What We Got Wrong About Weight Loss

**Jim Hill:** Welcome to Weight Loss And, where we delve into the world of weight loss. I'm Jim Hill.

**Holly Wyatt:** And I'm Holly Wyatt. We're both dedicated to helping you lose weight, keep it off, and live your best life while you're doing it.

**Jim Hill:** Indeed, we now realize successful weight loss combines the science and art of medicine, knowing what to do and why you will do it.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yes, the “And” allows us to talk about all the other stuff that makes your journey so much bigger, better, and exciting.

**Jim Hill:** Ready for the “And” factor?

**Holly Wyatt:** Let's dive in.

**Jim Hill:** Here we go. Holly, today we're going to do something a little different. Instead of talking about what works for weight loss, which we do a lot, we're going to talk about what didn't work. This is painful, but we're going to talk about things we got wrong in our career, where we failed as weight loss scientists. Things we got wrong and things the field got wrong. So we have to admit, you know, we're good, but we're not perfect. And we get it wrong some of the time. So talking about some of the things that maybe obesity science got wrong over the years.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah, I love this twist on things. Some people, I think, have trouble admitting that they got something wrong, or they choose not to even think about it, because it is painful a little bit to say I was wrong. But it's one of the things that I love to ask our guests, what would you do differently? What did you get wrong?

What did you think was real, but actually wasn't as you thought it was? It's also something I love to ask when I interview someone. I think it's a great litmus test for people. You You can they admit they made a mistake, or do they kind of never really want to admit that they got something wrong? And I think that tends to mean that you're pretty insecure, that you have a lot to prove, that you can't say, hey, sometimes we think we know stuff and we get it wrong. That's part of that learning, you know? So I think it's a great question to ask people.

**Jim Hill:** Yeah, I think some people just, you know, they get so caught up in their beliefs, they don't want to admit they're wrong. And I think we have to see it differently, that it's a stepping stone to success. When we do a study and it comes out differently than what we hypothesized, we've learned something, the famous Thomas Edison quote. I've not failed. I've found 10,000 ways that won't work. That's what science is. We move forward, we ask a question, we get the answer to that question. It may not be the answer we thought we were going to get, but we take that answer and we move forward.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah, no regret, I always say. And, you know, being able to be a little bit open-minded to say, I might have something wrong, I think is how you move the field forward. I think we see so many people saying, this is the right answer. And no matter what, they are going to stand behind that answer. And that's when you really get stuck and you don't move ahead. You don't evolve in your thinking, you don't learn. So So made a list, you made a list, we're going to put them together. We may not agree on things that we got wrong, but I thought it would be an interesting way to move forward.

**Jim Hill:** Yeah, it's a little humbling to see how long this list is, Holly. I was hoping it would be a lot shorter, but we got several things that we can talk about. Oh, we're not going to be able to talk about them all, so we prioritize. We'll see how far we get. All right, so let's get started. One of the big ones is the concept of the best diet for weight loss, right?

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah, I spent a huge part of my career really wanting to prove there is one diet. And even at the beginning of my career, believing 100% that it was a low-carb diet. I mean, I came to you, when I met you, Jim, I came to you and said, we should all be eating a low-carb diet. diet. Here's why. I was very passionate about it, believed it 100%. Not wasn't necessarily true. So that's big for me.

**Jim Hill:** And I’ve probably been on the other end of feeling like a low-fat diet was the best diet to do. And I did a lot of research on low-fat diets and how low-fat diets worked and whether they were the best diet for weight loss. But what do we get wrong, Holly, about this?

**Holly Wyatt:** Well, I think we got wrong that there is one diet. I was stuck in wanting to prove. I really believed that low-carb diet was the best diet. It's a good diet for me. I do well on a low-carb diet, so I had that personal experience. There was some data to support that, although I wanted to collect more data. So that was part of why I came to you. And started our research careers together. But I think the idea that there's one and you have to be right, that kind of limited it. What do you think?

**Jim Hill:** Yeah, I think we did learn that. And if you remember, we were the first group to actually scientifically study the Adkins diet. The Atkins diet was everywhere. The book was selling like crazy. You had restaurants putting the Adkins diet items on their menu. And we decided to actually do a research study to study it. And I probably went into it with the idea that we were going to show that low-fat was better than low-carbohydrate. And lo and behold, what we found is that the Atkins diet worked very well. The low-fat diet worked well. The Atkins diet worked well. It sort of expanded our knowledge about different diets. And I think what we learned is there isn't a best diet.

And I think there are a couple of spin-offs from that. One is the whole field now is looking at this idea of precision nutrition. Can we find which diet is the best person for each individual? And so there's a lot of research going on toward doing that. But I think as a field, we've accepted the notion that several different diets can be effective for weight loss.

**Holly Wyatt:** And I think that's important. And I think that even applies to other things we're looking at now. I think because I had that experience and it was like, okay, Holly, you were wrong. You weren't wrong for everybody, but you were wrong in that there's one best diet. And now I always think about when I believe there's one best anything, it kind of humbles me a little bit. I kind of come back and think, okay, wait a minute, maybe this is more individualized. Maybe there is more than one. Maybe I should look at this with a little bit broader lens, I think.

**Jim Hill:** This is a podcast about what we got wrong, but I do have to give us credit for one thing, is that we kind of use this information to begin thinking about weight loss, maintenance, different from weight loss. And while I agree that you can pretty much go to a bookstore and buy any diet book, and if you follow it, it will work because food restriction is the key to weight loss. But weight loss maintenance is different. And I think that's one of the things that came out of we were wrong about one diet being effective for weight loss, but it helped us realize that weight loss and weight loss maintenance were different.

**Holly Wyatt:** And something that came out of this that was actually really good is if I'm remembering right, one of the reasons why you started the National Weight Control Registry with Rena Wing was to figure out which diet was the best diet for weight loss.

**Jim Hill:** Yeah, we did. We thought we were going to get the National Weight Control Registry involved looking at a lot of people who were successful long term and figuring out what they did to lose weight.

And what we found is it was all over the map. There was no consistency in how they lost weight, but interestingly, what we found is a lot of consistency in how they were keeping the weight off. So that convinced me that we had to look at weight loss and weight loss maintenance separately. And I still think that's one of the failures of our field, which is communicating that information to the public.

**Holly Wyatt:** I agree. And for our listeners, I think how can they translate or how can they think about, how can it help them, the mistake that we made. And I think it's understanding that it may take some trial and error to find what works for them, that they don't have to, you know, oh, any person who says there is one way, I'm always a little bit suspect, especially when it comes to diets.

**Jim Hill:** The take-home message is try different diets. It's okay. Look at one that you think will work for you. Try it. If it works fine, if it doesn't, try another one. But you aren't likely going to stay on that diet for the long term. You have to think about at some point when you lose the weight on the diet you choose, now you have to think about switching to weight loss maintenance. And we've done other podcasts about weight loss maintenance that are important. And again, just to emphasize diet is the key to weight loss, but you've got to be physically active to keep it off.

**Holly Wyatt:** All right. What's number two on our list? What else did we get wrong?

**Jim Hill:** This is a really interesting one. And the idea of a broken metabolism, as you know, people came to us for years and said, I'm overweight and it's due to my metabolism. My metabolism is broken. And we did a lot of studies to convince people that that wasn't the case, right?

And it's a case of we were looking in the wrong place. We were looking at was there resting metabolic rate different? Could we see measures of energy expenditure? We were essentially looking at people while they were in a steady state. They were at a constant weight. So we brought them in, we measured their metabolism, we couldn't find anything wrong. And so we sort of went back and said, you know, it's not your metabolism. Your metabolism is fine, but we missed something big, Holly.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah. So Jim, this was my very first study that I ever did. I don't know if you remember this. This was my very first study, brought people in to the lab, measured their resting metabolic rate compared to people who were similar sizes, but had never lost weight.

We did all these controls. This was a big study, published it and showed that there was no difference, that the metabolism was not different, you know, therefore not broken. And I spent so much time in my clinical practice explaining this to people.

Look, you do not have a broken metabolism. Let me show you. Here's the data. I think we wrote lots of articles on this. I mean, this was a big one for us to say your resting metabolic rate is not different, is not broken. But we've now kind of evolved into understanding, like you said, that it's how it adapts. It's how it changes. You can look at it at one point in time, but that's not where to look at it, right?

**Jim Hill:** Yeah, one of the big concepts that helped us to understand that, in fact, some people do have a broken metabolism is the concept of metabolic flexibility. And we've done a podcast on this one, but simply, if you look at a person in steady state, it's hard to find anything different between people and their metabolism. But when you look at how people adjust, how your metabolism adjusts, it adjusts over the day.

Think about it. You wake during the night, you're burning fat, you wake up, you eat, your body has to switch to carbohydrate, you exercise, it has to switch. During a day, your body is constantly providing different sources of fuel from your fat cells, from your glycogen, et cetera. And what we've found is the optimum metabolism is one that switches very quickly between fuel sources. And an influx on one metabolism is one that switches, but not quite as fast.

And that difference can be a huge difference. This is something to think about, Holly, is that if you look before, say before 1980, most people maintained a constant body weight over their life. So think about someone that for 50 adult years stays exactly the same weight. That person may be taking in over a year, a million calories, one million calories. If the system were inaccurate at matching intake and expenditure by 1%, you'd gain 30 or 40 pounds in a year.

This is how amazingly accurate our regulatory system was. Now, look at today where obesity rates, the majority of people are obese today. But they're not gaining 30 pounds a year. They're gaining more like a pound or two a year.

So the accuracy is still greater than 99%. It's that small difference that's leading to obesity. And metabolic flexibility is this small effect that over time allows you to be a little bit more susceptible to gaining weight. So yes, some people do have a broken metabolism in that it's become inflexible.

Now, the good news is you can fix it. You can make your metabolism more flexible. We're all different genetics, so yours may always be different from mine. But what you can do as an individual is to make your metabolism as flexible as possible. What that gives you is that little extra ability to keep from gaining weight in all these situations where your body is switching between fat and carbohydrate.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah, I like to think about it. You have some wiggle room, right? You have some area where, yeah, you may be less flexible, your metabolism is someone else, but you can still move it. You can still adjust it. And that's great because if you were just born with it, then why are we even talking about it? You got it, you got it. But this, you can do something about.

And that's what I think is the nice thing. Yes, you may have a little bit of a broken metabolism, inflexible metabolism. You can make it more flexible. And I think we just were studying it a little bit wrong. We didn't even have the right concept and the data that we got said it's not broken when in reality…

**Jim Hill:** We were just looking at the wrong place. But I think metabolism is critical in this whole body weight regulation because, again, we're gaining weight due to just a small difference between intake and expenditure. And think about a million calories. You've got to exactly match your food intake to your energy expenditure, a thousand calories worth. We could never do that unless our body is helping to do that. And so even an inflexible metabolism helps you do that. But the flexible metabolism, I think, is that difference between a half pound of weight gain a year and weight stability.

**Holly Wyatt:** Right. It's the part for weight loss maintenance that we really want to encourage, definitely.

**Jim Hill:** It doesn't matter too much in weight loss because you're eating less than you take in and you're going to lose weight. And whether your metabolism is flexible or inflexible, you're still going to lose weight.

But it's during weight loss maintenance where a flexible metabolism gives you that little extra boost that can be the difference between weight gain and no weight.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yep, totally agree. All right. Are we ready for number three? This is the one that's going to be, I'm going to have to admit, I think.

**Jim Hill:** I think you go for it.

**Holly Wyatt:** All right. Number three, what we got wrong, what I did not believe really in at all, and I used to even roll my eyes when someone would bring this up or when even Jim would bring this up, is the power of your mind or your mindset in weight loss success. I believed, yes, we need to work on what people are eating and how much they're moving, but I did not believe in the power of the mind in terms of success at all.

And Jim, I can remember there was even a time when you, I think we can say, Deepak Chopra came to the University of Colorado and you're like, do you want to meet Deepak? And I'm like, no, I'm going to deal with the real stuff. You can go out there and deal with the mind state mindset, what I used to call woo-woo stuff. And I’ve turned the corner, right? I totally believe that we need to be working on our mindset, what we think, just as much as the other. So I definitely got that wrong.

**Jim Hill:** So talk about how you think the mind is important, because again, when most people go into weight loss, they think about what? They think about what to eat primarily. They may think a little bit about physical activity, but very rarely do they think beyond that. What are people missing by not recognizing the importance of the mind?

**Holly Wyatt:** Well, we have more and more data that what you think, what you believe, your beliefs, your thoughts impact the outcome. That's what I didn't really understand. I'm like, it doesn't matter what you think.

It's what you do, what you eat, how much you move that's going to produce the weight loss, are going to produce the long-term weight loss maintenance. And what you think about it, your beliefs aren't going to have an impact. But there's more and more data to say, it does. We don't really understand it. And I think it makes us uncomfortable as scientists.

How does it work? What do we measure? But more and more data that if you have the right mindset, if you think positive, if you think in terms of growth mindset, if you believe you can do it, you're more likely to succeed.

People with positive mindsets, there's lots of good data, say it's associated with lots of health benefits, it's associated with success, even living longer. Crazy things that was like, how does it do that? I don't know how it does it.

We don't know exactly, we're studying that. But more and more data, and it makes the process better, which I think if you make the process, the journey better, if you have a positive mindset about how it's going to be and what it is, it just makes the whole thing work better. So I think there's lots of ways mind is playing a role.

We don't understand it. A lot of scientists do roll their eyes at this, at least Western medicine and scientists tend to roll their eyes. But we do believe in a placebo effect. So I always get the scientists who don't believe in the power of the mind or don't really think we can be using it for behavioral change. We believe in a placebo. The placebo effect is where we give someone a sugar pill, we don't tell them, they don't know. They think they could be getting the real medication, but it isn't. We're blinded, no one knows. And even when they get the sugar pill that has no real medication, they still have an outcome and they still have side effects just because they believe they can. They could be getting it.

**Jim Hill:** So I think that's one thing that really has contributed to the lack of success and weight loss maintenance, the lack of attention to the mind.

And again, people want to say diet, exercise, what do I eat, how do I move? And those are important. Don't get me wrong. They're both very important. But the third leg of the stool is mindset.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah. I always tell people it's not just about believing. If you say, I am going to lose weight, I believe I'm going to lose weight, it's you get your mind right, you think of the positive things, and you sit on the couch and don't change anything else, I'm not betting on you and Vegas on that one either. It's an and situation, but I do think it's equally important and usually not used, utilized in weight loss and in behavioral change.

**Jim Hill:** So the mind is important. Diet, exercise, mindset - those three are critical for weight loss maintenance, not necessarily for weight loss. You can do weight loss with diet with one of the three, but you need all three for weight loss maintenance.

**Holly Wyatt:** Right. And I think weight loss is a little bit better if you put some.

**Jim Hill:** I agree.

**Holly Wyatt:** All right. What's next?

**Jim Hill:** Well, the next one is one that's very important to me. And it's more what the field has got wrong rather than what you and I have got wrong because we've actually been pretty good on this one. But as a field, one of the things that we have done very, very poorly is failing to understand the interaction of diet and physical activity. You have the nutrition community that goes out diet, diet, diet. Let's look at this diet, that diet, weight loss, etc.

You have the physical activity community that's going out looking at the impact of exercise and being sedentary and still surprisingly few people look at those together. The analogy I've always used Holly about diet and physical activity. So if you're looking at your weight as an influence of both diet and physical activity, it's like your finances. Is your net worth do more to your income or to your expenditures? And that's the same way I see body weight. Is your body weight do more to what you eat or how much you exercise? And the answer is yes, you can't separate the two.

And here's the thing. As a society, we become so sedentary. And part of that is not just that people are spending less of their leisure time at activity, although they are. But one of the other big ones is we've essentially engineered physical activity out of our lives. We don't need to be active anymore. You used to have to be active in your job. You used to be active for transportation.

Technology has made it easy for us to be very, very inactive during the day. I personally think that the decline in physical activity that probably started happening 100 years ago has really allowed the obesity epidemic to develop. I think if you're an active society, you're going to have less obesity regardless of diet. And I'm not saying diet isn't important. But if you're a sedentary society, you're going to have a lot of obesity regardless of diet as well. Diet is very important.

But if you're sedentary, your energy expenditure is so low that you have to eat so little to maintain your weight loss. And we're just not geared to food restrict. We're geared to eat. And the only way you can eat a satisfying diet is to be fiscally active. So what we got wrong is the concentration on diet only or physical activity only. You cannot understand one without the other.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yes. And I think part of it is hard to study them together, moving together. It makes the studies more complex. So people tend to go in and try to control everything and just study a change in a diet. Or they try to go in and hold everything steady and just study a change in activity. When, in reality, that's never happening.

Like, that's a false condition. But it's easier to study in science that way. So you really know what's going on. It's real complex if you have things moving on both ends, lots of things changing, what's causing what.

But in reality, I think that's what's going on. And which diet is best probably depends on the amount, like you just said, of physical activity. So when you study it independently, you come out with conclusions that just don't really work because it's just not really the case. So it's really about what do you eat when activity is high?

What do you eat when activity is low? That's really how we need to be studying it. And still, even today, you see very, very few clinical trials that do that.

**Jim Hill:** Yeah. And I think your point is it really, the best diet for you depends on your physical activity level. And let's take the extremes. I love the elite athletes. If you look at the diet of these elite athletes, they're eating more fat and sugar, like double what the recommendations are. And they have virtually no metabolic disease. I'm not saying everybody needs to be an elite athlete, but it shows what's possible when you're very, very active, you're eating to match your activity. And it's what appears to be an unhealthy diet, and it would be unhealthy if you weren't sedentary. So a diet for a very physically active person is very different than a sedentary person. If you look at those few people, and there are a few people who maintain their weight with very low physical activity, they have to pretty much obsess over every calorie.

They eat so little that their diet has to be perfect. So most people are in the middle. And in the middle, the more active you are, the more flexibility you can have with your diet. But I think unless we're able to raise the physical activity level of the population, it's going to be very, very difficult to maintain weight with any kind of diet.

**Holly Wyatt:** Agree. And I think when we're moving forward studying things, we have to add that complexity into our studies. We're not discovering anything new if we don't start looking at it that way. We're just repeating the same thing and not really getting any new data out there to help people.

**Jim Hill:** Agree. And just because it's hard, it's not a reason not to do it. We've got to do the right kind of research. And the right kind of research is considering both diet and physical activity.

**Holly Wyatt:** Right.

**Jim Hill:** What's next?

**Holly Wyatt:** We're on, what are we on? Number five, we got a long list. I don't think we're going to make it to the end.

**Jim Hill:** Good. I don't want to lay out all of our failures.

**Holly Wyatt:** I think for number five, what I wrote down is that, and this is the field and us too, I think we did some of this, but the field too. And this is really something that's important right now. As scientists, we have not valued what we call qualitative research. We only tend to value quantitative numbers and where we can measure something in a way that we can say it's different. And we have kind of said that qualitative research isn't real science. It's kind of soft science. We've kind of put it on the back burner and that real science is around numbers and being able to quantitate things. And I'm now thinking that's probably been a mistake. I think there's a lot out there we could be learning from the qualitative stuff. What do you think, Jim?

**Jim Hill:** Yeah. Again, it's not an either-or, just like with diet and physical activity. It's not one is better than the other. They're both important. And I think the key is how do you integrate them? How do you learn from quantitative research to inform qualitative research?

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah. So maybe we should give the listeners a difference. Give us what would be some qualitative questions versus some quantitative ones?

**Jim Hill:** Let's take the GLP-1 medications. So a qualitative would be measuring their weight, measuring their food intake, et cetera. A qualitative would be how do they feel about this? Are they happy with their diet? Are they happy with their physical activity? Is the weight loss satisfying to them?

And again, to me, I want to know the answers of all those questions and the qualitative stuff would inform the quantitative stuff. If you say, oh, these drugs work, they're very well, they keep the weight off, but yet you find people aren't happy with them. They struggle, they, et cetera. So you need both to understand this.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah. So the qualitative stuff tends to be how people think and feel. And it's a little bit gray zone, right? Because people are picking a number, picking a word and versus a weight, scientists feel strong. Like, I know what this means, a certain body weight and a change in body weight. So I think in the past, it's softer and it doesn't lend itself as much to the rigors of science, as we like to say.

**Jim Hill:** Well, it's like I always say, you'll have your weight loss and you're happy with the weight loss, but it's your life happier.

Your weight loss has lowered the number on the scale, but has it made you happier? And you need both qualitative and quantitative to answer those questions.

**Holly Wyatt:** Right. Because you have a number that's amount of weight loss, then you go ask someone about it, you're going to get different people that are going to say different things. So a 30 pound weight loss may make some people feel happy and make some people not feel happy, right? And so that's the difference in quantitative, 30 pounds. We know what that is versus qualitative is a little bit depends on the individual, how they feel about that.

**Jim Hill:** Yeah, it's back when we used to tell people how successful they were by losing 5% of their weight and people weren't buying that. They're saying, are you crazy? I wanted to lose 40% and you're telling me that 5% is successful, not buying it.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah. So I agree, both are important. I think I feel like the field is shifting a little bit and starting to look at more some of this qualitative. We have some new research or statistical ways to look at this type of data, which I think is helping us make it more legitimate, I think, in the science world. All right. Do we have time for one more at least?

**Jim Hill:** Well, I'm going to put one in here and then if we have more time, we can do another one.

**Holly Wyatt:** You're adding more, Jim.

**Jim Hill:** I am adding because during our conversation, I thought of this. I think both of us started out approaching weight management just from the weight. What do people do? Their behavior, how do we change their diet? How do we change their physical activity? Maybe how we get them to sleep better? I think one of the things that we've learned is the approach of saying, I'm going to take time out in my life and I'm going to go out and I'm going to change my behaviors and get the weight off and then I'm going to come back to my life. Doesn't work. You cannot change your weight without changing your life.

I know that sounds, oh my God, but we have seen that over and over and over. You can't just focus on your weight. To maintain a weight loss, you have to change your life. Now, the good part, and we've learned this from our registry work with the National Weight Control Registry and the International Weight Control Registry is once people do make those life changes, they're much, much happier, but it's not easy to make a life change. You have to go beyond diet and physical activity to other parts of life.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah. This concept that it's bigger than weight loss, definitely. I know that's a lot of times what people don't want to hear. They really want it to be, they want to just be able to solve the problem and not change anything else, but I agree. That way of thinking about it, I'm just going to lose the weight and then my problem is going to be over.

I'm going to go back to the same life that I had before. It just does not work. That actually may be something that our listeners are still, some of them have wrong, that they could be thinking about a little bit differently, that we've got to think about changing what you need to do to lose the weight, but then you've got to change your life in addition to that.

**Jim Hill:** What we're saying is you're going to like that change once you do it. It's hard to change. Changing your life, you think, oh my god, changing my life. How hard is that? Well, it takes some work to change it, but I guess I'm 100% convinced that most people that do it end up with a life that they're happier with than where they started.

**Holly Wyatt:** Let's bring that mindset right back in because I think what we've discovered is if you think it's going to be hard, if you think you're going to suffer, if you think it's going to be really, really difficult, then it will be.

But it doesn't have to be. You can do this and have fun. In the end, you still get the same outcome, but the journey there and what you end up with is different than if you say, oh my gosh, I'm going to do it, but I'm not going to like it at all while I'm doing.

**Jim Hill:** This is where you've worked on me. I'm totally, I'm changed in how I approach it. I now see it as a journey of self-discovery.

Rather than see it as hard, well, we do stuff every day that's hard. This is a journey of self-discovery. Sometimes that's a little scary. You say, oh yeah, I can change my diet, but am I really going to look at my life and what I need to do to change? I think what we're saying is, yeah, you have to do that.

Changing your weight and keeping off a significantly lower weight. This is a big deal. To do that, you do have to take on these other aspects of your life. Think of it as a journey into self-discovery.

**Holly Wyatt:** Self-discovery, I love that term growth, learning. I think part of this is we haven't, I don't know if we've done a podcast on identity, but it is really identity, who you are. You've kind of got to change who you are and line up with who you want to be, what feels good. That is a process. It is a journey. It is a self-discovery piece. It can be very exciting. For most people who do it when we talk to them, here comes some qualitative research, they say, yes, it was worth it. We like it.

**Jim Hill:** Almost to a person, they tell you it's worth it.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yes. I rarely hear anyone say it wasn't worth it.

**Jim Hill:** Nobody says, oh, I want to go back to the way I was before.

**Holly Wyatt:** When we start, that's what I tell them. I said, let's try this. If at the end, I almost make it like an experiment. If you don't like it, you can go back. I'm not going to keep you here. You can go back.

**Jim Hill:** It's easy to go back.

**Holly Wyatt:** Go back. Sometimes that's what I tell people. Okay, let's try it. If you don't like it, I promise you, you can go back.

**Jim Hill:** Definitely. Is that enough of the things we've done wrong? I know we have more.

**Holly Wyatt:** I know. We may have to do a whole second episode because we got so many on our list. I always say, that's really how you grow. That's really how you evolve. You know what you got wrong, leads you to thinking about something differently and lead you to continue to study it. I don't know that we'll ever have it all right.

**Jim Hill:** You hope we get some more things wrong in the future.

**Holly Wyatt:** Well, I mean, we can choose to see it that way. I mean, that's how I guess I choose. That's probably the way that gets me through, right?

When I see all these things I've got wrong, that's what makes me get through it. But I did have one listener question. It was, what do you think is the biggest mistake that the listeners are making in terms of weight loss?

**Jim Hill:** Oh, that one's easy. The biggest mistake people are making is not understanding the difference between losing weight and keeping it off. Those are very, very different processes. When people start on a weight loss journey, all they think about at first is losing weight. They don't think down to the point of keeping it off. They just want to lose more and more and more. That is a recipe for weight cycling. Lose it and regain it. You have to understand that keeping weight off is a whole different process than losing weight. That's the biggest mistake people are making.

**Holly Wyatt:** I agree with you on that. I think that kind of along those same lines is getting good at weight loss maintenance. Even if they say, okay, I believe in it, they still stay in weight loss too long and they never move into weight loss maintenance and get good at it. I said, which would you rather be good at? Losing weight or maintaining weight? If you were going to be better at one than the other, you want to be good at both. But if you were going to be better at one than the other, which one would you want to be better at?

**Jim Hill:** Absolutely. The right answer to this is weight loss maintenance because that's where you want to spend the majority of your life. You can't be in weight loss.

Almost certainly. That's the way that science works, is you learn new things and as you learn new things, you figure out, maybe you didn't get it totally wrong, but it was certainly incomplete. So science is a process of adding and sometimes going back and course correcting. In thinking about this, I don't know that is what we got wrong, but I think what we've failed to recognize is the importance of the brain and all this. We've looked at diet and exercise and metabolism and glucose control and lipids. I think with new techniques to explore the brain, we're learning more and more about the power of the brain in all of this weight regulation stuff. Certainly the GLP-1 medications, they tend to work in the brain. And so I don't know that's wrong, but it's incomplete, which is, I think, minimizing how important the brain is going to be. And as we understand more about how the brain works, I think we're going to have some strategies that are going to help in weight loss and weight loss maintenance.

**Holly Wyatt:** Yeah. So our incomplete understanding of the brain has really maybe, we think some things are, we have some incorrect assumptions because we don't really understand how the brain is functioning. When I was writing this question, I thought, I think we're going to learn something from these GLP-1, the new medications, something we don't understand now.

Same thing. We don't know, so we've made some assumptions. And I think as these medications get out there and more and more people are on them, I think it's going to change something. Our learning is going to evolve. And some of the things we thought should be one way, will decide should be another. So I think there's some evolution happening because of these new weight loss medications. So we'll have to wait and see.

**Jim Hill:** We'll wait and see. Wow, this has been a humbling experience going through the things we've got wrong. But this is the way science works. I think on each of these things that we've got wrong, we've learned from it. And it's allowed us to be better at what we do and ultimately to provide better information and guidance to people that are really serious about long-term weight loss maintenance.

**Holly Wyatt:** I agree. And would we ever want to have know-it-all? Where would we then ask the questions? I don't know. There's something about...

**Jim Hill:** Yeah, would be no place to go from there.

**Holly Wyatt:** I don't know if I'd ever want to get it done.

**Jim Hill:** I don't think we have to worry, Holly.

**Holly Wyatt:** All right. All right. Our jobs are safe is what you're saying.

**Jim Hill:** Our jobs are safe. Well, this is a humbled Jim Hill and Holly Wyatt admitting that we don't always get things right, but hopefully we learn from the things we get wrong and we move forward. So thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on Weight Loss and...

**Holly Wyatt:** Bye, everybody.

**Jim Hill:** And that's a wrap for today's episode of Weight Loss and. We hope you enjoy diving into the world of weight loss with us.

**Holly Wyatt:** If you want to stay connected and continue exploring the “Ands” of weight loss, be sure to follow our podcast on your favorite platform.

**Jim Hill:** We'd also love to hear from you. Share your thoughts, questions, or topic suggestions by reaching out at [weightlossand.com](http://weightlossand.com/). Your feedback helps us tailor future episodes to your needs.

**Holly Wyatt:** And remember, the journey doesn't end here. Keep applying the knowledge and strategies you've learned and embrace the power of the “And” in your own weight loss journey.