Reply to comment

Our conversation about the ineffectiveness of dieting raised some questions for me, mostly chemical.  A UCLA study exposed the following findings on dieting after noticing the strange trend that existing research rarely followed up on dieters beyond six months:

" 'We found that the average percentage of people who gained back more weight than they lost on diets was 41% (...) In each of the studies, a third to two-thirds of the subjects gained back more weight than they lost.'

Does this mean that most of the people in the studies actually lost weight and kept it off? No, Mann says.

'This is actually bleaker than it seems -- even though most people would find that 41% number to be pretty depressing," she says. 'We have strong reasons to feel that this number underrepresents the true number of participants who gained back more weight than they lost.""

This seems to be a mostly chemical phenomenon.  According to LiveScience, we're "stuck with" the amount of fat cells in our bodies by the time we're 20 years old, and that number is largely due to our childhood exercise and diet routines.  But maybe there's hope; because there's a function in the body that generates new fat cells when one dies, if scientists can figure out a way to cease this turnover, we could actually "reduce fat-cell number in adults."