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[C_Ella]

I am a retired research scientist.  When I decided to lose weight, I began reading the latest research on the subject.  The best, most comprehensive paper I have read is from Scientific American, June 2017 issue.  It is straightforward, easy to grasp and provides new information that really helped me to understand weight management.  I think it is fun to read up to date information when embarking on a goal as challenging as weight loss.  I am now at 50% of my weight loss goal.  Yippee! 

[WendyB]

Thanks for sharing!

[Dominique · Accepted solution]

The June 2017 edition is available here. I assume this is the article you refer to:

Since you’ve already achieved 50% of your weight loss goal (congrats for that, btw!), you must have applied the teachings from the article before reading it.

It’s often said weight loss is 80% about diet and 20% about exercising (or that it’s hard to "out-train" a poor diet), which would be in line with the above summary of the article.

[Dave001]

I'm not sure there's very much debate now about the hard science of weight management. 

A calorie deficit = loss

A calorie surfeit = gain

But now it's time for the soft sciences to help us apply that very simple equation in a healthy, happy, sustainable way.

Forming healthy habits seems to be a much slower process than forming destructive ones. 

Striking a balance in life seems harder than doing things to extreme. 

It's time to apply the scientific method to these challenges to health for the benefit of our species!

[GershonSurge]

@C_Ella,

As a retired research scientist, I think you would find this paper by Nathan Pritikin interesting. 

[MagsOnTheBeach]

I will chek the article this week.

Weight loss is not simply calories in and calories out.  I think it is 90% what is in your brain, 8% calories and 2% exercise (I made up those percentages to illustrate that you tell anyone about the calories, but it won't matter until they deal with more than the weight).

[OrionNebula]

@MagsOnTheBeach you make a good point. Biologically-speaking, it is as easy as maintaining the proper ratio of calories in to calories out (with some caveats related to medical conditions and changes to metabolism over time). However, there is obviously more to weight loss or we'd all be at our ideal weights all of our lives. A lot of it is mental. I think this is why people often have issues with weight loss or maintaining weight. It's so easy to throw that nice ratio out the window and eat too much delicious food or park your butt on the couch and binge watch your favorite TV shows, and it becomes easy to do that several days in a row. For some people (or maybe many people), weight gain is related to personal issues like depression, stress, anxiety, etc. and all of those negative factors make it so hard to stick to an eating or workout plan.

So yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Many people really need to address the underlying causes of weight gain if they want to be successful in the long run.

[C_Ella]

You're absolutely right.  I lost weight by recording calories, attempting a balanced diet and daily exercise.  So, of course, I enjoyed the Scientific American article.  Thanks for posting the reference as I hope other people will enjoy it.  By the way, I have friends in Espoo, Finland.