​Weight loss is all about discipline

Weight Loss Bumps Up Appetite More Than Threefold

More below.

"For every kg of weight they lost, patients in a new study consumed an extra 100 calories a day — more than three times what they would need to maintain the lower weight.

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The findings suggest that "a relatively modest increased appetite might explain a lot of the difficulty that people are having in both losing the weight and maintaining that weight loss over time," noted senior author Kevin D Hall, MD, from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease, National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Previous studies show that metabolism slows when patients lose weight, "as recently popularized by our previous studies of The Biggest Loser contestants," Dr Hall told Medscape Medical News.

'However, our new results suggest that proportional increases in appetite likely play an even more important role in weight plateaus and weight regain," he suggested.'"

"We get patients all the time who hit these plateaus, and we're trying to figure out, what do we do?" Dr Fujioka said. "It's real clear to us that you really need to deal with the food-intake side, the driven appetite, from this paper."

Weight loss is driven by the diet, not by the exercise. However, the exercise is a necessary component to force the body's metabolism to stay higher than it otherwise would. Discipline is the other necessary component for the individual to eat the correct amount of high quality, highly nutritious food. 

"The few individuals who successfully maintain weight loss over the long term do so by heroic and vigilant efforts to maintain behavior changes in the face of increased appetite…in an…obesogenic environment." Or, in the vernacular, discipline.

Any who want to lose weight, and keep it off need to understand that the difficult part of the journey is not the weight loss itself, but the discipline necessary over the subsequent year to maintain the new weight.