Lose It Forever: The 6 Habits of Successful Weight Losers from the National Weight Control Registry

by Jason R. Karp

Overview

Discover how to lose weight by learning what’s worked for others across America.

Don’t rely on your neighbor’s latest gym stories or diet fad. Lose It Forever is a cutting-edge self-help book based on data from the National Weight Control Registry. Inside, you’ll learn what’s worked for the thousands of others trying to lose weight fast—and keep it there.

Despite the overflowing bookshelves of dieting tips and health books, the United States remains the most overweight country in the world. Most people who work towards successful fat loss just gain weight back a few weeks later. And frankly, many of us are just always hungry or overeating. So, what’s unique about those who succeed? The answer is buried deep in the archives at the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center, home to the largest study of successful long-term weight loss maintenance.

?The National Weight Control Registry includes data from more than ten-thousand individuals about their weight, nutrition and fitness habits, and weight management strategies. This is where Jason Karp comes in—a nationally-certified coach, medical doctor devoted to healthy living, and the founder of the REVO2LUTION RUNNING™ certification program. In his unique food book, he boils data down into actionable tips and wellness strategies for your everyday life. Inside, you’ll learn that not all carbs are bad, eating can increase energy, and maintainable ways to:

• Monitor your fats, carbohydrates, and protein
• Exercise (a lot!) daily
• Control your calorie intake with diets that work

Praise for Lose It Forever

“A must-read primer for anyone who has worked hard to lose weight and wants to keep it off. [Jason’s] extensive data, research, and six practical habits make weight loss attainable. As a fellow fitness professional, it’s always a pleasure to refer clients to other colleagues, such as Jason, who can bring a different perspective to getting fit and healthy.” —Tamilee Webb, MA, star of Buns of Steel

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642503470
Publisher:	Mango Media
Publication date:	10/28/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	163
Sales rank:	385,476
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

The passion that Jason found as a kid for the science of athletic performance (one of his earliest questions was how baseball pitchers throw curveballs) placed him on a yellow brick road that he still follows all these years later as a coach, exercise physiologist, author, speaker, and creator of the REVO2LUTION RUNNING™ certification program for coaches and fitness professionals around the world.

A prolific writer, Jason is the author of eight books: The Inner Runner, Run Your Fat Off, 14-Minute Metabolic Workouts, Running a Marathon For Dummies, Running for Women, 101 Winning Racing Strategies for Runners, 101 Developmental Concepts & Workouts for Cross Country Runners, and How to Survive Your PhD. He also served as senior editor for Active Network and has been an instructor for USA Track & Field’s level 3 coaching certification and for coaching camps at the U.S. Olympic Training Center.

Dr. Karp is a USA Track & Field nationally certified coach, has been sponsored by PowerBar and Brooks, and was a member of the silver-medal winning United States masters team at the 2013 World Maccabiah Games in Israel.

For his work and contributions to his industry, Jason was awarded the 2011 IDEA Personal Trainer of the Year (the fitness industry’s highest award) and was honored with the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, & Nutrition Community Leadership Award in 2014.

Dr. Karp received his PhD in exercise physiology with a physiology minor from Indiana University in 2007, his master’s degree in kinesiology from the University of Calgary in 1997, and his bachelor’s degree in exercise and sport science with an English minor from Penn State University in 1995. His research has been published in the scientific journals Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, and International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance.

Read an Excerpt

From the book:

Why do successful weight losers exercise so much? Partly because it takes a lot of exercise to prevent a return to previous weight, and partly because exercise has become a habit of this population. Ninety-two percent of NWCR members exercise at home, 40.3 percent exercise regularly with a friend, and 31.3 percent exercise in a group. Walking, running, cycling, weightlifting, aerobics classes, and stair climbing are the most common physical activities. Walking is the most popular, with 76.6 percent of NWCR members doing so as their preferred mode of exercise. Those walkers average more than 11,000 steps per day. Weight training has become more popular over the years, with 37.0 percent of men and 36.6 percent of women who enrolled in the registry from 2001 to 2004 doing it compared to 25.3 of men and 22.9 percent of women who enrolled from 1993 to 1996. All these data have led the founders of the NWCR to conclude that the optimal amount of exercise to maintain weight loss is about one hour per day or, in terms of caloric expenditure, 2,500 to 3,000 calories per week.

Although diet usually gets more attention in conversations on weight loss and maintenance, very few successful weight losers in the NWCR use diet alone to lose weight. Only nine percent of these successful weight losers, who were a whopping ten BMI units lower than their pre-weight loss BMI at the time they entered the NWCR (decreasing from 35 to 25 kg/m²), said they maintained their weight loss (which averaged 66 pounds for 5½ years) without regular exercise. It seems that only some successful weight losers can maintain their weight without much exercise. Among these people are those who lose weight through bariatric surgery. Surgical weight losers are much less physically active than non-surgical weight losers, burning only half as many calories per week (1,504 vs. 2,985 calories per week, respectively). (Surgical weight losers engage in different behaviors to maintain their lost weight than the rest of the NWCR. In addition to exercising much less and consuming less carbohydrate and more fat, they eat fast food more frequently and eat breakfast less frequently than non-surgical weight losers.) While changes to your nutritional habits—most crucial of which is how many calories you consume every day—have the bigger impact on getting your weight off, exercise has the bigger impact on keeping it off and making you a successful weight loser.

In the days of “clean eating” and low-carb, vegan, paleo, gluten-free, keto, dairy-free, juice-cleanse diets, it’s become trendy to claim that diet is everything. Indeed, most fitness trainers claim that physical appearance and body weight are eighty percent nutrition and twenty percent exercise and that “abs are made in the kitchen.” However, there is no scientific evidence to back up that claim. Exactly how much of a person’s physique is due to nutrition, how much is due to exercise, and how much is due to genetics is difficult to determine. (Research on identical twins raised apart in different environments has shown that genetics has a large influence on body weight.) It’s presumptuous to think that the specific foods you eat are more important to your cosmetics, fitness, and health than are exercise and genetics. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get my sculpted legs from eating kale salads; I got them from running six days per week for 36 years. And so it is for other physically active people as well. Athletes, bodybuilders, and dancers all do a considerable amount of physical training to look and perform the way they do. The sculpted legs of runners and upper bodies of fitness magazine models didn’t get that way just by eating fruits and vegetables. If we take two people, and one eats perfectly clean with a nutrient-dense diet and no processed foods but doesn’t exercise much, and the other works out in the gym every day but has a mediocre diet with the occasional chocolate chip cookie, who is going to look better and be fitter? Obviously, the latter.

A decrease in physical activity is a major reason why people gain weight. Think of your high school’s star quarterback who has a big belly at middle age. How many people at age thirty or forty or fifty weigh the same as they did in high school? The NWCR has shown that individuals who regain weight within one year show marked decreases in physical activity of more than 800 calories per week, with no change in overall calorie intake. That means that weight losers are regaining their weight not because they start eating more, but because they start exercising less. This is a major finding of the NWCR—a large part of regaining weight after losing it is due to the inability to maintain exercise habits for the long term.

Table of Contents

Warm-Up 8

Introduction 16

Habit 1 Live with Intention 34

Habit 2 Control Yourself 54

Habit 3 Control Calories 78

Habit 4 Eat a Low-Fat, High-Carbohydrate Diet 98

Habit 5 Eat Breakfast 118

Habit 6 Exercise (a Lot) Every Day 132

Epilogue 156

Acknowledgments 158

Endnotes 160

Index 188

About the Author 192

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Jason Karp, PhD, has written a must-read primer for anyone who has worked hard to lose weight and wants to keep it off. His extensive data, research, and six practical habits make weight loss attainable. As a fellow fitness professional, it’s always a pleasure to refer clients to other colleagues, such as Jason, who can bring a different perspective to getting fit and healthy.”

—Tamilee Webb, MA, star of Buns of Steel