Weight Loss: There’s No Free Lunch

Now is the time of year when people everywhere try to shed those extra pounds they gained over the holidays. Millions of Americans are overweight and the latest studies tell us that more of us are becoming overweight every year. Being overweight is a risk factor for heart disease, stroke, diabetes and several kinds of cancer.

Weight loss is a multi-billion-dollar business. Its advertisements make many claims and it is hard for people to know what is possible, what is reasonable, what is an exaggeration and what is an outright lie.

Outrageous advertising claims harm the public by creating expectations that cannot be realized. People who fail to magically lose large amounts of weight in short periods of time may become discouraged and stop trying to eat and exercise sensibly.

Sensible eating and regular exercise leads to gradual, modest weight loss, making you feel better and protecting you from many chronic diseases.

There is no magic involved in losing weight. Our fat cells are like a gas tank on a car. They store fuel until we need it. Unlike a car, our body fat stores continue to expand as long as we continue to add more fuel than we use.

To lose body fat, you must burn more energy than you eat so that your body uses the fuel stored in fat cells.

The only way to lose weight is to increase the amount of fuel you burn, decrease the amount you consume or do both at the same time.

The rate at which you can lose weight is limited by how fast the body burns energy. When people start a diet, they often lose five pounds or more the first week. Most of this is a loss of fluid which simply returns when you stop dieting. The real goal of weight loss is to decrease body fat, not a short-term loss of fluid.

I apologize for using math, but I hope you will be able to see the absurdity of some weight loss claims. The average overweight woman (180 pounds) burns about 2,000 calories a day. A pound of body fat contains 3,500 calories. To lose a pound of body fat, you have to burn 3,500 calories more than you eat. To lose a pound a day (or 30 pounds in 30 days), the average overweight woman would have to stop eating (2,000 calories a day) and to start doing 1,500 calories a day of extra exercise. To burn this many extra calories, she would have to ride a bicycle five hours a day.

The problem of losing 30 pounds in 30 days is made more complicated by the fact that your need for calories goes down as you lose weight.

After losing 30 pounds, our average woman would require about 250 fewer calories per day to maintain her weight (assuming she has given up the five hours of bike riding). To continue losing a pound a day, this woman would need to add an extra 50 minutes to her daily bike ride by the end of a month to compensate for her lowered need for calories.

Is there a pill, an herb, a mineral or a diet counselor that can make you stop eating and start riding a bicycle five hours a day? Could you keep this up for a month? The answers are no and obviously not.

After one five-hour bike ride you would be so hungry (no matter what pill or herbal supplement you are taking) that wild horses could not keep you from eating. I know, I have been on five-hour bike rides! If you are going to exercise this much, why not continue to eat your regular amount of food and be happy to lose 10-12 pounds in a month?

In fact, why not eat moderately, exercise regularly, and lose 1-2 pounds per week?

Unfortunately, wanting something to be true does not make it true. It is simply not possible for the average person to lose a pound a day, even by completely fasting. In 1993, the National Institutes of Health convened a conference of obesity experts. This blue-ribbon panel looked at data from hundreds of weight loss studies. They concluded that the typical individual following a sensible diet (1,200-1,500 calories a day) and exercise program can expect to lose 15 to 20 pounds in about four months.

When people go on physician-supervised, very low calorie diets (800 calories a day), they can expect to lose about 40 pounds in four months. At the end of a year, two out of three people who lose weight will have gained most of it back. By five years, almost 95 percent of weight losers will have gained back all of their weight, many being heavier than when they started.

If you are thinking of takings steps to shed a few pounds, you have my encouragement and support. I also encourage you to be a shrewd consumer. If somebody advertises a plan for losing 14 pounds in six days, ask them how this is possible and demand to see the evidence. Then, keep in mind that simple arithmetic shows that this really is too good to be true.

xxxx