If you know anything about NBC’s The Biggest Loser, you know that the weight loss is epic – hundreds of pounds are lost per contestant by the show’s finale after hours and hours of arduous exercise and diet. But what is less known are contestants’ struggles to keep the weight off after the camera stops rolling. Most regain the weight they worked so hard to lose; some are now even heavier.
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Kevin Hall, a scientist at a federal research center had the idea to follow the Biggest Loser contestants for six years after the season ended. The project was the first to measure what happened to people after they had lost large amounts of weight with intensive dieting and exercise. His study, which was recently featured in The New York Times, showed just how hard the body fights back against weight loss.
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Before the study started, researchers already knew that anyone who deliberately loses weight—even if they start at a normal weight or even underweight—will have a slower metabolism when the diet ends. In fact, according to a recent Ted Talk by neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt, people who have lost 10% of their body weight burn 250-400 fewer calories because of a suppressed metabolism. This means that a successful dieter must eat that much less forever than someone of the same weight who has always been thin.
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But even though this knowledge had broadly been established, what shocked researchers was that as the years went by, the contestants’ metabolisms didn’t recover:
They became even slower, and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their effort to pull the contestants back to their original weight.
The study proved that dieters are at the mercy of their own bodies, which can produce hormones and alter your metabolic rate to drag you back to your old weight – whether that is hundreds of pounds more (like the contestants) or just an extra 10 or 15.
While ideally it’s best to never pack on any extra weight, experts did say that individuals respond differently to diet manipulations, like low-carb or low-calorie diets, as well as to exercise and weight-loss drugs.
Curated article from:
NY Times
