Why Biggest Loser Dieting Doesn’t Work (Fattening Starvation)

April: Hello everybody it’s April Perry and Jonathan Bailor and my new dog, sunny with another episode of the SANE Show. Are you so excited, Jonathan?

Jonathan: We got the trifecta here. If you are only listening to this on iTunes or whichever new magical service there is. You got to go to the SANE Solution website, click on blog and look at the video because this dog is the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

April: Oh my gosh, she’s like a teddy bear and she’s going to get bigger but I was telling Jonathan that this is actually a big SANE move, because when you get a dog you are active. You’re going outside, seriously, every 30 minutes so that she can become house trained. Which she’s doing great. But we are going to be walking more, our family is out and about, we’re engaging more. We are having so much fun, we’ve been waiting for this little girl for a long time. I was telling them, It’s like—it’s almost better than having a baby because I am in love with my four kids but I will say I didn’t have to loss any pregnancy weight and it was like a little addition to the family that’s made everything happy. I’ll set her down here and she’ll kind of hang out while we’re chatting.

Jonathan: She just yarned three times, so again, you have to check out the video because she’s over here—apparently we are not exciting enough for her because she’s just giving out this big dog yarns, which is supper cute.

April: So fun. Just had to share that fun with our SANE family out there. Today we are talking about why SANE works amazingly well. We are also talking about why The Biggest Loser doesn’t. We are not trying to call out the producers or the people who participate in The Biggest Loser because, honestly, I know that the show is kind of creative as a way to inspire people to be able to work hard and be able to make their health a priority. I understand that. But there is actually an article that came out, just recently, in the New York Times and Jonathan said that all these people are asking about it.

So today we are going to talk a little bit about—I love to maybe even start with the article and what it said. Then I would love to talk about why isn’t that working and why is SANE different. Let’s dig into the science a little bit and explain a little bit more, because from what I can tell from the messages I’m getting, people are with us on SANE. Like, Okay, I’m getting it. I’m listening. I’m trying it. I feel amazing. I feel great. There are still questions that people really want to know how they can get more of this. Does that sound good for today?

Jonathan: That sounds great. I’ve been waiting a long time to talk about this article so I am happy to have the opportunity to do it.

April: Okay, so, just as far as, initially, what the article is saying, it looked like they just—maybe you want to explain it if you know a little bit more about it than I do about the study that they did. But they just basically followed people who have been on The Biggest Loser in Season 8 and showed how even though they lost 100s of pounds that they were gaining it back and that their metabolism had slowed so much, that they honestly—I think it was 800 calories a day they could eat; or something like that. I mean ridiculously low calorie numbers they could eat, and it was just creeping back. It’s just not sustainable. So that’s just kind of the initial feeling I got when I read it. Any other things you would add?

Jonathan: What this article did really well and why I was happy to see it is, what you see on The Biggest Loser show is what starvation dieting does well. Which is cause rapid—significant weight loss, impressive weight loss, that’s television worthy, but than what happens after the show. No one pays attention to that; right? Just like you can go to Los Vegas and you can go to the roulette table and you can say, I’ll take my entire life savings, my college education, my tuition for my children, and I’m going to bet it all on red and then they spin the wheel and it lands on red and you’re a genius. Success! Cut to black, you win. But then if you bet again and you get it wrong over time that strategy will not work out, over time.

So what this article does is it actually looks at these contestants—and it doesn’t just say what—I’ve actually worked with Jay and Jennifer Jacobs from The Biggest Loser for many years now. Derek Johnson, who is actually one of the owners or co-founder of The Biggest Loser Resorts, which the non-televised results have long been—everyone gains everything back, and more and it’s sad, and it’s heartbreaking, but what this article did was not only show that but they actually dug in and explained a little bit about why. The why is what we talked about a lot, which is when you starve yourself you actually cause further damage to your metabolism than when you stop starving yourself your metabolism, instead of having just one hand tied behind its back, it now has both hands tied behind its back, and you’re pre-disposed to gaining even more weight long term.

April: I was just looking at this last couple of paragraphs, I will just read what it said there. It says, “Researchers knew that just about anyone who deliberately loses weight, even if they start at a normal weight or even under weight, will have a slower metabolism when the diet ends.” I think people know that—you read that in books all the time. They weren’t surprised to see The Biggest Loser contestants had slow metabolisms when the show ended. What shocked the researchers is what happened next. As the years went by and the numbers on the scale climbed, the contestants’ metabolisms did not recover. They became even slower and the pounds kept piling on. It was as if their bodies were intensifying their efforts to pull the contestants back to their original weight.

I just have to say someone posted this in our SANE’s family’s Facebook group and the comments that were going on and the feeling, it was honestly like, we are so grateful for SANE and it was almost a somber thing thinking about these people who are going through this starvation dieting every day. It was a beautiful and painful feeling, simultaneously, being so grateful for SANE on the one hand and feeling so sick for the people who don’t know about it. That’s just kind of initially how I heard about the article.

Jonathan: It’s incredibly heartbreaking, April, because this is how I wake up every day. We read this article and we say, Oh my gosh! This is a big deal. It was news worthy. It’s in the New York Times. If you read the Calorie Myth at the being of Chapter 4, I talk about a study that was done in 1984, which they did the exact same thing. They took people who weighed 338 pounds and they starved them down to 220 pounds and then they compared their base metabolic rate to people who naturally weighed a 138 pounds. So a 220 pound person compared to a 135 pound person, the 220 pound starvation dieter, they required 5 percent fewer calories per day than someone who weighs 82 pounds less than them. This was done in 1984.

April: Okay, so the study should have been out there. Here is a questions. When you say they require less does that mean that they are less hungry?

Jonathan: When I say require less I mean if they were to eat—because this was a clinical study so these people on average needed 2171 calories per day to maintain their weight. So, if they ate more than that their weight would start to rise so…

April: So they’re most likely hungrier than that though; right?

Jonathan: Absolutely.

April: It doesn’t mean that that satisfies them, it means that if you eat any more than this you are going to gain weight.

Jonathan: Correct. That’s a great clarification. This is a much better way to say it. Their bodies required 2171 calories per day before any other calories would be shuttled away as fat. So, to just sort of maintain their weight that’s how many calories their bodies would need. That says nothing about how many calories their brain is demanding. There is another study—not to geek out too much on the science, but The Calorie Myth book has a lot of great science in it. There was another study done, the demand to regain that weight where another starvation dieting but what they did—what was interesting about this study is that they came back a year later and they measured various hormone levels in the individuals.

They found, for example, that the hormone levels tied to hunger were supper elevated. These individuals were not only, sort of pre-programmed—it’s like their body was fighting harder than before the weight loss, and you say that’s crazy talk unless you’re familiar with the science backing SANE, which is, well yeah, we have a set point weight and until we heal the system by starving ourselves we actually further compromise the system and then our brain, our hormones, and our gut are going to do everything in their power to take us back to that elevated set point weight and potentially even higher. Because we have broken the system down further.

April: This is why I love sane and because when I first heard you on a podcast and you starting explaining this, logically, it finally made sense. I didn’t need to starve. I need to heal my metabolism. I need to eat nutritious foods. That’s it was possible. The thing was, I didn’t know it was possible. But I want to share, briefly, a testimonial that came with this question, asking for you to comment on this New York Times article about The Biggest Loser. She said, My first weight loss journey was similar to The Biggest Loser. Way less drastic, but she said, I think I’m paying for it a bit now. I had all The Biggest Loser books. The Biggest Loser Calorie Counting Journals, workout videos, and watched most of their shows. I think a lot of America can say this.

I remember my son, Spenser, he was five and he said, When I get older I want to be really fat so I can be on The Biggest Loser. That was a goal he set for himself because he thought it looked exciting, what they were doing. So, worldwide, this is an issue. But here is what she said, Now that I’m SANE I know what it feels like to be able to eat whenever I am hungry. I realize I know longer binge eat, except on veggies so the quilt is gone. Getting rid of sugar has been relatively painless, and it is something that I think I can stick to mostly. I struggle with time preparing food but I think it’s worth it. I feel proud of the way I eat and I know I am setting a good example for my family. I hope that my daughter doesn’t have to go through all the yo-yo diets that I did in my early life.

Okay, Jonathan, you got to feel great. Knowing that you’re making this huge impact on these people’s lives.

Jonathan: I do. I love hearing those stories. But here’s my flaw. Is every time I hear one of those stories, I say, Oh my goodness, we need to—we have to do more. It’s not enough. Too many other people continue to struggle and especially—the thing, which is really not fun to talk about is the more deeply we understand the metabolic consequences of starvation dieting, the more we understand—it’s more analogous—if you take a piece of fragile china, I mean your body is beautiful, delicate, very intricate, and you take the china vase and you drop it off the counter and it shatters all over the floor. You damage it. I mean, yeah, you can put it back together but it might have some cracks, crevices, and it’s never going to quite look the same.

What we’re starting to understand more and more is that we love to have the concept that, I’ll make up for it later, or it’s okay it’s just temporary. When we do these extreme starvation diets or these detox, crazy cleanse things, we are learning know that there is some damage there that’s really long lasting, and yes we can recover from it but it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s a little bit more analogous to—yeah, definitely stop smoking and if you, with proper exercise and proper diet, can reverse the damage that’s been done to your lungs, but on some level we know smoking is so scary, because it’s going to do some damage that we may not be able to completely fix in the future.

So, when we see our friends, and family, and people we care about falling victim to these starvation dieting tactics—when we start to understand that there’s a strong possibility that they are permanently pre-deposing themselves to struggle even more for the rest of their lives. You want to just say—just like there are warning labels on cigarettes, I almost want Weight Watches packaged meals to have a warning label on them, which is—smoking may cause birth defects—eating this may cause long term weight gain and depression. Because that’s what it does.

April: That’s why I am recording with you, and the people who are here listening to the podcast, we depend on you to help spread the word. Help to get this out to people. Because this isn’t something like, Oh, we’re trying to show a new SANE diet. Jonathan came up with this new diet. It’s not like that at all. It’s like, It’s time to heal all of the people who have been victims of misinformation, and it’s not your fault if you try to count calories. My mom did it. I did it. My children did it. That’s how we thought we were supposed to do it.

If I had known that I was creating long term and potentially damaging my body, I would never have counted my calories, but I thought I was doing something good. I thought that I was—people were congratulating me for it and I was feeling accomplished. So I thing that we need to, first of all acknowledge that those who are trying to starve themselves typically think that they are doing something right. That just simply isn’t true. But SANE is right. We’re going to talk about why it is and that this is why I love to talk a little bit about the science behind the SANE.

I’ll kind of clarify the question. This came in from the same individual who shared The Biggest Loser Article. But she said, I need it explained to me so that it sticks into my subconscious, because the idea of the clogged sink, I need to understand it. Some people said, Well, you’re losing weight on SANE because when you eat those vegetables you’re consuming less calories. So, she’s like, Is that it. I’m just eating so many vegetables that my calories are lower, or how are we doing damage when we restrict our diets. Then I love this questions. Would we damage our bodies if we ate SANEly but just didn’t eat enough SANE foods and didn’t get enough calories? What’s the process our bodies are going through? Okay, Jonathan, here you go.

Jonathan: There are two very important factors to keep in mind here. One is, energy or calories, and then there is—to simplify things because we don’t have all day and it could take all day to explain is everything else that’s essential for human life. So, calories, energy is essential for human life; right? You don’t eat calories you starve to death and you die. So they are an essential nutrient. Then you have things like vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals; everything else you need to live. Now, if you don’t eat enough essential vitamins and minerals you get sick, that’s why they’re called essential. But if you don’t eat enough vitamins and minerals and things like that you will also experience other deceases. One of them is called obesity, another one is called diabetes, and another one is called heart decease.

We don’t think about them that way but that’s what happens. These are deceases, which are caused by a breakdown in the way your body works. So, if you are not taking in enough essential nutrition you will get deceases and your life won’t go as well as you would like it to. And if you are not taking in enough energy your body will start to shut down and you will experience bad results. Now, you may burn off some stored energy in the short term that’ the fat loss, but you’re not providing your body with enough essential nutrition so you’re actually building up a decease state underneath the surface.

To answer the questions of, Well, when I eat SANEly I accidently only ate 1600 calories per day. Well, first of all let’s acknowledge the fact that if you become completely full and satisfied taking in a huge amount of essential nutrition and then your body automatically says, Hmm, I have a hundred thousand calories already stored inside me, in terms of body fat, so I’m going to just start burning that, and because I’m burning that for energy I’m going to tell the brain, Hey, you don’t need to eat as many calories because I’ve already got some stored inside me. That’s like a total different dynamic then starving yourself. Because you’re not actually starving yourself, you’re still eating but it’s just coming off your hips rather than passing through your lips.

You do experience what’s called a spontaneous reduction of caloric intake when you go SANE but it’s not because you’re hungry, it’s not because you’re starving yourself, it’s because your body is reregulating your appetite. Because think about it, the other 100 pounds of excess fat on your body—that’s like 350,000 calories already inside you. Here is the real questions to ask. Why is someone who has 350,000 inside them already every hungry? So yes, you are eating fewer calories through your month, and yes you do need to restore your body’s ability to metabolize calories that are stored within it, but that doesn’t happen unless you take in the nutrition necessary, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, things like that, to heal your body.

To resensitize those neurotransmitters, those hormones, those digestive components of your body to say, Look, reregulate my appetite, start to heal myself, and yes, of course, your appetite will go down, because if you’re eating higher satiety foods, if you’re eating foods that are three times as filling, neurologically and physiologically, well then, of course, it takes way more Pringles by their own admission to make you feel full then it does if you eat Salmon. We know that doesn’t mean that you’re starving yourself. It means that you’re eating foods that satisfy you faster. So, no one is saying calories don’t matter. No one is saying that eating 5000 calories will help you lose weight. What we are saying is that it’s a combination—it’s actually not a combination, it’s using food quality to restore your body’s ability to manage calorie quantity automatically. That’s the distinction.

April: Okay, I think that explains it really well for me. As I found when I was eating a ton more vegetables and that I was filling myself up and eating this nutrition dense food that was filling me up that I didn’t even think about—somethings I wonder how many calories am I eating? Should I count them again just to check? I have too many things that I need to think about I don’t want to worry about calories anymore. But I love that you’re showing us how we can help our body learn to burn excess fat because it now has this high quality food inside of it so all its needs are met.

Jonathan: That’s exactly right. Let me answer the two other, sort of very specific questions that were written in here. Would we damage our body if we ate SANEly but just didn’t eat enough SANE foods and didn’t get enough calories? So here’s one way to think about this. If you don’t eat enough Vitamin C then yes your body has been damaged. But we know that.

April: Let’s say I ate just two SANE meals a day. Let’s say I wasn’t actually getting to the 10 servings of vegetables, maybe I had just a couple of servings of vegetable, I ate all SANE foods but just a little bit in the morning and a little bit at night. Then that would be damaging?

Jonathan: I am going to answer that questions in a way that hopefully makes it—this isn’t what I think, this is what we would all agree with. Having a nutrient deficiency is bad. That’s why people take multivitamins. Yes, if you’re not eating enough nutrition, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids—I didn’t say calories, because your body can sometimes supplement—you can store calories and burn them off. Your body doesn’t hoard Vitamin C for when it runs out it can then use some of its own. So that’s why eating enough non-starchy vegetable and nutrient dense protein is essential, and you can’t, you can’t overeat those things. You could never eat 3000 calories of non-starchy vegetables and nutrient dense proteins, your stomach would explode.

April: Okay. So have we gone through all those questions? We want to make sure that we eat enough that we’re full. We want to make sure that we’re getting enough nutrition. I think that makes sense to me. So, as far as scientifically what our bodies are going through, it’s like when we go more SANE, at six months, one year, one and a half year, that’s just metabolism continuing to heal itself. Is that how you would explain it?

Jonathan: Yes, there is another way a part of the paragraph that accounts for this questions is, that some people told me you’re just losing weight because when you eat vegetable you’re consuming less calories, but is it more than that. Why exactly—it’s a great question and there’s a book call The Calorie Myth that goes deep into the science of exactly how this works. And then it’s got 1300 scientific references that will explain the biomechanics of every aspect of it. So, unfortunately, we can’t get into that in this show but I’ve got a whole lot more information if you’re interested.

April: So one of the things—so Sunny has now fallen asleep at my feet. One of the things that I think has been interesting is that when we got this dog there’s specific food that we’re supposed to feed to her. There’s specific food we’re not supposed to feed to her. You give her the food that her body needs to grow and thrive and she regulates it; right? She knows when to go to her bowl. She knows when she’s hungry. She’s doing a great job growing and doing amazingly well. I think that when we feed ourselves food that was designed for humans, right, we’re not eating all these corn syrups and all the sugar and processed nonsense, as you would call it. When we eat the food that’s right for our bodies and we focus on the quality, it’s amazing to see what happens naturally.

You’ve just completely transformed the way that I look at this. I had no idea. I didn’t know that it was possible to never be hungry. To eat wonderful food that I enjoy and to be able to have a body I feel good about. That when I wake up in the morning I’m not thinking about my calories. I’m not feeling depressed if I haven’t gone out and gone running every day. I feel so good and so happy and I feel like I could be normal. Just being able to enjoy my life, that’s what SANE has done for me. Next action what would you suggest, Jonathan.

Jonathan: I going to give, sort of a joking next action and a serious next action. Because you just said words that I can’t top. Those are beautiful words. The serious next action is to, if at all possible, whenever you think of taking any lifestyle change, independent of whether it has anything to do with eating or exercise. Say is what I’m going to do is something I can keep up for the long term because as we are seeing here for The Biggest Loser short-term success can sometimes lead to long-term failure. So just ask yourself that question.

The funny, joking next action is if you want to know the hard core mechanisms of why eating nutritious food until you’re full heals your body go to Google and type in negative adiposity feedback look. Type in metabolic dysregulation, and type in homeostatic regulation of weight. Do those three search terms and enjoy. Because you’re going to get a bunch of scientific papers that are going to make you happy, and probably really bored. But there is a lot of great information out there.

April: Alright. Wonder, Jonathan. Thank you so much and thank you for joining us at the SANE Show. Please share SANE. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Let’s help reshape the way our society views dieting and health and food. Have a wonderful day and remember to stay SANE.