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Basically, my idea is that I'll stop losing weight when I have to use drastic or unhealthy methods to keep losing weight. So when I reach a point where getting any more weight off involves lots of hunger or too much exercise then I'll stop there.
BTW, I would define lots of hunger as the kind of dieting where I'm obsessed with food all day, feel cranky, have physical hunger pains etc... IOW, the way I used to think that being on a diet had to feel. And too much exercise is both when I don't give my body a chance to recover and when feeling obligated to exercise outweighs my enjoyment of movement. -
This is really easy to answer. I don't believe the failure rate for weight loss is 95%. I think it's high, but not that high. And I'm in some classes where the percentage of people who won't pass can be as high as 50%, I'm still in the classes because 1)it's worth it to me to try and do this and 2)I believe I know what I need to do in order to pass my classes. It's not a perfect analogy, but I feel the same about fat loss.
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Well, first I should clarify that my high sugar diet was only for a briefish period of time. I'm now back to a more balanced way of eating with higher protein, lots of veggies and fruit and, yes, sweet stuff sometimes too.
However, even when my diet was high in sugar, I was still relying on counting calories to lose weight so it didn't affect my weight loss much at all nor did it seem to change my waist circumference (I've heard some theories that higher sugar diets can affect where you gain weight.) I will say that it's harder to maintain a larger deficit when you're not eating filling foods though.
On a related note, I don't get specific with how the scale or other measurements are changing. This is mainly for me. I want to see a downward trend, but I don't want to obsess and not blogging the numbers is one of many ways I avoid that obsession. -
Um because hello? NEW AND SHINY. It may turn out that this goes the way of my twitter account (abandoned.) I do think that this lets people feel more anonymous than asking questions on blogs because there's always the fear that the blogger in questions has ways of knowing exactly who is asking what.
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Oh wow, good question. Now I could post something super duper long and rambly or I could give a pithy anecdote and then link to and quote others liberally. My natural inclination is to do the first, but I'll spare you.
First I should start off by saying that my mind wasn't changed about set point so much as tweaked. Hopefully, I'll be able to give you a better idea of what I mean with my little anecdote below.
So, some of the first evidence for a weight set point was in research done on rats. Basically, you allow rats access to rat food and they tend to maintain their weight in a pretty tight range. You take away the rat food (poor rats!) and they lose weight, their metabolisms slow down, they move less and, once food is reintroduced, quickly eat back up to their previous weight. Simple.
However when researchers expose rats to what is actually called a 'cafeteria diet' (lots of options, many of which are particular scrumptious to our rodent friends) the rats quickly gain weight above their ratty set point. Put them back of rat chow and they lose this weight and once again maintain at their original weight.
Now don't read too much into this. I'm not saying that people would be better off with our own version of rat chow. More that the homeostatic control of weight definitely exists, but which weight it maintains has a lot to do with environment - what kind of food options we have, how much movement is necessary in our daily lives. This is why I've said before that more than even a 'lifestyle change' I envision my personal weight loss as an environmental change. I can't actually change my environment, of course, but I find it a better fit mentally in terms of what I'm doing.
Now here's the point where I have to acknowledge that whether or not people can lower their set point is far from decided in terms of research. The generally accepted opinion, afaik, is that it's much easier to gain weight and raise one's set point than the reverse. Linda Bacon even says this is her HAES book.
However, research is all over the place on this one. We know that metabolism slows during dieting - which would support the above view. We also have research which shows this effect disappearing once people have lost weight and put on maintenance calories. That would suggest that it's this deficit that affects metabolism and not the weight one ends up at.
Ok, last thing, some researchers are now using the term settling point or settling zone to talk about this tendency of the body to maintain weight in a particular range. This differs from set point though in that it's the zone the body settles in while in a particular environment and not a pre-programmed weight that the body 'wants' to reach. When I post this on my blog, I'll post some links that are a little more eloquent than I am.
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