Continued from Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss.
If you drop from the high end of your range to the low end, maybe you’ve lost 20 pounds. So the idea would be to vigilantly hold the line there, instead of despairing that you didn’t reach some lower target weight and then gaining it all back.
You’d feel good, you’d look good. Why do we have to feel that it’s never enough?
But aren’t there a few people who can keep white-knuckling it below their normal range? In the book, you share an anecdote about Angie Dickinson being spotted eating her own celery and carrots at a restaurant.
Yes. But women who are naturally thin may have an advantage as actresses. I’ve heard that Angelina Jolie has a hard time when she tries to gain weight.
Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. If you gained a lot of weight over time because every day you were consuming 100 calories more than you were burning off, why couldn’t you just go to the gym every day and burn off an extra 150 calories and lose the weight the same way you gained it, a little at a time?
My best answer to that comes from Jeff Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, who says we just don’t have that kind of exquisite, conscious control over the calories we eat.
Accounting errors alone add up to more than those 150 calories; otherwise, even when we were trying hard to hold our weight steady, it would be going up and down all the time. But that’s not what happens. There’s some higher-level system in your brain that counts calories much better than you can.
In every rigorous study I know of in which people exercise and don’t diet, they don’t lose weight. You don’t tell yourself, I think I’ll eat another 150 calories today – but over the long term, that’s what happens. Your body evens everything out.
How about the idea that with exercise you can build up muscle, which burns more calories and ups your metabolic rate?
The answer is, the bulk you get with exercise is such a small percentage of total skeletal muscle that it won’t make a difference. To be continued…