The New York Times article, After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought To Regain Weight, got a lot of attention this past week. It’s lead to a bit of despair amongst some of my clients – “there’s no hope! We are all doomed to keep weight on!” Well, I am personally not a fan of making anything about weight, but, to address this particular concern, let’s talk about the 4 main mistakes that get made in the Biggest Loser. Focusing on them can help you understand what is going on here.
1. The scenario is totally unrealistic
If you take a person and confine them to one place where they are forced to work out for hours a day while only eating foods specifically prepared for them, they will lose lots of weight. Once you return them to real life where they don’t work out all day and have a chef, keeping the weight off is not going to be easy.
2. Crash diets crash your metabolism
This is what the article primarily talks about. If you severely restrict calorie intake your metabolism drops (probably in an effort to avoid starvation). What the study in the article showed was that once the metabolism has dropped, it does not come back up.
Related: Calorie Burn – How Many
3. It’s all cardio
The overwhelming majority of the exercise is cardio. They even have people run marathons on the show! Even if they are doing strength training, which I don’t think they are – I admit I have only seen the show twice – it will never overcome the sheer volume of cardiovascular training. (Note, just because someone has a weight in there hand doesn’t mean they are strength training!) The contestants are losing weight rapidly, and a big portion of it is cardio. This will inevitably lead to a good amount of muscle loss which will only exacerbate the metabolic crash that the contestants are set up for.
4. It’s all about quick results
The fitness industry in general is guilty of this. The idea gets perpetuated that we should all be transforming our bodies rapidly. 6 weeks to your beach body, or 4 days to flat abs. Good weight loss pace is considered to be somewhere between 1 and 2 pounds per week. The contestant in the article lost 239 pounds. That should have taken over 2 years. Rushing the process does not set you up for long term success.
Conclusion
The desire for rapid changes using unrealistic and unsustainable methods is not a recipe for success and it isn’t going to pay out in the long run. This is true no matter what the biology says. There is a lot we don’t understand about weight loss and weight gain, but trying to find the perfect solution – the key to everything so to speak – isn’t going to help. Along the same lines, thinking that maintaining a healthy weight is biologically impossible based on a series of flagrant mistakes is equally misleading. The biology is important, but let’s not be distracted by it. What we need to focus on is avoiding the common mistakes that lead to poor health in general, and that can sabotage legitimate attempts to make change. This is a bigger conversation that I will address in the near future. For now, know that you can make permanent, positive improvements to your health and physique but it takes an entirely different approach.
RELATED – Forming New Diet Habits
PHOTO – Mason Masteka, Bathroom Scale-001, License
Pingback: Once Again, It's Not About The Weight - do the movement May 22, 2016
[…] Why The Biggest Losers Regain Weight […]