I'd be interested in seeing the source.
Here's a study on long term hormonal adaptations to calorie restriction, including the leptin response and the relationship between reduction of adiposal tissue and hunger signals in the hypothalamus:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1105816
Here's an article on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was done in the 1950s. We have literally known for sixty years that calorie restriction causes food obsession, depression and binging.
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/10/hunger.aspx
Here's an article on a 55-year study by the British Medical Research Council that found almost every participant gained weight despite any attempt to lose weight over the course of the study:
http://www.rxpgnews.com/obesity/Overweight-people-will-stay-that-way-for-ever_524153.shtml
Unfortunately both that final study and the meta analysis I mentioned in my post are behind academic paywalls, but you get the idea.
And here's a study on the impact on resting metabolic rate and circulating leptin of weight loss including calorie restriction:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25236175
That's not the study I had in mind, but it was the best I could do outside of paywall.
No. There's a phenomenon I'd call the New Year's resolution gym goers. After New Year's you always see about twice the amount of people in the gym than you usually do. After about two weeks you don't usually see any of them anymore. I have no reason to think it's any different for people that go on a diet. I don't think the circumstance is unlikely at all. It's easy to start eating healthy and exercising, it's much harder to make that a lifestyle change.
I'm certainly not denying that those people exist, but they're not who I'm talking about. The 95% figure is people who
succeed at losing weight through exercise/diet/"lifestyle change" and then gain back the weight. That is all of those people who have managed to make the lifestyle changed effectively enough to lose a measurable amount of weight. That can't all be accounted for in just "giving up".
Again, sources? I have never in my life heard of calorie restriction being unsustainable and causing permanent changes in the body that promote weight gain. I'm sorry but that sounds like total B.S.
Hunger hormones are a thing. Metabolic rate is a thing. We've had this evolutionary response to fight starvation since before we were mammals. See studies above.
Well it's not exactly some crazy secret that a lot of people get on a diet but end up failing and falling back into their previous unhealthy lifestyles. It's really no different than any other addiction, this one just happens to be food. For someone that's eaten unhealthily their whole life it is going to take tremendous willpower to change. That's why I think diets are actually stupid in the first place because the emphasis really needs to be in a sustainable lifestyle change.
Except that not all fat people overeat, and not all overeaters are fat? Weight gain and loss is a really complicated series of interactions between lots of different bodily systems. We still don't really understand how it works.