What is your evidence that losing fat is very good for people?
I doubt there is any direct evidence since it’s pretty unusual for people to lose weight and keep it off for at least 5 years. And probably a lot of those people adopted lifestyle changes which would have been very good for them regardless of whether they lost the weight or not.
Still, I think it’s reasonable to believe that losing fat and keeping it off (assuming that you were obese to begin with) is a healthy thing for a couple reasons. First, one can analogize obesity to cigarette smoking. Evidently, both things cause harm to your body. But it’s well known that if you quit smoking, over time the excess health risks due to smoking go down and after 15 or 20 years your risks are pretty close to those of the never-smoked population. Common sense says that it should work in a similar manner for weight loss.
Second, I believe that there is research showing that objective measures of metabolic health such as cholesterol levels; blood sugar levels; and blood pressure tend to improve in obese people who lose weight. Again, this is suggestive that losing fat is good. This is also consistent with common sense. If excess fat increases your risk of health problems, then losing that fat ought to reduce those risks.
By the way, here is an excerpt from the blog of an obesity researcher:
First, the data on yo-yo diets, otherwise known as weight cycling. Looking at the most recent and robust data, one set from than Cancer Prevention Study II Nutrition Cohort which followed 55,983 men and 66,655 women from 1992-2008, and the other set from the Nurses Health Study which followed 44,882 women from 1972-1994, neither demonstrated any relationship between weight cycling and mortality. Other studies have exonerated weight cycling from increasing the risk of hypertension, and type 2 diabetes, and there’s a mixed bag of studies suggesting both protective and causal effects of weight cycling on various forms of cancer.
When you think about it, there’s some sense to this. It’s reasonably to hypothesize that the human body is adapted to weight cycling (at least to some degree).
I doubt there is any direct evidence since it’s pretty unusual for people to lose weight and keep it off for at least 5 years. And probably a lot of those people adopted lifestyle changes which would have been very good for them regardless of whether they lost the weight or not.
Still, I think it’s reasonable to believe that losing fat and keeping it off (assuming that you were obese to begin with) is a healthy thing for a couple reasons. First, one can analogize obesity to cigarette smoking. Evidently, both things cause harm to your body. But it’s well known that if you quit smoking, over time the excess health risks due to smoking go down and after 15 or 20 years your risks are pretty close to those of the never-smoked population. Common sense says that it should work in a similar manner for weight loss.
Second, I believe that there is research showing that objective measures of metabolic health such as cholesterol levels; blood sugar levels; and blood pressure tend to improve in obese people who lose weight. Again, this is suggestive that losing fat is good. This is also consistent with common sense. If excess fat increases your risk of health problems, then losing that fat ought to reduce those risks.
However, if very few people keep the fat off, then the effects of regaining it also need to be considered.
By the way, here is an excerpt from the blog of an obesity researcher:
http://www.weightymatters.ca/2012/03/why-haes-may-never-go-mainstream.html
When you think about it, there’s some sense to this. It’s reasonably to hypothesize that the human body is adapted to weight cycling (at least to some degree).
Yes, I completely agree.