cravings and the urgency of their weight is not as great a motivator when they are thin than it was when they were overweight. Occam’s Razor: we don’t have to search for complex theories when existing explanations suffice. —– (P.S.: Can you enable paragraphing or use of paragraph tags for comments?)