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In the January 1 edition of The New York Times Magazine, Tara Parker-Pope’s “The Fat Trap” looks at one of the most interesting aspects of obesity: how difficult it is to keep lost weight from coming back.

I skimmed it when it first came out, but after an email arrived this morning inviting me to sign a petition authored by Gary Taubes, I decided to read it carefully.

Ms. Parker-Pope’s article is excellent. Since it presents valuable evidence on some issues I have been planning to write about, I thought I’d use it to begin expounding my theory of obesity.

The Yo-Yo Dieting Pattern

A common experience on weight loss diets is successful weight loss – but often not to normal weight – followed by unremitting hunger that requires heroic willpower to resist, and ultimate capitulation leading to weight regain. This pattern may repeat itself in yo-yo fashion.

Parker-Pope describes a recent study from The New England Journal of Medicine:

After a year, the patients already had regained an average of 11 of the pounds they struggled so hard to lose. They also reported feeling far more hungry and preoccupied with food than before they lost the weight.

While researchers have known for decades that the body undergoes various metabolic and hormonal changes while it’s losing weight, the Australian team detected something new. A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost…. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place.

The study measured hormonal levels a year after the weight loss:

One year after the initial weight loss, there were still significant differences from baseline in the mean levels of leptin (P<0.001), peptide YY (P<0.001), cholecystokinin (P=0.04), insulin (P=0.01), ghrelin (P<0.001), gastric inhibitory polypeptide (P<0.001), and pancreatic polypeptide (P=0.002), as well as hunger (P<0.001).

Note that insulin levels were still lowered, even as the participants were re-gaining weight:

Decreases in insulin levels after weight loss were evident, and the interaction between postprandial period and study week was significant (P<0.001), with significant reductions in meal-stimulated insulin release 30 and 60 minutes after eating, both from baseline to week 10 (P<0.001 for the two postprandial comparisons) and from baseline to week 62 (P<0.001 for the comparison at 30 minutes; P = 0.01 for the comparison at 60 minutes).

Gary Taubes, in his petition, complains that Ms. Parker-Pope “forgot to mention that the hormone insulin is primarily responsible for storing fat in her fat tissue”; perhaps this omission was just as well.

Resistance to Weight Gain

There is variability in the response to overfeeding. Commenting on a seminal series of experiments published in the 1990s by Canadian researchers Claude Bouchard and Angelo Tremblay, Parker-Pope writes:

That experimental binge should have translated into a weight gain of roughly 24 pounds (based on 3,500 calories to a pound). But some gained less than 10 pounds, while others gained as much as 29 pounds.

Note that eating a pound’s worth of calories typically led to something like a half-pound of weight gain; this shows that weight increases lead to energy expenditure increases. This was in a study in which the subjects were prevented from exercising. Likely the weight gain would have been generally lower if the subjects had been free to move as they wished.

Genes Influence But Don’t Decide

Genes – at least the known ones – are not determinate for obesity:

Recently the British television show “Embarrassing Fat Bodies” asked Frayling’s lab to test for fat-promoting genes, and the results showed one very overweight family had a lower-than-average risk for obesity.

Successful Weight Loss Is Possible

Some people do lose weight successfully:

The National Weight Control Registry tracks 10,000 people who have lost weight and have kept it off. “We set it up in response to comments that nobody ever succeeds at weight loss,” says Rena Wing, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University’s Alpert Medical School, who helped create the registry with James O. Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado at Denver. “We had two goals: to prove there were people who did, and to try to learn from them about what they do to achieve this long-term weight loss.” Anyone who has lost 30 pounds and kept it off for at least a year is eligible to join the study, though the average member has lost 70 pounds and remained at that weight for six years.

Kudos to Drs. Wing and Hill: This is precisely the kind of data-gathering effort that is needed to help us understand weight loss.

The results, at least as reported by the Times piece, aren’t what most dieters want to hear. The people who kept weight off were those who basically continued some form of calorie restriction indefinitely:

There is no consistent pattern to how people in the registry lost weight — some did it on Weight Watchers, others with Jenny Craig, some by cutting carbs on the Atkins diet and a very small number lost weight through surgery. But their eating and exercise habits appear to reflect what researchers find in the lab: to lose weight and keep it off, a person must eat fewer calories and exercise far more than a person who maintains the same weight naturally.

If this is true, then few people have figured out how to cure their obesity. Rather, they’ve just found ways to keep weight off while remaining “metabolically damaged.” They can’t live like normal people and maintain a normal weight.

Paleo Helps

The piece then goes on to discuss the case of Janice and Adam Bridge. Mrs. Bridge peaked at 330 pounds in 2004, now weighs 195; Mr. Bridge peaked at 310 pounds and now weighs 200.

Mrs. Bridge stays at 195 pounds with a reduced-carb Paleo-style diet:

Based on metabolism data she collected from the weight-loss clinic and her own calculations, she has discovered that to keep her current weight of 195 pounds, she can eat 2,000 calories a day as long as she burns 500 calories in exercise. She avoids junk food, bread and pasta and many dairy products and tries to make sure nearly a third of her calories come from protein.

No junk food (presumably sugar), bread, pasta, or dairy is pretty Paleo. Compared to the standard American diet, it’s low in carbs and high in protein.

Persistent Alterations in the Formerly Obese

The article points to other sources of evidence for metabolic differences between the obese and the never-obese.

[O]ne woman who entered the Columbia studies [of Drs Rudolph Leibel and Michael Rosenbaum] at 230 pounds was eating about 3,000 calories to maintain that weight. Once she dropped to 190 pounds, losing 17 percent of her body weight, metabolic studies determined that she needed about 2,300 daily calories to maintain the new lower weight. That may sound like plenty, but the typical 30-year-old 190-pound woman can consume about 2,600 calories to maintain her weight — 300 more calories than the woman who dieted to get there.

Presumably 190 pounds is still obese for the “typical” 30-year-old woman. So the reduced-weight obese woman is burning fewer calories than a same-size obese woman who never reduced her weight.

So obesity followed by a malnourishing weight loss diet often creates persistent changes that hinder further weight loss, or even maintenance of the lower weight. One observation:

Muscle biopsies taken before, during and after weight loss show that once a person drops weight, their muscle fibers undergo a transformation, making them more like highly efficient “slow twitch” muscle fibers. A result is that after losing weight, your muscles burn 20 to 25 percent fewer calories during everyday activity and moderate aerobic exercise than those of a person who is naturally at the same weight.

Another observation in these patients is persistent hunger. Self-reported hunger is confirmed by observable changes in the brain:

After weight loss, when the dieter looked at food, the scans showed a bigger response in the parts of the brain associated with reward and a lower response in the areas associated with control.

In the Columbia patients, the effect is highly persistent:

How long this state lasts isn’t known, but preliminary research at Columbia suggests that for as many as six years after weight loss, the body continues to defend the old, higher weight by burning off far fewer calories than would be expected. The problem could persist indefinitely.

What Caused the Metabolic Alterations?

Are these persistent alterations to the body caused by the original obesity, or by the malnourishing diet that produced the weight loss? Dr. Leibel believes that the cause was the obesity, but that it is slow-acting – requiring an extended period of fatness:

What’s not clear from the research is whether there is a window during which we can gain weight and then lose it without creating biological backlash…. [R]esearchers don’t know how long it takes for the body to reset itself permanently to a higher weight. The good news is that it doesn’t seem to happen overnight.

“For a mouse, I know the time period is somewhere around eight months,” Leibel says. “Before that time, a fat mouse can come back to being a skinny mouse again without too much adjustment. For a human we don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s not measured in months, but in years.”

However, other researchers are exploring the possibility that it was the malnourishing weight loss diet that was at fault:

One question many researchers think about is whether losing weight more slowly would make it more sustainable than the fast weight loss often used in scientific studies. Leibel says the pace of weight loss is unlikely to make a difference, because the body’s warning system is based solely on how much fat a person loses, not how quickly he or she loses it. Even so, Proietto is now conducting a study using a slower weight-loss method and following dieters for three years instead of one.

My Theory of Obesity: Lean Tissue Feedback

I’m going to be spelling out my theory of obesity over coming months, but let me introduce here a few hypotheses which can account for the data reported in Ms. Parker-Pope’s article.

I believe the brain defends not only (or primarily) an amount of fat mass, but also the health of the body, as reflected by the quantity and quality of lean tissue.

So it is plausible to speak in terms of set points, but there are two set points: a “fat mass set point”, and a “lean tissue quality set point.” The second is dominant: Lean tissue is essential to life, while gains in fat mass may diminish fitness in some environments but will increase fitness in others and are rarely catastrophic. So the tissue-quality set point usually dominates the fat mass set point in its influence upon the brain and behavior.

Feedback to the brain about the quantity of fat mass comes to the brain through a hormone, leptin, that researchers can easily monitor; but feedback about the state of lean tissue comes through the nerves, which sense the state of tissues throughout the body. Lean tissue is too important for health, and can be degraded in so many different ways, that signals about its state cannot be entrusted to a fragile, low-bandwidth mechanism like a hormone. Lean tissue signaling uses the high-bandwidth communications of the nervous system. This feedback system is hard for researchers to monitor.

So the “fat mass set point” is visible to researchers, but the “lean tissue quality set point” is invisible. This is why researchers focus on the fat mass set point, while actual dieters, who know their own experiences are not explained by a simple fat mass set point theory, resist the idea.

Malnutrition will decrease tissue quality, triggering the brain to increase appetite (to get more nutrients) and diminish resource utilization (to conserve nutrients).

If the diet is deficient in the nutrients needed to build tissue, but rich in calories, then tissue-driven increases in appetite and reductions in nutrient utilization may (not necessarily, because the body has many resources for optimizing lean tissue and fat mass independently) lead to an increase in fat mass. Eventually a rise in leptin counterbalances the tissue-driven signals, but this occurs at a new equilibrium featuring higher fat mass, higher appetite, and reduced nutrient utilization compared to the pre-obese state.

Leptin signaling is responsible for the resistance to fat mass increases. The degree to which this resistance affects outcomes depends on the quality of lean tissue. The higher the quality of lean tissue, the less the brain needs to protect it and the more sensitive it is to leptin. The lower the quality of lean tissue, the more lean-tissue drives dominate and the more the brain ignores leptin signals (is “leptin resistant”).

Malnourishing “starvation” weight loss diets degrade lean tissue, and therefore they make the brain hungrier then it was before the weight loss, more eager to conserve resources that might be useful to lean tissue, and more leptin resistant.

However, weight loss diets that restrict calories, but improve the nourishment of lean tissue, should have the opposite effect. They should make the brain less hungry, less focused on conserving resources, and more leptin sensitive.

How much has to be eaten to provide adequate nourishment to lean tissue? In Perfect Health Diet: Weight Loss Version (Feb 1, 2011), I explored this question. Just to provide the necessary macronutrients to maintain lean tissue, I believe it’s necessary to consume at least 1200 calories per day. To optimize micronutrients as well, it’s probably necessary to supplement, even on a 1200 calorie diet. This is on a perfectly-designed diet. The less nourishing the diet, the more calories will be needed to eliminate tissue-driven hunger.

The Experiences of Perfect Health Dieters

A few Perfect Health Dieters have been using our diet for weight loss for a long enough period of time – 9-12 months – to test this hypothesis.

Jay Wright’s Weight Loss Journey (Dec 1, 2011) is a carefully chronicled account. Jay became overweight in college, obese by age 28, and had been obese for 10 years by the time he started our diet. He described his weight loss history:

I was a yo-yo dieter – I could lose weight but it always ended up even higher. I tried meal shake replacements, frozen dinners to limit calories, no meat/meat, no dairy/dairy, acid/alkaline, exercise/no exercise while dieting, no cash or credit cards in my wallet going to work so I wouldn’t stop at a fast food, punishment where I had to eat a raw tomato if I cheat (I hate raw tomatoes), and many other vegetarian leaning and mental tricks.  A pattern emerged with these diets.  I would starve with low energy for about a week or two until my will power ran out. Then, I would go eat something “bad.”  If I continued to repeat the pattern and managed to be “successful,” I stayed hungry even once I reached my goal weight.  I tried to transition to a “regular” amount of food to stop starving and just maintain but to no avail.  My weight went right back up even higher than before even without cheating on the diets.

This yo-yo pattern of hunger followed by weight regain exactly fits the experiences described in Tara Parker-Pope’s article.

However, Jay’s experience on PHD breaks the pattern. Jay went from 250 pounds to 170 pounds – his normal weight – in six months. Weight loss was steady and he experienced little hunger. He’s maintained his normal weight without regain for 3 months.

This is just as my theory predicts. PHD is a lean-tissue supporting diet, and if his lean tissue is well nourished, he should feel little hunger. If his lean tissue heals fast enough, then his lean-tissue drive will decrease faster than his leptin signaling, his equilibrium weight determined by the balance of these two drives will always be below his actual weight, and he should experience smooth weight loss. Which he did:

Jay’s experience is counter-evidence to many of the ideas put forth by the academic researchers in Ms. Parker-Pope’s article. For instance, Dr. Leibel’s theory that months of obesity create a persistent rise in set point is refuted; Jay had been obese for 10 years but his set point was quickly reset.

Here are Jay’s before and after photos:

Conclusion

I’ll be spelling out my theory of obesity in much more detail later; this is only a first installment.

But I’ll say this: I’ve been gratified by the experiences of people who have tried our diet for weight loss. Our Results page has many reports of reduced hunger, reduced food cravings, and weight loss.

Even those who have not lost weight have reported greatly reduced hunger. I think that means their lean tissue is becoming better nourished, causing the brain to feel less urgency about acquiring more nutrients.

I think this reduction in hunger is the proper first step to healthy weight loss. And I hope that in time we can gather enough case studies to prove that a nourishing diet like the Perfect Health Diet is the best approach to weight loss — and to a genuine cure for obesity.