Maintaining Weight-Loss Might Be Tougher Than You Think

Remember the reality tv show Biggest Loser? The one where trainers barked and contestants cried as they worked their bodies to exhaustion. Starving themselves as they ate double digit fractions of their normal diets and watched the pounds drip off in rivulets.

Kevin Hall, a scientist at the National Institute of Health (NIH), Time Magazine writes, studied 14 Biggest Loser contestants and found out a devastating truth. “Overtime, 13 of the 14 contestants Hall studied gained, on average, 66% of the weight they’d lost on the show, and four were heavier than they were before the competition,” he told Alexandra Sifferlin from Time.

Hall figured out that the contestants’ weight-loss actually triggered a change in their resting metabolic rate. A change that was not for the better. When the contestants lost mass amounts of weight their metabolism actually began to slow down. Supposedly this is the body’s natural reaction to protect itself in the case of starvation. The body starts slowing down the metabolism to conserve energy and fat when it thinks food supplies are short.

This reaction would be helpful in the case of a sudden famine, not in purposeful action of weight-loss.  What makes the problem worse is the contestant’s metabolisms didn’t pick back up once they were done shedding pounds, It stayed slow.

But losing weight and keeping it off is not a hopeless situation Time argues. One problem has been claims by various diet fads that their diet is the one diet that will do the trick. In reality, Rina Wing, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior sciences at Brown University, didn’t find one weight-loss program that worked for everyone when it came to keeping the weight off.  Through her research at the National Weight Control Registry, Wing found the necessary diet and exercise required to lose weight and keep it off was different for everyone.

At the registry they tracked weight-loss on people who had already lost at least 30 pounds and had maintained that weight loss for at least a year.  They found that 45% of people lost significant amounts of weight following various diets of their own and 55% said “they used a structured weight-loss program. And most of them had to try more than one diet before the weight-loss stuck,” Time said. This is why weight watchers as well as all the other diets have been popular. They all work, but only for some.

 An understanding of the differences in each individual’s needs when it comes to weight-loss is becoming more popular. Recently Buzzfeed came out with a video where one of their staff, Daysha Edewi, who has always had trouble losing and keeping weight off, tried a new program called Fitness Genes.

The program gave her a unique fitness plan based on her DNA. Fitness Genes tracked genes in Edewi’s DNA that told them how her metabolism worked, her amount of sensitivity to saturated fat, the best meal plan for her body, and her peak hours for exercise.  She followed the plans for 30 days and the video concludes with Edewi losing and maintaining 11 pounds, 8 of the pounds being purely body fat.

Programs like Fitness Genes seem like they may be the future. Many more are popping up, like Nutrigenomics, which provides ideal dietary information bases on your DNA an article in Health Line found. And while the article thinks such a program would be great in the case of determining food sensitivities, they were still skeptical on its ability to determine the whole of an entire diet. Either way the diet and exercise world seems to be shifting from mass to individual.