"What Naked and Afraid Taught Me About Weight Loss"--Honor and Daring

I recently published a guest post from The Realist about some lessons learned from watching the Naked and Afraid television series. So it seemed a bit of serendipity that I came across this post by Michael Sebastian at the Honor and Daring blog entitled "What Naked and Afraid Taught Me About Weight Loss." Sebastian relates that the question for him had always been whether dieting or exercise was better for weight loss--a topic with no clear answer from the various articles on losing weight--but which was answered for him from one particular episode of Naked and Afraid. He noted that the contestants on the show lost significant amounts of weight ... with one exception: Cassie De Pecol. Sebastian writes that at the beginning of the challenge, both Cassie and her partner, Forrest Galante were slightly overweight, but he figured that they would lose that extra weight. He describes what happened, though:

Typically, both partners contribute about equally to the success or failure of the team. But Cassie was different. Rather than help her partner, she spent her days either sunning herself on the beach or sitting in the shelter that her partner had constructed. ...

This left Forrest to do all the heavy lifting. He did everything. ... [T]hey both ate very little. By the end of the competition, Forrest had lost a boatload of weight going from a slightly doughy couch potato to fighting fit.

Cassie, on the other hand, lost only a few pounds. Her butt was still a bit large. How on earth can you starve for 21 days and still not lose weight?

Inactivity, that’s how. Because she was just sitting around, Cassie burned next to no calories. It is a testament to how efficient our bodies are.

An interesting observation. Read the whole thing.