Weight Loss

What's the best way to lose weight - load up on proteins and cut carbohydrates? Keep the good carbs and just trim fats? Or build "healthful" fats into your diet? Scientists now say it doesn't matter as long as you consume fewer calories. A new study in The New England Journal of Medicine tested four different diets and found that participants lost similar amounts of weight on each of them. In the extensive two-year study, investigators randomly assigned more than 800 overweight participants to follow one of four heart-healthy diets, each emphasizing a different combination of carbohydrates, protein and fat. All replaced saturated with unsaturated fat and emphasized whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

Growing numbers of obese people are opting for weight-loss surgery - once a risky last-resort procedure for the very fat - and new research suggests it is saving lives. Two studies being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine show that patients who choose surgery to drop their extra pounds can restore some of the life expectancy that obesity shortens. One of the studies, on American patients, shows that seven years after their gastric bypass operations, death from diabetes decreased 92 percent, from cancer 60 percent and from coronary artery disease 56 percent.

Eat what you want - just don't eat too much of it. That may be fine advice, but it's easier said than done. Now a Canadian scientist has conducted a simple study to see whether a special set of dishes can help dieters toe the line. In the first clinical trial on "portion control plates," Sue Pedersen, an endocrinologist at the University of Calgary, had 65 subjects use a specially designed plate and bowl to limit their calorie intake for part of each day. Another 65 people who didn't use the dishes served as a control.

Diets that focus on weight loss don't work.If you're among the 99 percent of women who are trying to get or stay thin, you already know this. But it's one thing to deduce it from your own bitter experience, quite another to have it confirmed, in unequivocal terms, by an obesity researcher.His name is Michael Lowe. Officially, he's a psychology professor at MCP Hahnemann University in Philadelphia. His specialty: dieting behavior. In other words, he makes his living studying how folks react to victory and defeat in the battle of the bulge.

Q. I just finished reading your column on helping a sad or depressed child. My 2-year-old grandson shows many of the symptoms you described. Since his sister was born last December, he has lost a lot of weight, experiences frequent fatigue and doesn't seem interested in physical activity -- but he likes reading, videos and quiet activities.He is under the care of pediatric specialists who are doing tests to rule out physical causes of his weight loss. But if the root of this is psychological, how is it treated?

SINCE MOST OF YOU have failed to notice, I thought I would take this opportunity to mention that I have lost 10 pounds.My doctor noticed. During a recent office visit, she expressed her satisfaction and said, "Would you puh-leeze write something about this?"She wants me to write about how I did it. About how it was not easy, but it was simple: Cut calories, watch out for fat and exercise more. She wants me to say that it is a slow and unremarkable process; a pound a week is top speed for weight loss.

1903: President William Howard Taft, at 355 pounds, gets stuck in the White House bathtub. He vows to reduce.1907: Americans are introduced to the calorie and urged to keep count of how many they consume. "Nobody loves a fat man," says actor Roscoe "Fattie" Arbuckle in "The Round-Up." Actress Lillian Russell, for years the nation's pinup girl at nearly 200 pounds, begins dieting and bicycling.1910: The first diet pills are prescribed; among other ingredients, they contain caffeine, arsenic and strychnine.

Some golfers head into major championships hoping to make history. Tom Lehman goes into the 98th U.S. Open later this week at the Olympic Club in San Francisco hoping to find one place in the record books -- and avoid another.In each of the previous three years, Lehman has entered the final round of the Open with at least a share of the lead. It is a feat that has been accomplished by only one other player. The legendary Bobby Jones did it between 1928 and 1930, winning twice.Lehman has taken an 0-for at the Open.

SAO SEBASTIAO, Brazil - The average weight loss among the crew of Chessie Racing during their 26 days at sea between Auckland, New Zealand, and this sweltering port was 6.6 pounds.Jerry Kirby, 42, a bowman on the 60-foot racer, lost the most, weighing in here 16 pounds lighter than when he set out on the 6,670-mile Leg 5 of the nine-leg Whitbread Round the World Race.For several days, Kirby, who has one of the most strenuous jobs on the boat, handling foresails, was without his partner after Annapolis' Greg Gendell, 29, sustained a gash in his leg to the bone when a wave washed him into the mast.

Are there any surgical treatments for obesity?Over the years a number of surgical procedures have been used to treat obesity either by restricting the intake of food or by reducing its absorption from the intestine.One of the simplest methods is to wire the jaws shut so that the diet is limited to liquids taken through a straw. Although this approach generally leads to weight loss (the author of this column managed to gain weight when his jaws were wired shut for a broken jaw), weight is usually regained as soon as the wires are removed.

Americans spend millions each year searching for the right diet or exercise program - all in an effort to shed some fat. But there's one type of fat that most would probably like to hold on to: brown fat. Instead of storing excess energy from food in lumps and bumps throughout the body - like its well-known sister, white fat - brown fat helps burn incoming calories. Because its primary purpose is temperature regulation, brown fat cells are packed with mitochondria, the powerhouses of cells.

What's the best way to lose weight - load up on proteins and cut carbohydrates? Keep the good carbs and just trim fats? Or build "healthful" fats into your diet? Scientists now say it doesn't matter as long as you consume fewer calories. A new study in The New England Journal of Medicine tested four different diets and found that participants lost similar amounts of weight on each of them. In the extensive two-year study, investigators randomly assigned more than 800 overweight participants to follow one of four heart-healthy diets, each emphasizing a different combination of carbohydrates, protein and fat. All replaced saturated with unsaturated fat and emphasized whole grains, fruits and vegetables.

For many people, the start of the new year means the start of a new diet. But most people will ultimately fail in their efforts to lose weight, says Dr. Lawrence J. Cheskin, founder and director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center. A New Year's resolution to lose weight is a good step, according to Cheskin, associate professor of international health (human nutrition) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. But it's simply the first step in what must be a life-changing strategy to shed pounds and keep them off. What is the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center?

In a nation struggling with soaring obesity rates, there is no gimmick that Americans haven't tried to lose weight. But what if someone paid you to keep the pounds off? Could it work? New research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has found that cash could be the ultimate incentive in weight loss. In a study of 57 people seeking to lose weight over four months, those who were paid to shed pounds lost more than those who were not. The study, released yesterday in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is based on a well-known premise in psychology: Positive reinforcement can help people change their behavior.

Exercise Hour workout daily halts weight gain, study says That 30 minutes of daily exercise you think you're supposed to do to keep weight off? You need to step it up, people. As much as twice that amount may be needed to lose weight and keep it off. A recent study found that overweight and obese women needed to exercise about an hour a day, five days a week to sustain weight loss. The findings bolster what some health experts - and those who have lost weight and kept it off - have been saying for years: Copious amounts of exercise and adherence to a strict diet are necessary to take off the pounds and keep them at bay. The women who exercised more and stuck to their diets kept off a 10 percent weight loss over two years, compared with others who maintained only 5 percent.

It's accepted wisdom that most people who lose weight through dieting will gain it back. Salads and exercise will give way to pizzas and television - and all the weight they tried so hard to lose. Must that be so? Researchers collaborating in the largest study yet of weight-loss maintenance say the news isn't quite that grim. But they concede it could be years before anyone finds a dependable way to keep weight off. The topic looms especially large in light of an obesity epidemic linked to rising rates of diabetes.

Growing numbers of obese people are opting for weight-loss surgery - once a risky last-resort procedure for the very fat - and new research suggests it is saving lives. Two studies being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine show that patients who choose surgery to drop their extra pounds can restore some of the life expectancy that obesity shortens. One of the studies, on American patients, shows that seven years after their gastric bypass operations, death from diabetes decreased 92 percent, from cancer 60 percent and from coronary artery disease 56 percent.

Eat what you want - just don't eat too much of it. That may be fine advice, but it's easier said than done. Now a Canadian scientist has conducted a simple study to see whether a special set of dishes can help dieters toe the line. In the first clinical trial on "portion control plates," Sue Pedersen, an endocrinologist at the University of Calgary, had 65 subjects use a specially designed plate and bowl to limit their calorie intake for part of each day. Another 65 people who didn't use the dishes served as a control.

Loralie Thomas walked the manicured grounds of the city's Federal Hill Park on Tuesday and delighted in seeing so many families enjoying the sunny outdoors. She and her husband look forward to starting their own family someday, but for now, that's out of the question. Her doctor recently deemed her too fat to bear children. Those words were enough for the formerly 241-pound Chicago resident to get off the dieting roller coaster and switch to the new, exciting way to lose weight: reality television.

For a while, Chuck Duncan was a big loser. After eight months on a low-carbohydrate diet, he'd shed nearly a quarter of his body weight and was down to a lean, mean 178 pounds. Then, like a yo-yo, his weight shot back up. Now, a year after starting the diet, he has regained all but a few of the 50 pounds he lost. "Once you start cheating it's a slippery slope," said Duncan, 44, a public television producer from Dundalk. "You get lazy and it starts coming back." Duncan's dietary recidivism is a common tale - and now it has some solid scientific credence, thanks to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.