Want to lose weight? You eat less, exercise more. Fewer calories in, more calories expended. It’s just so simple… right?
Well, sure. To an extent. If you force your body into starvation, you’ll lose weight. But as the many different studies (performed in different nations, in different decades, by different people) discussed in this article point out, a heavy person who loses weight must maintain starvation in order to remain thin.
That’s right–you must starve yourself permanently to maintain the weight loss. Not "keep eating normally" or "just continue eating healthfully," but you must actually force your body into long-term starvation. So hey–now you know how to be a weight loss success story! Neat!
Interestingly, when researchers tried to make normally thin people fat, the same thing happened–they could stay fat only as long as they were forcing themselves to continue overeating. If they went back to eating when they were hungry, sating their appetites but not bingeing, they dropped right back to the weight they were before getting fat.
Even the American Heart Association & the American College of Sports Medicine admitted as recently as August 2007 that while "It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling."
That’s the best you’ve got for me? "Not particularly compelling data?" That’s what I’ve spent the better part of my life believing in and striving for? I’m lucky no one approached me with a great deal on ocean-front property in Utah, I guess. I’m especially appalled when I start realizing how long we’ve known that weight loss isn’t a simple math calculation, and that it isn’t "permanently possible for everyone." We’ve known for a loooooong time, and yet we’ve still made ourselves miserable striving for an unattainable body shape and/or size. (And, of course, we’ve royally screwed up a few generations of kids in the process, as it is now almost socially unacceptable to grow up loving yourself as you are–you’re supposed to loathe your genetics and long to change them by any means possible. Extreme Makeover, anyone?)
So the next time your doctor/friend/significant other/sibling/parent/magazine tells you that you too can be a size 2 if you’d just eat less and work out longer…
Laugh. Then go about your merry way.
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I’m Marissa, can-do-ologist, perpetual Curious George, and daily adventurer. 
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Hey Marissa…Only a few more months of law school to go for me, yay! I hope you are enjoying Verizon.
While looking for something interesting in Jurisprudence (Stith), I ran across your blog again.
I had to comment on this post, as i can attest to its veracity. I lost over 150 lbs prior to and during my first year of law school, and keeping it off requires lots of exercise and starvation. Diet & exercise = size 12 for me. A 2 will never happen. Not even with daily workouts and a 1000 calorie/day diet (that is maintenance for me).