Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss

The more you research/learn about obesity, the worse it is, much like smoking. One of the most depressing stats is that dieting does not get easier with time. The probability of eventually regaining all the weight eventually converges to 100%. Even if you're successful for 2 years, people still regain by year 4, 5, etc. The body never resists trying to regain the weight. GLP-1 drugs are the best hope yet.

absolutely. and yet people will still say "just eat less"! Imagine telling a person who smokes "just smoke less"

This is self-defeating and untrue. Many people, myself included, have kept weight off for decades. But you don’t get there by thinking of your new lifestyle as “dieting”. You need to learn to love eating healthy foods in a healthy amount, and getting exercise. Eventually you can get to a place where the old foods and habits are simply unappealing.

> One of the most depressing stats is that dieting does not get easier with time.

Yeah, I've tried several times under medical control.

I kept asking my supervising doctor: "When is the constant hunger going to get better?" And the answer was always in the range of a few weeks to several months. But that moment never came... never!

And, in the end, all the kilograms I had lost along the route always found their way back home, and always with some new friends they had met while we had lost sight of each other.

> in a healthy amount

That's the crux! Constant hunger starts nagging me as soon as I try. I've tried several times for several months, with nice results from the weight's points of view, but I never got to the point where my quality of life globally increased, and that was always due to the constant hunger.

I'll only retry when I'll have found a way to stop the hunger now.

That’s pretty useful info! If you were feeling uncomfortably hungry beyond a short adjustment period, that makes me question if your caloric deficit was too aggressive. And/or if your diet didn’t include enough fiber and protein for satiety. (It’s also possible to be confusing other signals for hunger, like thirst, boredom, or anxiety.)

Losing weight does not have to be so hard. You can lose a lot of weight gradually over time with a small, consistent deficit. Measurement accuracy is critical, though - you will absolutely fail if you aren’t logging your food like a lab scientist.

But it is definitely possible to succeed without that constant sense of privation. In fact, if you want to succeed long-term, you HAVE to find that balance because nobody can force themselves to feel deprived indefinitely.

That's... A completely reasonable thing to say..

the "just" is doing a lot of work, too much. Most people with an addiction or weight problem are very well aware of what they should be doing (or not doing), but they'll be fighting with their body telling them constantly that they really, really need to eat or smoke. This is the hard part and telling someone "just do it" is not helpful in the least

I found that sugar free hard sweets/candies helped to try and satiate some of the pangs. It's still hard, and you might end up "chain eating" like 5 or 6 of the things in a row, but I figure better that than bingeing chocolate or whatever.

Yeah I often think that I am addicted to food. They say men think about sex every 7 seconds - I think about eating every 7 seconds!

If I start eating badly, it is very very very hard to stop. I will crash off the rails into a spiral of binge-eating for the rest of the day until I feel physically sick (which takes a while).

You just can't start.

With alcoholism or smoking it is plausible (although hard) to go cold-turkey and just eliminate the things that lead you to the binges. You can make lifestyle changes to avoid them. But you still have to eat, so for me I am always one meal away from losing it and pigging out. I never feel full (the food challenges of "if you can finish this meal it's free" are a walk in the park for me - anyone for dessert?). It takes continuous and immense will power to stop - I am hovering around 95kgs at 1.85m which I know is "bad" but tell me something I don't know. It's hard.

Yeah, what you said is key - and I can also vouch that it's absolutely possible to keep it away for good, aside from small setbacks that almost everyone experiences, since we’re not robots.

The word diet is problematic because most people see it as something temporary. But you can't just eat healthy to lose weight and then go back to old habits, expecting the weight to stay off. That just doesn't make sense.

Also for many people, food isn’t just about pleasure - it’s also a way to deal with boredom, stress, depression, and so on. So even if someone sticks to a diet, if the psychological root causes are still there, it's going to be hard to stay away from junk food.

This is not untrue.

Look at the long term numbers for successfully keeping weight off, 5, 10 years out.

They’re abysmal.

Just live with the hunger? Been starving for last 3 hours but idc really. Thats how i never went above 75kg all my life

In line with the book "Intuitive Eating", I'm trying to make peace with both food and my weight lately for this reason.

Given what effects stress, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, etc. have on the psyche and body, I'm running an experiment, and betting that making peace and taking care of my body as it is right now will benefit me in the long run.

Its because people treat it as a DIET and not THE NEW NORMAL.

When you stop a diet, you go back to eating shit. The new normal just keeps you at the same place because you get used to the fact that you don't need to eat breakfast, and a 500 calorie lunch is perfectly satiating, hell maybe a bit too much.

I wonder how much of that is due to a sedentary lifestyle? If you're running and biking and strength training it makes a big difference vs trying to maintain a healthy weight with a low TDEE.

Embrace the suck.

That just isn’t true.

Ultimately this is true though right? If you want to quit smoking at some point you need to smoke less.

That depends on your definition of "reasonable". Every single person I have met who is struggling to lose weight is attempting to consume fewer calories. Telling them to "just eat less" provides no novel information or actionable strategies. At best it makes you sound like the kind of person who most people avoid because you prefer being right to being helpful.

It doesn't help everyone but some people find it more useful to try and "enjoy" feeling hungry rather than spending as much mental effort trying to ignore it or not feel hungry. Sort of like how body builders learn to enjoy the muscle ache from heavy lifting.

That is the key to stopping smoking.

Telling them they can't possibly smoke less through willpower is incredibly harmful. Same with eating.

    > Many people, myself included, have kept weight off for decades.

To be clear, more than 80% of people eventually regain weight lost during a diet. While your statement might be factually correct: "many people" can be 20% of the millions of people who diet each year, but it overlooks the main point: Keeping off weight after a diet requires near superhuman control. Most people cannot do it. Thank god I was born with good genes that makes it easy for me to control my weight. It looks and sounds like hell trying to diet to lose weight.

Have you tried GLP-1 class drugs?

Bingo. In my experience most people dealing with obesity are dealing with an underlying addiction problem. It requires a huge change at a deep level that is impossible for some and not hard for others. Hence the widely varying responses to GP in this thread.

Unfortunately it's also the only advice that works, in a trite and tautological way. You either find the willpower (in the addiction research it seems that some sort of "religious awakening" or "higher purpose" seems to be key) or you struggle with your addiction to the end.

The comment elsewhere about HAVING to eat was eye opening to me. For some reason I never made that connection - the cocaine addict doesn't have to do just a tiny line a few times a day. They can kick it permanently. A food addict has to face their temptations every meal...

> Keeping off weight after a diet requires near superhuman control.

No. This is wrong.

Keeping weight off requires retraining your habits and relationship with food so that it becomes natural and even enjoyable to stay healthy. It also may require addressing some emotional and psychological issues that are keeping you stuck.

The path to that point may be challenging (not always!), but it is simply false that you must exert “superhuman control” forever to keep your progress. In fact, the opposite is true: if you view yourself in an adversarial posture with your diet, and are relying on willpower to “win”, then you are likely to fail because nobody can deprive themselves forever.

Circling back to that 80/20 statistic: I think it’s evidence that most people are not approaching this problem in the right way. And part of the problem, in my opinion, is defeatist beliefs like the ones I am criticizing here.