According to the old version, for example, abstaining from a daily 250-calorie bottle of cola would lead to the loss of 35kg over three years. Dr Hall’s model predicts an average loss of just 11kg. Furthermore, it also acknowledges that a dieter’s weight will eventually reach a plateau—far more realistic than the old advice, which implied, incorrectly, that weight loss will continue steadily.

If you add one 60-calorie cookie to your daily diet, simple math suggests you’ll gain weight for the rest of your life at a rate corresponding to about a pound of fat for each 3,500 calories. But, in fact, as you gain weight, your body has to spend more energy maintaining the new tissue, using up some of the excess calories. A paper published last year in JAMA calculated that the weight gain would level off at six pounds after a few years.

Unfortunately for dieters, the same mechanism works in reverse when you cut calories. Your body becomes more efficient as you lose weight, and soon stabilizes at a new level. As soon as you resume your previous intake, your weight shoots back up.

Researchers are trying to identify the subtle but insistent cues that drive how many calories we consume – and their latest results reveal just how complex these factors are.

Last year, Dr. Chaput published an analysis of data from 537 participants in the Quebec Family Study. He found that a collection of unlikely factors – short sleep duration, emotional eating patterns and low dietary calcium intake – predicted the risk of obesity better than the amount of fat in the subjects’ diets or how much vigorous exercise they did.

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food.

The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.

For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub’s pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned.

His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.

But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.

Haub’s “bad” cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his “good” cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

Steve noted that this could also be called the “Bang-Bang Servo Diet” but that would likely be confusing to non-engineers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang-bang_control). “

Exercise? A fat lot of good that is for weight loss
In the fight against obesity, we’re urged to get off the couch. Yet new research claims that diet is what counts

In 1932, Russell Wilder, one of the leading obesity experts, lectured the American College of Physicians, saying that his patients lost more weight on bed rest than an exercise regime.

It’s one of those ha-ha moments of medical history, along with doctors prescribing cigarettes to patients to “clear the lungs”. Now we all know that exercise is the best way to lose weight, in the same way that we all know that our obesity epidemic is a result of Western sloths sitting on our ever fatter bottoms. It’s why chubby will be the new norm, with 90 per cent of today’s children predicted to be overweight or obese adults by 2050, costing UK taxpayers £50 billion. It’s why the most insistent plank of the Government’s anti-obesity drive is exercise. It’s why we look at our pudgy kids and cry “To the playing fields!”, and prescribe them ever more PE. It’s why, every new year, we sigh at our expanding muffin top and resolve to Power Plate it away.

That exercise is the key to losing our collective weight is something that we know so deep in our cultural guts that to question it would be ridiculous.

Except that is what the most cutting-edge obesity researchers are now doing. The recent studies show that the benefits of exercise for weight loss have been overstated. This idea is shocking. It goes so far against the orthodoxy that it is not something many can accept. And certainly for governments and the food industry that places them under so much pressure, it is too much to swallow.

“Oscar has the very same feedback curve as Sam, but his is shifted a little to the right, toward eating too much. One day Sam eats slightly more than he needs, and the next day slightly less. But since feedback keeps him within the range his metabolism can adjust to, Sam’s weight stays the same. When Oscar eats slightly too much, though, he’s pushed immediately into the region where he packs on weight. The next day, like Sam, he may eat less but, since that’s within the flat part where metabolism compensates, he keeps all the weight he packs on whenever he eats a little too much.

The shift in Oscar’s feedback curve with respect to his body’s need for calories acts as a ratchet; each excess runs his weight up, but equivalent shortfalls don’t burn off the excess weight. Over time, Oscar begins to see the evidence of this on the scale and in how his clothes fit. Having lived with this condition all his life, Oscar knows there’s only one solution: peel off the pounds. So, for the umpty-umpth time he embarks on a diet: perhaps a sure-fire plan that’s worked before, or maybe the current rage all the celebrities are swearing by.”

Now, if you are grossly overweight, diet alone will work, and is actually recommended as physical activity is stressful at extreme weights but its when you get down to that last 30 or so pounds to lose, that diet alone loses its effectiveness (just as exercise alone does… the body adapts and you start getting less results for the same things, thats why change in exercise routine and the odd cheat day in food are valuable, to stop the system from getting complacent).

Not to mention, when you do lose significant amounts of weight and have been overweight for sometime prior, loose skin will be a problem. At least with exercise (specifically weight lifting) you can sculpt and tone areas to hide it (not completely though…)

Starvation produces temporary weight loss. When the starvation stops, the weight is regained and exceeded. This is sometimes called the yo-yo effect. I am writing about permanent weight loss. If the loss is not permanent, then the dieting is just ineffective self-torture.

Feedback doesn’t explain everything, but it explains a great many things.”

Losing weight is mostly a matter of intentional starvation.