Weight loss may be hard, but it’s not impossible — you just need your own ‘lightning rod moment’ to decide it’s time
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A recent report that hit headlines last week suggests permanent weight loss is impossible. That may sound depressing, but first let’s consider a few things that were glossed or ignored in the story.
The piece, referencing the work of Traci Mann, a psychologist who runs an eating lab at the University of Minnesota, has led to the inevitable debate in the health and diet communities. And while it is, in many ways, reflective of the often gruesome stats that surround weight loss, we should be use caution before we consider it the final word on our battle on obesity.
Let’s be clear: For most people, most of the time, weight loss is very difficult. Or, to put it more accurately, while weight loss isn’t easy, keeping it off is hard. And yes, it can be a step away from impossible; for example, in the case of those with morbid obesity, we have better evidence in favour of bariatric surgery than we do for traditional diet and exercise (the best evidence is for a combination of the two). It is also true that the body, in many ways, conspires against you once you’ve lost the weight. Your appetite-stimulating hormone, ghrelin, goes up, encouraging to you to eat more, and your resting metabolic rate drops, meaning you’re burning fewer calories at rest than you did before you lost weight — and that’s just the start of it. Perhaps more importantly, restrictive diets make cravings more intense, putting you in the perfect position to binge when left all alone with the cookie jar.
First, let’s take a step back and remind ourselves that, when it comes to weight, an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of a cure. If we can help adolescents, children, and according to mounting evidence, even unborn babies in the womb maintain a healthier weight, then their odds are much better than if we try to undo the effects of weight gain years later. So keeping off weight to begin with is an obvious goal, if sometimes a hidden one.
Despite all of this, however, weight loss for those who’ve already put on pounds is still possible. And yes, it is even possible to keep it off, too. I’ve witnessed this numerous times, not only in my practice, but also in my own home. My own husband lost 60 pounds in his post-university years, and has kept it off for more than a decade. He actually weighs less now than he did in high school. How did he do it? It started with a six-week backpacking trip to Europe. We were cash-strapped (read: poor), so we had no choice but to walk everywhere, make food at our hostels where possible, and eat small, inexpensive (and occasionally sketchy) meals from sidewalk vendors. We climbed our first mountain — literally — and carried our packs on our backs.
By the end of the trip, he had lost about 15 pounds, but the real change happened when we got home. After years of relying on occasional trips to the gym to stay fit, my husband took up running, and found a true passion for the sport. He also did something equally, or perhaps more, important: he ate his last McDonald’s meal in Heathrow Airport and never went back. That was his lightning rod moment — the time when it became crystal clear what he needed to do.
Of course, I am aware of the obvious criticism of this story. After all, it’s just a one-off example of one person’s weight loss, set against myriad failed attempts reported in scientific literature. But not coincidentally, my husband’s weight loss follows very closely with the trends reported by the U.S. National Weight Control Registry, which, since 1994, has tracked and studied people who have lost at least 30 pounds and kept it off for at least a year. On average, these individuals report exercising about an hour per day (usually walking), and 98% of them modified their food intake in some way to control their weight. About two-thirds of them watch less than 10 hours of TV per week, and three-quarters of them keep track of their weight to make sure things don’t get out of hand.
Of course, the concept is simple, and the actual doing is the hard part.
When our eating habits are so closely tied to our lifestyle, our emotions, the eating habits of those around us, and we have easy access to cheap, high calorie, highly palatable foods, the odds are stacked against us. In my mind, the question should not be, is weight loss possible, but rather, what can we do both individually and as a society to encourage the habits that are needed to maintain a healthy weight to become the norm. Some of these changes might be small — getting TVs and smartphones out of bedrooms to ensure better sleep would be one example — and others will be harder — planning better communities with access to walking, biking, and public transit would go a long way to getting people moving more — but we owe it to ourselves and the generations to come to take the necessary steps to help people help themselves.
—Jennifer Sygo, MSc., RD, is a registered dietitian and sports nutritionist at Cleveland Clinic Canada, and author of the newly released nutrition book Unmasking Superfoods (HarperCollins, $19.99). Visit her on the Web at jennifersygo.com and send your comments and nutrition-related questions to her at info@jennifersygo.com.
Grown in California, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia, Pitaya is the fruit of a cactus plant. 
You can eat pitaya alone, or you can include it in delicious smoothies.
Dragon fruit has a pretty mild taste, especially in contrast to its rather extreme looks! It is similar to melon in its taste and texture, and it’s not too sweet. The flavor is quite delicate with pear-like notes. If you buy a pink-fleshed pitaya, your smoothies will have a vibrant, beautiful color.
