The Marine Corps has a boot camp remedy: it’s called The Fat Body Platoon
When I was in the Air Force, I was near the upper end of the weight limit for my height. I was not out of shape, could run fine, and was playing full-court basketball almost daily. When they put me on the program, they forced me onto a tracked high-carb low fat diet, and into an aerobics program (not to mention the basketball I played). Guess what? Even though my calories were restricted, and my exercise level went up, I failed to lose more than 5 pounds over 90 days. They were perplexed.
There was another guy in my unit who carried around a bit of a belly, but who was biking over 200 miles a week, running daily, and had run in marathons. They were doing the same thing to him. High carb, low fat. It didn't matter that we were supposedly burning more calories than we took in, we simply were not losing the weight with that mix.
“The Marine Corps has a boot camp remedy: it’s called The Fat Body Platoon”
Those of us who served in the military remember the special units used in Basic Training to remedy the obesity of draftees and volunteers. Using their example as an excuse to deny the existence of metabolic syndrome and its limitations on weight loss is a non-starter.
First, there have always been some people who did not lose sufficient weight to remedy their obesity, and they were prematurely discharged from military service during Basic Training as being medically unfit for military service. Until the last few decades the number of recruits who could not have their obesity remedied by diet and exercise during Basic Training were minimal. Today, the number of men who are too obese to be enlisted into military service and who are prematurely discharged from military service during Basic Training has skyrocketed to never before seen levels and then well beyond that.
In the absence of the draft to conscript obese men into military service, the vast majority of obese males have already been excluded from military service and Basic Training. The relatively fewer recruits who do manage to enlist and enter into Basic Training with a weight problem typically are not yet obese. Due to the obesity epidemic of the last few decades, however, these late recruits have a huge increase in the incidence of inability to manage weight gain never seen before in such great numbers. What is happening is that the increases in high carbohydrate and low fat (HCLF) diets has vastly increased the number of recruits who enter into military service with a pre-existing metabolic syndrome which has not yet presented itself as chronic high insulin levels and progressively uncontrollable weight gain. The young ages of the military recruits also means that the metabolic syndrome in most cases has not yet had time enough for the insulin intolerance to present as diabetes. This stage of the metabolic disorder typically is not reached until after about 40 years of age and long after the weight gain caused by the metabolic syndrome has been silently underway and becoming more and more irreversible for a number of years. This means most recruits in Basic Training today cannot be expected to have the weight gain problems associated with the metabolic disorder. The few exceptions are the recruits who were subjected to very high levels of carbohydrates and/or were much more sugar, carbohydrate, and insulin intolerant than most other people.
The use of young military recruits in Basic Training as an example for the efficacy of weight control is therefore inapplicable as a model useful to the older general population or the population of any age already experiencing the metabolic syndrome.