http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat-trap.html

The Fat Trap

By TARA PARKER-POPE

Published: December 28, 2011

In the battle to lose weight, and keep it off, our bodies are fighting against us.

I came across this article recently. A long read, but worth the time.

It's not fresh, so I might be late to the party (it having been disseminated on the forum years ago...) but it's certainly fresh for me.

What do you think?

Kris

A definite must read for anyone about to hit MAINTENANCE phase. Thanks !

_{The following extract brought it home to me totally - I can so relate to all the efforts it takes.}

_{I wish many fellow bariatric patients would read it - especially those at the beginning of the journey or trying to decide about surgery.}

_{Because let's face it: apart from a few lucky ones who can stay at their target weight without much of an effort, this is what we are all facing after loosing so much weight:}

Extract:

"...Janice Bridge, a registry member who has successfully maintained a 135-pound weight loss for about five years, is a perfect example. “It’s one of the hardest things there is,” she says. “It’s something that has to be focused on every minute. I’m not always thinking about food, but I am always aware of food.”

Bridge, who is 66 and lives in Davis, Calif., was overweight as a child and remembers going on her first diet of 1,400 calories a day at 14. At the time, her slow pace of weight loss prompted her doctor to accuse her of cheating. Friends told her she must not be paying attention to what she was eating. “No one would believe me that I was doing everything I was told,” she says. “You can imagine how tremendously depressing it was and what a feeling of rebellion and anger was building up.”

After peaking at 330 pounds in 2004, she tried again to lose weight. She managed to drop 30 pounds, but then her weight loss stalled. In 2006, at age 60, she joined a medically supervised weight-loss program with her husband, Adam, who weighed 310 pounds. After nine months on an 800-calorie diet, she slimmed down to 165 pounds. Adam lost about 110 pounds and now weighs about 200.

During the first years after her weight loss, Bridge tried to test the limits of how much she could eat. She used exercise to justify eating more. The death of her mother in 2009 consumed her attention; she lost focus and slowly regained 30 pounds. She has decided to try to maintain this higher weight of 195, which is still 135 pounds fewer than her heaviest weight.

“It doesn’t take a lot of variance from my current maintenance for me to pop on another two or three pounds,” she says. “It’s been a real struggle to stay at this weight, but it’s worth it, it’s good for me, it makes me feel better. But my body would put on weight almost instantaneously if I ever let up.”

So she never lets up. Since October 2006 she has weighed herself every morning and recorded the result in a weight diary. She even carries a scale with her when she travels. In the past six years, she made only one exception to this routine: a two-week, no-weigh vacation in Hawaii.

She also weighs everything in the kitchen. She knows that lettuce is about 5 calories a cup, while flour is about 400. If she goes out to dinner, she conducts a Web search first to look at the menu and calculate calories to help her decide what to order. She avoids anything with sugar or white flour, which she calls her “gateway drugs” for cravings and overeating. She has also found that drinking copious amounts of Water seems to help; she carries a 20-ounce water bottle and fills it five times a day. She writes down everything she eats. At night, she transfers all the information to an electronic record. Adam also keeps track but prefers to keep his record with pencil and paper.

“That transfer process is really important; it’s my accountability,” she says. “It comes up with the total number of calories I’ve eaten today and the amount of Protein. I do a little bit of self-analysis every night.”

Bridge and her husband each sought the help of therapists, and in her sessions, Janice learned that she had a tendency to eat when she was bored or stressed. “We are very much aware of how our culture taught us to use food for all kinds of reasons that aren’t related to its nutritive value,” Bridge says.

Bridge supports her careful diet with an equally rigorous regimen of physical activity. She exercises from 100 to 120 minutes a day, six or seven days a week, often by riding her bicycle to the gym, where she takes a water-aerobics class. She also works out on an elliptical trainer at home and uses a recumbent bike to “walk” the dog, who loves to run alongside the low, three-wheeled machine. She enjoys gardening as a hobby but allows herself to count it as exercise on only those occasions when she needs to “garden vigorously.” Adam is also a committed exerciser, riding his bike at least two hours a day, five days a week.

Janice Bridge has used years of her exercise and diet data to calculate her own personal fuel efficiency. She knows that her body burns about three calories a minute during gardening, about four calories a minute on the recumbent bike and during water aerobics and about five a minute when she zips around town on her regular bike.

“Practically anyone will tell you someone biking is going to burn 11 calories a minute,” she says. “That’s not my body. I know it because of the statistics I’ve kept.”

Based on metabolism data she collected from the weight-loss clinic and her own calculations, she has discovered that to keep her current weight of 195 pounds, she can eat 2,000 calories a day as long as she burns 500 calories in exercise. She avoids junk food, bread and Pasta and many dairy products and tries to make sure nearly a third of her calories come from protein. The Bridges will occasionally share a dessert, or eat an individual portion of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, so they know exactly how many calories they are ingesting. Because she knows errors can creep in, either because a rainy day cuts exercise short or a mismeasured snack portion adds hidden calories, she allows herself only 1,800 daily calories of food. (The average estimate for a similarly active woman of her age and size is about 2,300 calories.)

Just talking to Bridge about the effort required to maintain her weight is exhausting. I find her story inspiring, but it also makes me wonder whether I have what it takes to be thin. I have tried on several occasions (and as recently as a couple weeks ago) to keep a daily diary of my eating and exercise habits, but it’s easy to let it slide. I can’t quite imagine how I would ever make time to weigh and measure food when some days it’s all I can do to get dinner on the table between finishing my work and carting my daughter to dance class or volleyball practice. And while I enjoy exercising for 30- or 40-minute stretches, I also learned from six months of marathon training that devoting one to two hours a day to exercise takes an impossible toll on my family life..."

_{Extract ends.}

Very informative...I had heard about the genetic factor and how many of us are pre-disposed to being obese...but seeing these studies (in writing) really sends a message.

Thank you for sharing

Thanks for sharing this! It was very informative!

I have retread this article twice now and discussed it with both my husband and my best friend. Please share y'all's opinion in my take on how I'm interpreting this....

Let's say you have a 150 pound woman who has never been a higher weight than that. It may take her 2000 cal a day to maintain that weight. Now take, for example, a 250 pound woman who has lost 100 pounds and is down to 150 pounds. In order to maintain that 150 pound weight, it may take her 1600 cal a day to maintain that weight. In other words, the woman who lost the weight must continue to eat several hundred calories less a day to maintain her weight than the person who has never been overweight.

This to me is MINDBLOWING and explains soooo much. Very powerful info to all hitting MAINTENANCE phase!

There is a lot of research surfacing and getting into the public domain recently about the possibilities that:

1) A calorie is not a calorie

2) Eating less might have its particular downside explaining why so many people struggling so much with maintenance.

The reason I asked you all for your opinion as, for some reason recently I keep running into this completely different way of thinking about our health and weight, and I wondered if it's just me or we might have reached a tipping point on the topic. The result might be that we all need to reevaluate much of what we currently know and believe about weight and weight loss.

As for me, the jury is still out... but I will keep reading and disseminating the new set of information - I have a suspicion that they might be on to something.

If you'd like to know more and don't mind reading then I can recommend Fat Chance by Dr Robert Lustig to start with - I couldn't put it down!

If you are more a podcast person, then search for The Sugar Podcast or The Calorie Myth (a bit slow going, and I'm reading the book instead) by Jonathan Bailor.

I'm reluctant to take anything as weight loss gospel - God knows I did my share of trying, even with my band!) but I certainly giving up sugar (a week gone by now).

HealthyNewMe, that's how I read it. Explains so much. Like how I've hovered at the same weight (up or down a pound) all week and never exceeded 1000 calories on any day (usually 800-850). So how does this info tie in to the 3500 calories equals one pound mantra? I do think my yo-yo-abused body does not lose the way it used to. Years ago if I had been on 800-900 calories for four weeks in a row, I'd have lost way more than the 8 pounds I've lost in the past four weeks post-op. Plus, I am exercising every flipping day! I have never been so compliant for so long and lost so little. Not complaining really, just observing. This all becomes the age-old dilemma of how do we shake it up and get the weight off and KEEP it off, when our adaptive bodies keep figuring out how to hold on to the fat!?

Excellent article, definitely worth reading.

I've sent the article to my sister too. She's overweight, but not obese - yo-yo-ing between being curvaceously hot and a bit too plump all her life. We are about the same size now, however, she weight considerably less then I do (but we can wear the same clothes).

She's not having any of it! I mean the points and issues brought up in the article. It was like I wanted to talk to a hard-core religious nutter: no-no-no-no-no!

She kept telling me that this [i.e. where all these recently surfacing science points] cannot be right, because where would that lead? That we can just sit down, stop watching what we eat and trust our bodies? That cannot be right - she was telling me. What about all the fitness gurus (she loves Jillian Michaels, so she kept mentioning her), weightloss institutions (I did bot Weight Watchers and Slimming World, pre-band, she didn't participate in any of these) and all-over-knowledgeable and supposedly genuine people? - They cannot be all wrong (well, she used the phase "b..sh*t", but I'm a lady, so won't repeat that)! Also, she clearly felt cheated - in a way that if a new approach to weight management surfaces NOW, that all what we did so far was a huge waste of effort, time, emotions and money. She just couldn't take all this. Not a bit.

This really surprised me. We like to chat about all things, and me being the reader and information processer I am, I normally bring new things into our life which we discuss, disseminate and - sometimes - adapt into our lives. Like running - I started it after my surgery, get passionate about it, "infected" her - and now we both do it. Or ideas, books, research - I lay it out, she works it out.

But not now. I felt like I hit a brick wall by trying to talk to her about this. No matter what research or idea or issue I brought to support these findings, she just wasn't willing to even consider my point.

The reason I tell you all about this, is because I suspect if these findings are starting to get more airtime and get more frequently into the public domain - all the proponents of it will face an absolute uphill battle. If my easy going and open minded sister cannot face it, I don't believe many people could.

Well, she told me she's going on holiday in July and pushing her weight loss and exercise in the traditional way until then, because that's what she believes in. What she also believes is that if we really control our eating and exercise a lot then anyone can get to their goal weight. She's not thinking in the long term. Her point was that all of us being cursed with weight struggles just have to tough up and face the fact that we will have to fight this battle every single day until the day we give up (or give in...).

I only told her that I'm cutting down on sugar - I haven't told her that I'm planning to engage in the new science of weight loss. Only time will tell which one of us got the right idea.