The FastDay Forum

I've often linked to an article called the Fat Trap from the NYTimes. This post from the Weighty Matters blog offers a different take: http://www.weightymatters.ca/2014/06/is ... sible.html

The key is to find a weight loss method that you like enough to stick with. Sound familiar?

As usual, the comments after the original blog are just as interesting as the post itself! Readers of this forum know the value of figuring out what works for each of us & supporting each others' choices. Thanks for sharing.

I thought the article was great! Easy to read and the points were well made. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

IF certainly fits the bill for me - and obviously many others in this forum - as a manageable and pretty unrestrictive way of eating that can be used for losing and maintenance. So it is interesting to read about (in one of the tents) the reasons people have stopped this WOE, but great to see that they have returned to this WOL.

Fasting certainly is the easiest way I have found to shed excess kgs - my challenge is to overindulge less so that I don't need to fast quite so often!

There's a lot of good stuff on his blog.

I was surprised when I looked back at the study he linked to. That's a much higher maintenance level than the numbers you usually see (for maintenance of >10% weight loss after 4-5 years). If I understand correctly, all the subjects had diabetes, so had an important health reason to keep the weight off…

Still, it gives one hope that it isn't as hard as we've been led to believe.

While I am struggling a bit at the moment, I have maintained 25% weight loss for 8 months. My goal was a bit beyond that, and I've had trouble sticking to my goal weight, but I've still done better than on any other diet I've tried.

p.s. this is a bit depressing: http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/obesity-r ... -1.2663585
but I thought I should include the link because it is what the blog post was responding to. I can't find the review it refers to where it gives the dismal 5% statistic of people who actually keep the weight off...

Sorry, I've gotten obsessed. Here's another (more positive) link: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 971300528X
and a little story about it in case that link doesn't work: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... eight+Loss)

[carorees]

Hi @MaryAnn
I looked up the publications by Traci Mann who seems to be the source of the 5% statistic quoted and could not find any scientific paper in which she makes this assertion. Instead I found this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17469900/ in which she says that

These studies show that one third to two thirds of dieters regain more weight than they lost on their diets, and these studies likely underestimate the extent to which dieting is counterproductive because of several methodological problems, all of which bias the studies toward showing successful weight loss maintenance.

The full paper was available here when I checked: http://motivatedandfit.com/wp-content/u ... t_work.pdf
It is a comprehensive review of the long-term effectiveness of diets in general and while it concludes that weight-regain appears inevitable for most, it does not mention a figure of 5%.

There are two main components to the success of long-term diets: whether people continue to eat at the new lower TDEE and whether the TDEE continues to decrease such that the amount one has to eat to maintain one's weight gets lower. @peebles has intimated that this is what she has found in the past.

However, we already know that fasting is different from other diets. We are hoping that fasting will at least enable us to continue to eat to a lower TDEE long-term. Whether it can also reduce the extent to which TDEE falls with weight loss we don't yet know. We won't know for 5-10 years whether fasting is the answer!