Long-term Weight Loss is entirely Probable

The headline says:"Obesity research confirms long-term weight loss is almost impossible"

Not quite. Long term weight loss is almost impossible via the wrong route, the only one presented to us, calorie restriction.

Let's be clear. The failure here is not weight loss, that's an automatic process that just happens. Whether it's as a consequence of your body's delivery of energy throughout your day. The failure is the ONE means deliberately chosen to bring it about.

We get hints of possibility. After a period of gain that isn't sustained. Though stretching it a bit, when your body reduces or stops gain,  you can see that as a potential for it bringing about a reverse. It shows the body's ability to alter its metabolic outcomes to a sometimes marked degree. Though you haven't strictly lost by not sustaining gain, check with anyone who's gains every year without fail. I used to be like that.

If I hadn't stopped, ironically, after I stopped dieting I'd be a lot bigger than my biggest. There are many like that.

I can't swear to it, but I feel pretending that weight is just the calorific sum total of a set of conscious elective decisions, is getting in the way of finding out how the body slows or curtails gain in this/these way/s.

Because, then it would have to be stated plainly that, this is body, not a mind led process. And everybody knows why that's verboten. 

The subtitle's more illuminating "No known cure for obesity except surgically shrinking the stomach." No known is right. That doesn't mean there isn't, it means the western model hasn't uncovered in its times.

Some commenters seem confused [I'm being polite].

The reasoning is just stupid: most overweight people have trouble permanently losing weight, ergo losing weight long-term is "almost impossible. Instead, the author should have inquired why it is that overweight people have so much trouble with weight loss.

Favourite part;

This is an area where there is a growing amount of credible research.

Oh ain't that a motherlode in one sentence?! You'd think they'd have researched that over the last 40 + years. And why is 'ob' research always fracking growing, never ripening.

It's not about "overweight" people. Nor is the conflation of weight loss with weight loss dieting/lifestyle choiceychange whatever, correct.

Again, this is the observation of human biology in fat people. It is not unique to us. The same thing happens in thin, slim and plump people. Hence mags and papers publish diets all year. Slimmer people are often losing the same 5,10, 15, 20 etc., pounds, for weddings (their own other people's) parties, the beach, the summer, the LBD and so on and so on.

It's not about sugar, it's about biological design. There is no reason for the failure of the application of an abstract assumption, that doesn't account fully for the way biology works. It is a fact that attacking hunger, appetite and eating just tends to create a boomerang effect. If it doesn't that's usually the failure.

Just as sleep deprivation leads to an oversleep rebound and even, holding your breath for longer, produces a powerful compensatory rebound hyper-ventiliation. How many more years are we going to have to keep saying this? I know haters read me, this is yet another one for your hateraid grapevine.

Rhythmic vital impulses that are generated by your anatomy. They keen towards a mean of balance, whilst adapting by increasing or lowering signalling. 

Incidentally, note how fat people aren't enough to say something isn't working. Yet slim people can say anything doesn't work if they feel like it, in the face of obvious function. As we say; if something doesn't work 100%, slim people can assert it doesn't work. If something doesn't fail 100%, fat people cannot point out that it doesn't work. 

The article's money shot;

So if most scientists know that we can't eat ourselves thin, that the lost weight will ultimately bounce back, why don't they say so?

As the author Kelly Crowe is discovering from the drubbing she received in comments for this piece, fear.

At root, the belief in cals in/out is like the belief in god, if you believe that is a product of the human mind.

Belief in calorie restriction is not amenable to reality or to reason, that has to be lept over to get to it in the first place. So these people are unforgiving and vicious when you attack their go(o)d.

Honestly, don't you just love us fat people? Do you know I'd forgotten that what we take for granted is actually intolerable for some who haven't been exposed to this sort of response? Maybe we're a bit fooled by constantly being told, no-one gives enough hate to fat people. We know that's not true, but it suggests others don't think much of the heat we do get. Their reluctance to endure the minor forms of it, is a reminder.

Obesity construct double think strikes again.

The response from an expert;

Tim Caulfield says his fellow obesity academics tend to tiptoe around the truth......"You'll be in a room with very knowledgeable individuals, and everyone in the room will know what the data says and still the message doesn't seem to get out.

Yeah, would you be the one to tell haters if you didn't have to? FA knows how they shoot the shizz out of the messenger.

You have to be careful about the stigmatizing nature of that kind of image," Caulfield says. "That's one of the reasons why this myth of weight loss lives on.

In other words, both they and their reputation will be dragged through the mud. Possibly career ending, after all, this comes and is generated from within. They have everything to lose and nothing to gain. They're afraid and they're right to be.

Kelly Crowe says the message/truth is "harsh". There's nothing to replace it mainly because instead of pursuing pure facts, which would produce possibilities and hope for those who want/need it. Cals in/out has been allowed to infest the research and become the all or nothing.

That leaves the kind of void that cannot just exist. It has to be filled with more knowledge, which is being blocked by the contrived necessity of the sine qua non of 'obesity' research.

Note-there's also the idea that aiming for weight loss or wld is control. That control of eating is gotten only through aiming for that, even if you miss. This fails to account for the fact that restriction is a primary trigger of hyperphagia. 

This idea of control is a sign of anorexia by proxy.