The FastDay Forum

http://time.com/4793832/the-weight-loss-trap/

There's a nice article in Time emphasizing that people respond differently to diets and it may take a few tries to find what works best for you.

Thank you. It is a good article. I didn't get to finish it (it's very long) but I will try to later!!

[Tracieknits]

Great article -- thanks for sharing

Thanks for sharing and it contains many points that we have come to understand in this forum. One seems to be still under-estimated, given this fragment:
"That's why a significant portion of his meetings with patients is spent talking about the person's daily responsibilities, their socioeconomic status, their mental health, their comfort in the kitchen. "Unfortunately," he says, "that's not the norm. The amount of effort needed to understand your patients is more than many doctors put in."
In an August op-ed published in the journal the Lancet, Freedhoff and Hall jointly called on the scientific community to spend more time figuring out how doctors can help people sustain healthy lifestyles and less on what diet is best for weight loss." (Color added by me)
If it's not only about biology, why expect that medical doctors have specific expertice to help us ? Doctors need to understand they need other experts, in psychology, in behaviour, in social interaction and most notably 'in real life experience of ordinary people like us'

Thanks for the link MaryAnn. The article brings together a lot of material that we are aware of (including the NWCR findings) and reflects many of the views I have come to hold about diets.

I agree totally that different diets / ways of eating will work for different people in helping lose weight and that to sustain weight loss some permanent changes will have had to be made to what the person eats or how they exercise. (I also think that most diets don't work for most people...)

And (of course) I agree that the focus with eating should be on healthy behaviours, not on weight loss.

I agree with the issues that P-JK points out. To me, this relates to the fact that the article did not appear to address the issue of emotional eating. Is there an assumption that the changed behaviour that allows people to maintain their loss has addressed their emotional eating issues??

I would also have liked to have read about what people who are successfully maintaining do if they overindulge...

But overall, a good article (maybe because I do agree with most of it....?!).

Thanks for the article @MaryAnn. Its very detailed.
I agree that one-size-fits all is not the right approach. There is 7 billion different ways of being human, and I'm sure there is just as many different approaches to everything including losing weight.
I worked in nursing homes once, and I noted that there were people in their 90's still smoking.... and then yesterday I heard how a very healthy person died of lung cancer...didn't smoke.

I'd like to see a study done on food/exercise belief systems and their relationship with weight loss. For example: "I believe that if I eat this grapefruit every day, I will lose weight". I hypothesize that what works the best for the person is what they "believe" in.