Lately, some pessimistic information has been on the news outlets, like CBC, with titles like “Why Willpower Isn’t Enough to Keep the Pounds Off.”

In that article, they point out that:

  • 80-95% of people who lose weight put it all back on in about 2 years.
  • Metabolism slows down as you lose weight
  • Your body fights hard to regain the weight you lost.

And while all of this is true, what that news story didn’t give is the “what now?” side of the story.

Original source: here.

Is there any point to losing weight in the first place, if you’ll just end up at your starting point anyway?

And what about the 5-20% of people who do manage to keep their weight off beyond 2 years? What do they have in common?

How do you enhance your own chances of maintaining your weight loss?

That’s exactly what we’ll talk about in this article.

Why Weight Maintenance is So Hard

What the article in CBC mentioned is what happens when a person loses weight. We have 2 hormones that regulate hunger and fullness (there’s actually more, but we’ll keep it simple):

  • Ghrelin: it tells us we’re hungry
  • Leptin: it tells us we’re full

Right after you’ve eaten, ghrelin goes down, and leptin goes up. If it’s been 5 or 6 hours since your last meal, ghrelin goes up, and leptin goes down.

Besides that, we’ve known from lots of starvation experiments, going back as far as the 1920s, including Ancel Keys’ monumental work, The Biology of Human Starvation (1950) what happens when calories are forcefully reduced:

  • Body temperature drops. With drops in body temperature come drops in metabolism. We don’t know exactly how much, but we know that they happen.
  • You decrease the amount of unconscious movement that you do. For example, you might be a person who naturally bounces their leg as you’re just sitting there, or you might be tapping your finger all the time. In general, you fidget. All these tiny little movements can add up to hundred of calories per day. And yet, they go away if you’re in a chronic state of calorie deprivation (this also applies to sleep deprivation).
  • The thyroid can slow down. The thyroid is the master regulator of your metabolism.
  • You have lower energy and lower motivation, so either your workouts in the gym suffer, or you’re tempted to just skip them all together.

…and more.

So yes, the body rebels against weight loss. In an otherwise lean person, the body actually also rebels against weight gain. But this is less true for a person who naturally has weight problems.

Is there any point to losing weight in the first place, if you’ll just end up at your starting point anyway?

The thinking is that you need to lose weight to be healthy. However, research from the well-respected Journal of the American Medical Association shows that being overweight (as defined by having a BMI of 25.0-29.9) is actually not associated with early death. Being underweight (BMI of under 18.5), and being obese (BMI of over 30) is associated with early death.

Another study of 1.7 million Norwegians actually showed that the ones who were overweight by our standards had the highest life expectancy (yes, higher than those considered “normal” weight).

And another peculiar finding: even as our weight rose, so did life expectancy. What gives???

So as you can see, if you’re obese and inactive, weight loss will improve your health. If you’re just overweight and inactive, getting active will improve your health. But what if you’re overweight and active? Then further weight loss likely will not improve your health. It’ll maintain your health.

But nonetheless, despite the evidence suggesting that going from overweight and active to normal weight and active will not improve your health, most people want to lose weight for different reasons:

  • To look better
  • To fit back into their old clothes
  • To like the way they look in pictures.

So is there a point in losing weight anyway? It depends:

  • If you’re obese, yes, weight loss will improve your health
  • If you’re overweight, but not obese, and you’re active, then weight loss is unlikely to improve your health
  • If you’re overweight, and your goal is to look better, then yes, weight loss will accomplish that.

What about the 5-20% of people who do manage to keep their weight off beyond 2 years? What do they have in common?

If you look at the overall statistics on the maintenance of weight loss, they aren’t pretty. But if you look specifically at those who have managed to maintain their weight loss beyond 2 years, there are certain principles that are consistent among them all:

One large study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition Found that people who have been able to maintain their weight loss for an extended period of time:

  • Exercised for at least 1 hour per day, most days of the week
  • Ate breakfast regularly
  • Self-monitored their weight
  • Their eating habits didn’t change from weekdays to weekends
  • Maintained a (relatively) low-calorie, low-fat diet

Wow! Now those are surprising commonalities. Who would have expected that regular exercise, weight self-monitoring, and good eating habits lead to long-term weight maintenance? I never would have figured that out in a million years.

The real big key though is that you don’t just do these habits to lose weight. You can’t stop doing these once you’ve reached your “ideal” weight. You have to keep it up.

These behaviors must become as automatic as brushing your teeth.

If you need help with the implementation of these habits, and you’d like to see if we’d help you, feel free to fill out this questionnaire.