After ‘The Biggest Loser,’ Their Bodies Fought to Regain Weight

You could of course. It's just easier to cut 50% for a couple of months than 10% for years because the results come faster, and so does the motivation to keep it up.

Also, counting calories is not really an exact science, so you want to make sure you stay way below your daily goal, just in case the lunch had 300 calories more than you calculated. This is much easier with lower calorie-goals.

For me a good pace was 1 kg a week, which I could do by sticking to 2000 calories. Most weeks it lost only 0.5 kg but there's still some progress. Luckily, maintaining my weight works just fine with a daily intake of ~3000 cal.

Regarding quick-fixes: You still have to keep tracking your intake long after you reached your goal of course, otherwise the old eating habits will come back slowly but surely. I think this is where most "diets" fail: They hold your hand for a few months, when you need them to do so for the rest of your life.

> muscle requires 30 calories/pound

There's a unit of time missing there. You probably mean "per day" (though 50 calories/pound/day is the more commonly quoted, and apparently, wrong number.) The places I can find that seem to actually be linked to some kind of reasonable source seem to have 5-10 calories per pound per day to maintain muscle.

I'm curious about how the metabolic rate of these former contestants is determined. Are they confined to a lab where their dietary intake and physical activity can be accurately measured for an extended period of time? Probably not. My best guess is that the subjects being studied are asked to keep food and activity journals and then these, plus their weight, is used to calculate their metabolic rate.

I've experimented with keeping a food journal in the past, and it's exceptionally difficult to keep track of everything you eat without this extra work impacting your food choices. e.g. The chore of writing stuff down might prevent me from casually snagging a handful of nuts on my way through the kitchen, and consciousness about how it will look in the journal might make me pass on those chips. Even ignoring these problems, it takes a lot of effort to produce even remotely useful data. e.g. "I ate a pear." is actually pretty vague. Breed, size, and ripeness all have a pretty big impact on the nutrients you'll get from that pear. You need to weigh everything as a bare minimum. Also, you need to keep the journal all of the time, because if you keep it for just a week or two that sample likely won't be very representative of your normal habits.

Likewise, activities are hard to keep track of. With a fairly standard ergometer (such as a Concept2 rower) you can get a reasonable measure of activity level in a workout. Lifting weights, running, walking, etc. are all much, much vaguer. 30 minutes of "moderate jogging" means different things to different people. Most people are likely to overestimate or habitually pad their activities.

So, you have a really vague, spitballed idea of what these people are eating and doing, combined with weight gain. Are their metabolisms really slower than expected, or is there a systematic error common to these people in that, after a period of extreme privation (i.e. the competition) in which some of them lost more than a pound a day, they are now underestimating their food intake and overestimating their activity levels?

How much can basal human metabolism really vary anyways? If humans can get by on substantially fewer calories, why don't we all typically do this? Where does all the extra energy normal people inefficiently burn off go?

While doctors don't always know the most about a diet there is also the aspect of actually following the diet. People suck at following diets so giving one that is as little adjustment from a normal diet as possible might increase compliance and will result in predictable insulin levels.

If you pick a very strict diet then people drop the diet completely or cheat all the time, resulting in uneven insulin levels.

It is like inflammatory bowel disease. Many doctors rarely prescribe rectal medication for long term use even if it might be more effective than alternatives just because it is difficult enough to get people to take their pills.

But I do think diet suggestions will change more in the future when it comes to diabetes.

> It's not that nobody does them, it's just really hard to get a conclusive result that applies to everyone.

Exactly. The research is starting to show that individual reactions vary dramatically.