Yesterday I posted a scientific research article about biological adaptations that promote weight regain in obese humans, with a link to a less technical article explaining the same issue. 

The article below addresses that issue from a “Health at Every Size” position.  

I agree with the article, and I admire the positions of “Health at Every Size” and “Size Acceptance”.   I spent many years of my life working to diet while living with morbid obesity.  I’ve experienced having the Fat Bias of others directed against me, and I didn’t like it.  Those cultural experiences were unpleasant enough to cause me … even now at 70 years of age … to continually struggle to keep my body in a state of starvation so that it will consume itself and be smaller than it wishes to be.

At this point, I’ve chosen NOT to personally adopt an “Intuitive Eating” non-diet lifestyle for myself.

I don’t plan to allow my body to ever tell me what to eat because, if there’s any way to avoid it,  I don’t want my body to become enormously fat again.  There’s a good chance that keeping up my constant struggle to eat a very tiny amount will - at least - reduce the speed of my weight regain.

I’m old now, so I figure that my life won’t be long enough for the what-now-appears-to-be-an-inevitable-weight-creep-upward to return me all the way back into morbid obesity.

Would I make the choice to continue the struggle if I were now in my 30’s or 40’s or even my 50’s?  If I knew, — that even though I continued to vigilantly and consistently work to successfully eat only 500 to 800 calories every day, — that eventually, my body would still wind up extremely fat again?  Probably not.

Why Do Dieters Gain Their Weight Back?
                    by Regan Chastain, of www. danceswithfat. org

…I think that one of the persistent myths that allows the diet industry to increase their profits every year with a product that doesn’t work is the idea that  “well, people gain the weight back because they just go back to their old habits!” (Of course in this case “their old habits” means not putting their body into a state of starvation so that it will consume itself and become smaller, but we’ll get to that in a minute.)

The thing about intentional weight loss is that research shows that almost everyone can lose weight short term, but then almost everyone gains it back &nd...

The following is author Michael Neill's perspective on Natural Eating:

Working from the perspective of the Inside out, rather than from the Outside In, here is the way we would all naturally eat if we hadn’t been taught to eat differently.

When your body is hungry eat.
Eat what you want, not what you think you should.
Eat consciously and enjoy every mouthful.
When you think your body’s hunger is satisfied, stop eating.

Think about it - but for our societal training in mealtimes and childhood training using food as both reward and punishment, why would you ever eat if you weren't hungry?

If it weren't for all the information and misinformation around us about what we're supposed to eat, why would you ever even put something in your mouth you didn't want to eat?

But for our multi-tasking on-the-go culture and the fact that most of us try to eat what we should instead of what we want, why wouldn't you take the time to enjoy every mouthful of the food you are eating?

And but for everything we've learned about the importance of cleaning our plates and fears about being hungry later because we're not supposed to eat between mealtimes, why would you ever keep eating past the point of full?

Speaking as someone who has played around with numerous outside-in eating programs over the years, ranging from Atkins on one side to Potatoes not Prozac at another, I know first hand the allure of the outside-in. Everyone has cool sounding success stories and shiny scientific data, along with pictures of people who we just know we'll look like when we've followed the program for as long as they have.

Worse still, most outside-in eating programs actually work - for as long as you follow them. So we ignore the overwhelming data suggesting that diets are the most successful weight-gain programs in history and assume it must be our fault - if only we were more disciplined, or hadn't been born with the fat gene, or whatever our best guess as to why we're the only ones who can't make something work that statistically doesn't work for over 95% of dieters, we'd lose weight and keep it off for life.

But as always, life lived from the inside-out is simpler than that. When we're looking in the direction of what's natural as opposed to what's normal, we see that all the reasons we would eat when we weren't hungry have one thing in common - they're made of Thought.

We think it would be rude not to eat what we're given and immoral to leave food on our plates. We think we know better than our bodies about what they need to function optimally, and because we are so out of touch with our bodies, we collect evidence to make these thoughts seem even more real and substantive.

What about so-called "emotional eating"? Well, since every emo...

My observation is that the fat people who become "normal" size and maintain that size for more than just a few years, manage to do this through doing the hard work it takes to continually and consistently oppose the natural physiological desires of their "reduced obese" bodies.

Rather than allow their bodies to tell them how to eat, they use their minds to overrule those bodies and consciously choose to eat food containing far less calories than their individual body desires.  Forever … one-day-at-a-time. 
It is possible, but it isn't easy.  
See Running Down the Up Escalator.

First, let me clarify that my definition of a "fat" or "obese" or "reduced obese" person is not someone who merely hangs somewhere around their BMI Obesity border. Meeting that criteria requires a person to put in more than two or three years at a weight of … at least …. 20 to 50 pounds above their BMI Obesity border. To me, those who fail to meet that requirement are merely "overweight", a condition that is often temporary for them. Although many of these people term themselves as "fat" or previously obese, in general, they appear to have a very limited understanding of true obesity or the fat condition.

An overweight person tends to think that because they went on their first diet and easily lost and kept off 10 or 20 lbs, then an obese person, on their 50th diet can do the same thing for a longer time and lose and keep off 100+ lbs. This attitude is easily seen within the numerous online diet forums that are full of overweight or formerly overweight people who are eager to offer copious advice and personal judgments along these lines to people who are obese or reduced obese.
This unequal comparison … apples to oranges … often confuses people who are truly obese or "reduced" obese and frequently results in negative self-judgments which are just wrong.

So, applying this clarification, There are psychological desires (of the mind), and physiological desires (of the body). What does it take to continually and consistently use one's mind to oppose the natural physiological desires of one's body? Is the ongoing difficulty of opposing those desires worth the effort that it takes to be "normal" weight?

This is a Judgment call that depends   
on the severity of the individual's mental pain which is caused by the culture's fat-bias, and the severity of the individual's physical pain which is caused by denying to one's own obese, or reduced obese body, the food substances which that body believes it needs for survival. 

We must each decide this for ourselves. Thus far, for me personally, the balance tilts toward accepting the physical pain to avoid the mental pain. However, my personal dieting ...

The word "Diet" simply means "food and drink regularly provided or consumed, i.e. habitual nourishment".

However, our present pop culture has basically changed the term "Diet", to primarily mean "a regimen of eating and drinking sparingly so as to reduce one's weight".

All research indicates that none of those "regimens" or methods are effective to reduce people from fat to a "normal" size long-term, except for a very tiny fraction of the fat population.

That information appears to have gotten around because just about everyone is trying to give their Diet - i.e. eating regimen, "way of eating", or "lifestyle", a different label… anything other than the word "Diet".

"Intuitive Eating" type "nondiets" have been doing this since they first introduced their concepts - "eat when hungry, stop when full".

Lean Cuisine now has ads that say "ditch the diet and go on a try it!" and then suggest that people eat their frozen meals to lose weight.

Special K now says to stop worrying about the number on a scale…but they still want people to buy their products in an attempt to lose weight… they just want this to be called "Size Sassy".

Weight Watchers now says they aren't a "Diet", they're a "lifestyle choice".
Yeah ... It's a lifestyle where you choose to be on a Diet.

The Bottom line is that all eating plans are diets, no matter what they are called. They can say it's "not a diet", it's a "lifestyle", a "way-of-eating", a "nondiet", "size sassy", but at the end of the day it's still the same Diet concepts that have been proven to fail the vast majority of people, and… in fact… have the exact opposite of the intended physical result on the majority of people who try it.

Call it what you will. My observation is that the fat people who become "normal" size and maintain that size for more than just a few years, manage to do this through doing the hard work it takes to continually and consistently oppose the natural physiological desires of their "reduced obese" bodies. Rather than allow their bodies to tell them how to eat, they use their minds to overrule those bodies and consciously choose to eat food containing far less calories than their individual body desires.

Forever … one-day-at-a-time.
It is possible, but it isn't easy.  
See Running Down the Up Escalator.

 Here at DietHobby there are many articles about my weight-loss and maintenance of that weight-loss.

For more details see ABOUT ME in the Resources section, and various Status Updates etc. in the ARCHIVES.

I've consistently recorded all my food into a computer food journal every day for more than NINE years.

I've also recorded my weight daily or weekly during that time. Those detailed records show a large weight loss, followed by a couple of years holding pattern, followed by about five years of gradual weight-gain while eating a calorie average of around 1050 calories daily.

Despite my careful adherence to calorie budgets, and detailed documentation, people tend to disbelieve this truth. I'm tired of being considered a liar. In fact, involving myself further in discussions on the issue is becoming too exhausting to even contemplate. My records are helpful to me personally, but are generally discounted by others as inaccurate, mistaken, or faulty in some way because … what these records show "simply cannot be true".

This is a common phenomenon.
 
Medical personnel and weight loss gurus get to openly doubt the claims of any and all failed dieters because their fat bodies are the visible proof that they are lying.

Former dieters who claim diets don’t work were probably just doing it wrong all along, or else they didn’t try Guru X, Y or Z, who would have set them straight right away.

However, the bottom line is, diets don’t fail because failed dieters are liars, but because the only diets that yield substantial, noticeable weight loss in a statistically significant portion of the population are the same diets that are largely unsustainable for many, many reasons.

The problem isn’t lying dieters, it’s that the expectations surrounding diets and weight loss are built on lies, half-truths, insinuations, flawed research and cults of personality.

It is important to realize and understand that people regain lost weight due to biological reasons which are totally out of their control.

When a person engages in the kind of severe caloric restriction necessary to lose significant amounts of weight, it triggers hormonal changes in their body that pushes back against that caloric deficit, both physically and emotionally.

The body's response to caloric restriction involves issues involving leptin, ghrelin and adaptive thermogenesis. In a nutshell, one's body does everything it can to preserve what few calories it is taking in. This is the semi-starvation neurosis that is most noticeable in the infamous Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Those continual, ongoing, unpleasant symptoms are the body’s way of trying to urge a person to find more calories. Most people find that kind of lifestyle unsustainable.

The 3500 kcal per pound Theory was derived by estimating ...