Beauty is Not Age Related
This morning I saw an anti-aging ad for a moisturizer
which told me that I need to fight aging on 3 different levels.
I don’t think so.

What does a beautiful old woman look like?
  See Mother Teresa.
The wrinkles of character that Time gives to a woman are Beautiful.

It's not a sprint to the new thin you.
It's outrunning the old overweight you for the rest of your days.

  Anyone who has spent much time here will know that weight-loss maintenance is an extremely issue to me, and this is my own personal basic focus. I find the following article worth sharing here at DietHobby...

Keeping up to keep weight off
                              -by James Fell, Chicago Tribune July 11, 2012

I've lost 50 pounds of fat and put on 20 pounds of muscle. It was quick and easy. Then I was abducted by aliens, and they told me the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot are the ones making all those crop circles.

The first sentence above is actually true, but when I went through my fitness transformation it was an endless process of behavior change that took so long it seemed almost criminally unfair. I've seen many books promising six packs abs in 12 weeks. For me, it took more than 12 years, and even then I only managed a four-pack.

And yet I've bucked the trend of yo-yo dieters, sustaining a substantial weight loss for almost two decades. I'll share my secret at the end, but first let's examine why all those magazine covers, internet ads and Jillian-Michaels-filled infomercials promising quick and easy weight loss are about as realistic as getting stock tips from tea leaves.

The reason is that if weight loss is your goal, your body is going to launch a multipronged assault against you to keep the fat right where it is. Failing that, if you lose weight, your physiology will launch a vicious counterattack to get it back. It becomes an endless war of your mind against the rest of your matter.

Motivated yet?

Weight loss is about creating caloric deficits. There are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, so if you cut 500 calories from your intake you'll burn off a pound of fat each week, right? Wrong, because your metabolism starts rapidly downshifting.

"The calorie deficit decreases after the first day because energy expenditure starts to slow down immediately in regards to this restriction," explains Eric Ravussin, director of the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. La.. "What is a 500-calorie deficit on day one is less so on day two, and even less on day three, and so on."

Early on, a significant portion of this is simply due to a reduced thermic effect of food, Ravussin explained, which is the extra calories you burn via digestion. When you eat less, your body burns fewer calories because its digestive system has less work to do. Also, "When you lose weight this is going to lower your resting metabolism during the entire day," he told me.

And it just keeps compounding. "By the 30th day of calorie restriction," Ravussin says, "what started off as a 500 calorie per day deficit has dropped to 300 or 250 calories per day."

In the strictest sense, the math of there being 3,500 calories in a pound of fat still holds true, but in order to sustain that daily level of restricting 500 calories per day below maintenance level requires eating less and less each day to keep up with the drop in metabolism. This is because when you lose weight, "maintenance" keeps shifting downward. But continuing to cut calories more and more isn't a good idea either.

"If you are doing that," Ravussin says, "you are going to reach a level where you won't have all the essential nutrients for health."

And while this can be combated with exercise, it's far from a miracle cure. Claude Bouchard — an internationally renowned obesity researcher also at Pennington — led a series of studies in 1997 that provide interesting mathematical insight into caloric deficits.

In one study, seven pairs of male identical twins were kept on "no exercise" maintenance level calories. Then the researchers added in 1,000 calories worth of calorie burning via stationary bicycling nine out of every 10 days for a 93-day period (a lot of exercise, for certain). They estimated the participants created a 58,000 calorie deficit during the experiment, but the average weight loss — which was all from fat stores — represented the equivalent of only 46,000 calories.

The reverse happens too, as the team also experimented with 12 pairs of male twins adding 1,000 calories of food over maintenance level for 100 days, but only 60 percent of these extra calories turned into weight gain. This is because metabolism goes up, but so do, uh, trips to the bathroom.

In regard to the role of exercise, Ravussin sent me a study he co-wrote, published in June in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, which showed that even when vigorous exercise was included as part of a massive weight-loss regimen for the severely obese in order to preserve fat-free mass, this "did not prevent dramatic slowing of resting metabolism."

"It's much easier for obese people to cut 500 calories worth of food than burn it off from running," he says.

Last December, New York Times Well blog editor Tara Parker-Pope lamented the near impossibility of sustainable weight loss for her and the overweight population in general, reporting that the small percentage of people who are successful require constant vigilance regarding caloric intake and exercise. Canadian obesity expert Dr. Yoni Freedhoff responded to Parker-Pope's post on his own blog stating that a better word than "vigilance" was "thoughtfulness."

Freedhoff has an answer for why figures for sustainable weight loss are so low: We're doing it wrong. Many set outrageous weight-loss goals and choose crash diets and downright "all-or-nothing" suffering to get there. He then referenced a study published last year in Obesity showing that when people actually use their brains and, you know, pay some attention to reasonable and healthy food intake and exercise that 42.2 percent kept off almost 18 percent of their starting weight for the full four years of the study.

Once again, tortoise trumps hare.

Sustainable weight loss isn't about continual pain and deprivation, but changing who you are. You can't sustain something you hate long term. You can't view exercise and healthy eating as simply a means to an end. We're surrounded by 24-hour McDonald's restaurants and never have to walk anywhere, and to live lean in such an environment requires a massive mental shift.

If you hate exercise, it's a multiyear process to become someone who loves it instead. If you love fast food, you need to gradually shift your attitudes (and even your work schedule) toward being someone who loves cooking healthy meals. It's the process that creates the outcome. When you eschew quick fixes and become the process so that regular exercise and healthy eating defines you as a person, then weight eventually comes (and stays) off as a happy byproduct.

Earlier I used the words "war," "assault" and "attack" to describe physiology versus psychology, but to be successful it's essential to view fitness as more of a journey than a battle; one that never ends.

James Fell is a certified strength and conditioning specialist.

 
I don't have to personally agree with every word that another person says
to appreciate and enjoy their viewpoint. 
And, every so often, I run across an article in someone else's blog that is so amusing and clever,
that despite any minor points with which I might personally disagree,  I wish I'd written it myself.
Here's an example that I find worth memorializing at DietHobby:

........QUOTE.......
  "The weight loss conundrum

Disclaimer: this post expresses my personal opinions. Fancy that. On my personal blog too. And guess what, this opinion may even be different to yours. You can let me know if you agree or disagree with the views expressed here. You might even go as far as to tell me that I am wrong. I may or may not care about that. Enjoy reading.

Phew. Now that we got that out of the way let’s talk weight loss. Everyone on the internet knows that the best way to get traffic is to tag your pearls of wisdom “weight loss tips” and “Jessica Biel’s diet secrets”. I have neither. Sorry. But this post was mostly brought on by the frustration that the topic of losing body mass is still a priority not just in conventional women’s magazines but in the ancestral health community.

You know the one: “Yes, I’ve given up grains because Robb Wolf told me to, I don’t eat refined carbs after reading Gary Taubes, I stopped sugar after watching that Lustig’s video and I force down a tablespoon of fermented cod liver oil since attending Weston A.Price conference. I feel great but… How do I lose another 10kgs?”
And of course there is no shortage of available experts on the interwebz:

- eat less carbs
- eat more safe starches
- introduce interval training
- stop HIIT to salvage your burned out adrenals
- eat sauerkraut for healthy gut
- calories don’t matter
- calories matter
- start IF
- use FitDay to track your daily intake
et cetera.

It’s all very sad.

In the meantime the average long term success of most weight loss strategies is around 1%. Yeah, sure, most people do it wrong. They choose the wrong diet (Lemon Detox, anyone?), they choose the worst possible exercise (if you are a female with a cup size C and above, for god’s sake stop running). And they just don’t have the willpower that the new dieter has (sarcasm font). Because the new dieter knows that he/she will be different. I will be in that 1% who does it right and stays skinny ever after. The End.

There are numerous reasons why weight loss strategies fail. And there are numerous reasons why they succeed. Temporarily. You can lose weight in literally thousands of different ways: Paleo, low fat, low carb, low calorie, ketogenic, vegetarian, aerobic exercise, HIIT, IF, bariatric surgery, liposuction…

That’s why the to and fro arguments on which approach is better for weight loss is kinda pointless. YES! YOU CAN LOSE WEIGHT EATING MARS BARS AND DRINKING COKE! (feel free to leave this page at this point and celebrate).

We have this love and hate relationship with a number that determines our body mass. Lily Allen famously said: “And everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner”. There is another number that we have become very preoccupied with in the last few decades: serum cholesterol. Chasing that number (down) is the name of the game, mostly by pharmacological means. Of course, you could tilt this snow globe upside down and decide that the number per se is not very meaningful and in fact represents some other pathological process in the body. Ideally you would choose an intervention that both addresses the cause of the problem and pushes that number in the direction you want. A nutrient-rich diet free of processed junk and pro-inflammatory toxins accompanied by reasonable physical activity is likely to address the chronic inflammatory state that leads to dyslipidaemia and therefore drop the dreaded cholesterol numbers down and please your conscientious doctor.

But sometimes it doesn’t get you to the magic 5.5 mmols that your doctor wants to see. Just like your 6 month foray into the Paleo diet fails to get you to that elusive number that determines your weight, size and consequently happiness. Time to go on PaleoHacks and shout for help.

I am not having a go at the desire to be slimmer. Sure, I wouldn’t mind losing a few kgs. I also wouldn’t mind losing my freckles or having bigger hands (it sucks trying to find surgical gloves that fit). Neither affects my sense of self worth.

So for what it’s worth, these are my ideas in relation to weight loss (note, doesn’t say FOR weight loss):

I am overweight? Oh thank you, kind sir, I wish I knew this earlier!
Let me just switch to a healthy diet and start running.

1. If your primary focus is weight loss you are already behind the eighth ball. If being skinny was a powerful motivator we wouldn’t have 2/3rds of the Western world overweight or obese. Wanting to lose weight tends to screw with people’s heads even with the best foundation: they start stressing (excess cortisol=bad), they start reducing/counting/starving/hating their bland food/exercising at 5am and generally stop listening to their bodies.

Things are quite different when you eat to nourish every cell in your body. Shift your focus to wellness and flip the switch.

1a Unless you have congestive heart failure or chronic kidney disease, chuck your scales. Like now. Get up and throw them in the bin.

2. Start with having a nutrient-rich diet and get rid of junk. Use whatever framework takes your fancy: Paleo, primal, perfect health diet, whole30, Mediterranean, vegetarian (gasp! ). Minimize the “healthy” versions of unhealthy food, you don’t want any food holding you emotionally hostage.

Until you have that down pat, forget the words “Do you have these pants in a smaller size?”

3. Find a regular consistent physical activity you enjoy. I know exercise is supposed to be about torture. That’s ok if you enjoy torture, no judgement here. Do something you can see yourself doing regularly in a year. Or five.

3a. Do not ramp up the volume/intensity of the said activity to accelerate weight loss beyond the level you see yourself comfortably doing long term. Did I hear you say “bootcamp”? Pfft.

4. You cannot fix self esteem issues with weight loss. The two have very little to do with each other.

4a. In the same vein, having weight loss as a dangling carrot in the future can derail your enjoyment of today. Don’t put off activities, clothes or happiness until you get thinner. See point 1.

5. It seems that the thoughts of weight loss frequently return when people are still longing for a six pack in spite of measurable improvements in their physical and mental health. This is where we hit a little snag.

Let’s say you start off in the obese category. Up to a certain point weight loss and health gains go together. Then you reach a state where your body is happy, healthy and well-nourished. To lose more subcutaneous fat from this point will not gain any further health benefit. In fact, you may dip down into negative territory. If you are body builder, dancer, gymnast or any athlete dependent on low body mass this is the risk you have to take. If you are a suburban mother of 2, disappointed she doesn’t look like her graduation photo any longer, you may be playing a dangerous game. If you still choose to continue down this path that’s cool. Your choice. It’s way harder to shift the happy-healthy weight so you may have to pull out all stops. Some of those deviate even further from the path to long term health and wellness. Obviously if you are naturally lean and small you have to flip this scenario 180 degrees. Getting massive past the point of diminishing returns may not be optimal for your body either.

When I see an obese patient I do not have an overwhelming desire to help them lose fat. To me their weight is nothing more but an external manifestation of serious internal issues. I worry about their risk of heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and autoimmune conditions. I feel the same level of concerns for the skinny-fat: normal BMI with little muscle and obvious visceral adiposity.

Incredibly sexist and quite offensive to naturally thin women.
However we don’t think twice when the ads are turned the other way around.

For a health-conscious and somewhat rebellious community we are still remarkably superficial and eager to conform to the current body image stereotype."
               by Anastasia on Primalmeded.com

   All good points that are certainly worth consideration.

A strange and all too common phenomenon is the way a person, who is has never been very far beyond the borderline of the obesity range, loses around 20 to 30 lbs and suddenly becomes an expert on dieting and obesity.

These people take their personal experience with minor weight loss.. (which of course, might be MAJOR to them personally)… and decide that whatever worked for them ought to work for everyone, and that clearly the solution to the weight issue is easy, because “hey, if they can do it, so can anyone”.

This is like someone who has just finished their first piano lesson telling others about how to become a concert pianist.  It’s like asking someone without cancer how they prevented cancer in their own body, and then using those lessons to treat cancer patients.

I say to such a person:

"Congratulations on your weight loss. I'm sure it's significant to you. But you do not have the same issues that a person with 100 or 200 pounds to lose frequently has."

It’s almost amusing how everyone feels they have an “expert” opinion to share with someone who is trying to lose weight. Even people who have never had a weight problem tend to assume that they are doing something that fat people aren't doing, and therefore they also know the solution to obesity.

There are many naturally slim people (some of them who are even doctors or nutritionists) who truly think obese people are just ignorant, greedy, and lazy. After all, they, themselves, have slim bodies which stay slim by "occasionally taking walks and not eating entire gallons of ice cream in one sitting."  Especially, those who have mediocre processed food diets, and are borderline sedentary, are very quick to assume that obese people must have VERY bad habits.

Anyone who truly believes that people who continually struggle with weight issues are simply missing the information, personal desire, and sense of personal responsibility it takes to succeed, is showing that they don't have a grasp on what it really is, to struggle with a great deal of excess weight, nor an understanding of obesity’s difficult issues. The "eat-less-move-more formula," for a morbidly obese person, is frequently far more complex than even the majority of medical professionals make it out to be.

The habits as outlined in the National Weight Registry Control research – which appear necessary for the majority who succeed at weight-loss maintenance, …. such as daily weighing, calorie counting, lots of exercise etc….. are the same behaviors that are castigated by those medical professionals who involve themselves with treatment of “Eating Disorders”. And yet there is an immense amount of proof that if a reduced obese person stops self-monitoring and making immediate corrections, the weight comes back on without fail.

Many people find it easy to lose a bit of weight, but the body fights back, so very few are able to do what it takes to keep it off.  Invariably when I read "inspiring" weight loss stories in the popular media, 99% of those profiled haven't even made it to the 5-year maintenance mark. When .. and if ... they get there, I’d like to hear about it. Also, please tell me what society you can live in where normal sized people don't feel compelled to shame fat people. I'd like to move there.

Sometimes doing what it take for weight-loss maintenance feels like a dreary way to live. My own position is: “Being Fat is Hard. Losing Weight is Hard. Maintaining Weight is Hard. Choose Your Hard.”

Weight loss is difficult and often complex, no matter how determined you are.
As a reduced obese person who is now maintaining a large weight-loss, I am well aware that obese people sometimes make excuses and wallow in self-pity instead of doing things that they “know” will be effective in decreasing weight. Many people spend decades looking for the magic of an easy way, while in basic denial of the simple truth that eating less calories than you burn will …in most cases…. lead to weight loss.  Truthfully, it is very hard to believe how few calories an obese person actually burns, because for many, the Scientific Theory that 3500 calories equals 1 fat lb just doesn't always hold true for everyone at every weight.

More precisely, it's not that we fat people need to hear this from others - after all, what fat person hasn't already heard it a thousand times?. Rather, it's something that many of us need to take to heart once and for all, instead of continually ignoring/denying the Reality of the difficulty of the consistent, ongoing, lifetime effort it is really going to take.

Eat less calories than we burn.  However, how do we individually DO that?
And then, … how do we do it consistently, FOREVER?
Obesity can't be treated with a one-size-fits-all solution. We are not cookie cutter people and what works for one person won't necessarily work for another. How great it would be if everyone could truely take to heart the message within the video below.

                                            
I am certain that there is NO One-Right-Way to lose weight.
However there are plenty of wrong ways,
and what's right for one person is almost certainly wrong for another.

My body doesn’t provide me with the ability to eat intuitively. I put every bit of food that goes into my mouth into my computer food journal. I also use my food journal to help guide me in my decisions of what to eat. I see looking at the calories ..and other nutrients…when I eat as like looking at price tags when I shop. Just like price isn't the only consideration when shopping, neither are calories the only consideration when eating. Food is also in my life to celebrate and comfort, and therefore knowing the amount of calories doesn't always lead to low-calorie choices.

Brian Wansink is a brilliant researcher based out of Cornell whose life's work revolves around mindless eating. His recent research study determined that consuming crackers from 100 calorie packs vs. large bags, cut consumed calories by 25%.

I’ve noted that tracking in a computer food journal protects me against mindless eating by allowing for the use of calories in decision making. There are people who feel that you don't need to count calories to eat mindfully, and that there are other ways of journaling, and that one is better served by paying attention to how one’s body feels, and/or to one’s psychological state.

So who's right? Should one eat intuitively, or should one count calories? And looking at an even larger picture, should one do low-carb, slow-carb or low-fat? Should one include cheat days or no-cheat days? Should there be forbidden foods, or should everything be allowable? These questions could go on and on.

I’m a member of The National Weight Control Registry … which is the world's largest prospective study of people who have been successful with long-term weight management. It tracks how people have lost weight before they register within the program. The average registrant has lost about 65 pounds and kept it off for more than five years. The Registry’s records indicate that while there are some behaviours which are shared by a large majority of registrants, …such as eating breakfast and exercising, … there is an enormous variety in the way each of these registrants' manage their own weight.

As of today, Amazon.com has more than 71,000 titles with the word, "diet" in them. And truthfully, each of these diets probably all 'work' for someone. However, many of these diets will probably provide a temporary result only, because one needs to actually like the way one lives in order to keep living ..or weighing .. that way.

I agree with Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, MD when he says :

“It's about living the healthiest life that you can enjoy, not the healthiest life that you can tolerate, because if your life is simply tolerable, you're not likely to keep living that way. To take an extreme example, while becoming a teetotaling, vegan, shut-in, marathon runner might well help you to manage your weight, is that a life you'd be willing, or even able, to live with forever?”

One’s bodyweight involves many different variables. Some of these are within our control, and some are not. There are some things in our lives that we can change to help manage our weight, but there are also some things in our lives, which affect our weight, that we either won't be able, … or won't be willing,…to change.

We can use our scale numbers … weight, body mass index, body-fat percentage…. to see where we are in life, and to decide whether or not to Diet. But it can be a mistake to set detailed and arbitrary goals based on those specific numbers, because the ultimate goal that we actually need is to live the healthiest life that we can enjoy.

There is no point in trying to live a life that we can't sustain. The personal cost of reaching and maintaining some table's definition of “ideal” might be too high for some of us. We are rightfully proud and satisfied with our personal best in every other area of our lives, and our personal best is also good enough weight wise.

So if you want to lose-weight, or maintain weight-loss, which diet should you choose?
Whatever works for you. Whatever you can honestly see yourself doing for the rest of your life. If there were only One right way, we'd all be doing it.