40 Fun Facts About Weight Loss

When body fat is burned off, most of its mass leaves the human body as which substance?

Carbon dioxide carries off about 84 percent of lost fat, breathed out through the lungs. Physicist Ruben Meerman worked out that the remainder leaves as water.

The 10,000-steps-a-day target began as the name of a 1960s pedometer sold in which country?

Japan got the manpokei, or 'ten-thousand step-meter', from the clockmaker Yamasa. A Tokyo clinic chief had urged everyone to walk that far each day, and walking groups soon formed in all 47 prefectures.

The ketogenic diet was devised by doctors in the 1920s to treat which medical condition in children?

Epilepsy in children was the target, and the Mayo Clinic's Russell Wilder coined the term ketogenic diet. It fell out of favour once effective anticonvulsant drugs arrived.

The GLP-1 diabetes drug exenatide is a synthetic copy of a compound found in the venom of which reptile?

The Gila monster gets by on a handful of large meals a year, which drew one researcher to its venom. Exendin-4, isolated from it in 1992, was turned into exenatide.

Which talk show host wheeled a wagon holding 67 pounds of fat on stage in 1988 to mark her weight loss?

Oprah Winfrey had dropped from 212 to 145 pounds on the Optifast diet and showed off a pair of size 10 jeans. She regained much of the weight after going back to real food.

Filming of which Tom Hanks movie paused for a year so he could lose weight and grow a shaggy beard?

Cast Away shut down so Hanks could shed the 50 pounds he had gained for the early scenes. Director Zemeckis used the break to shoot What Lies Beneath with the same crew.

Which US president, remembered as the heaviest, hired a British diet doctor and logged his weight daily?

The diet ran by post, with letters crossing the Atlantic over the next ten years. William H. Taft had hired Dr Yorke-Davies, an English diet expert, in 1905.

Which toy names the dieting cycle of losing weight and regaining it, a term credited to Kelly Brownell?

Yo-yo dieting often starts with a plan too extreme to keep up, so the lost weight bounces back. Brownell, a clinical psychologist, also coined the phrase 'toxic food environment'.

Which crunchy vegetable is most often said to have negative calories, burning more to digest than it supplies?

Celery actually costs only about 8 percent of its calories to digest, far short of the 100 percent the claim needs. There is no evidence that any food is calorically negative.

According to the traditional dieting rule of thumb, one pound of body fat stores roughly how many calories?

3,500 calories per pound led dieters to expect a pound a week from cutting 500 calories a day. In practice the same cut tends to bring half a pound to a pound.

Which Queens homemaker founded Weight Watchers after starting a weekly support group for six friends?

Jean Nidetch began the group in her apartment because a city clinic's meetings discouraged discussion. Within two months, 40 women were turning up each week.

Which hormone, made mainly in the stomach, peaks before meals and is nicknamed the hunger hormone?

Ghrelin levels drop back once a meal has been eaten. Besides driving appetite, it plays a part in the sleep-wake cycle, taste and memory.

Which part of the human diet supplies about seven calories per gram, second only to fat's nine?

Alcohol packs 29 kilojoules, or 7 calories, into every gram, while sugar and starch supply only about 4. A drink's calories can come more from its strength than its sweetness.

Which New York cardiologist's 1972 Diet Revolution promised a high-calorie way to stay thin forever?

Robert Atkins developed the plan at the private practice he opened on Manhattan's Upper East Side in 1959. It keeps carbohydrates tightly controlled and leans on fat for calories.

Which NBC reality show, launched in 2004, gave a cash prize for shedding the highest percentage of body weight?

The Biggest Loser ran for 17 seasons on NBC up to 2016. An NIH follow-up of one season's contestants six years on found most had regained weight and their metabolisms were still slowed.

Which citrus fruit is the centrepiece of the Hollywood diet, an American fad dating back to the 1930s?

Grapefruit first starred in an 'eighteen-day diet' of 1929, alongside eggs, toast and oranges. One early critic remarked that 'casualties' were heavy around Hollywood.

Which vegetable is the basis of the seven-day soup diet that spread by fax machine in the 1980s?

Cabbage soup is eaten in heavy amounts for a week on the plan, whose origins are unknown. It spread as 'faxlore', passed from one office machine to the next.

Adolphe Quetelet, the astronomer and statistician who devised the body mass index, came from which country?

Belgium's Quetelet worked it out between 1830 and 1850 to describe the 'average man', and never meant it for medical assessment. It was first known as the Quetelet Index.

Which actress made the 1982 Workout tape, the first non-theatrical home video to top the sales charts?

Jane Fonda went on to sell 17 million videos between 1982 and 1995. The routine was developed by Leni Cazden and refined at the Beverly Hills studio the two ran.

Which weight-loss support group, based in Milwaukee, began in 1948, fifteen years before Weight Watchers?

TOPS Club takes its name from 'Take Off Pounds Sensibly' and runs as a non-profit with chapters worldwide. One study found three-year members kept off five to seven percent of their body weight.

Which hormone, released by the body's fat cells, tells the brain how much energy is held in reserve?

Leptin was discovered by Jeffrey Friedman in 1994 after decades of research on obese mice. High levels tell the brain that reserves are full, and low levels that they are running down.

Ozempic and Wegovy are brand names for which drug, first approved in the US in 2017 for diabetes?

Semaglutide is made by its originator Novo Nordisk, which sells it as Wegovy for weight management. A third brand name, Rybelsus, is also used for diabetes.

Which type of body fat, abundant in newborn babies, burns energy to make heat instead of storing it?

Brown fat makes up about 5 percent of a newborn's body mass, lying along the upper spine and shoulders. Babies depend on it because they cannot yet shiver to keep warm.

Which nutrient costs the body the most energy to digest, using up 20 to 30 percent of its own calories?

Protein is hard for the body to process, whereas fat uses up 3 percent of its calories at most. Carbohydrates sit in between, at 5 to 15 percent.

Dietitians say one serving of meat or poultry should be about the size of which everyday object?

A deck of cards is the usual yardstick, about the same as the palm of your hand. The same guide matches a serving of cheese to a pair of dice.

Underwater weighing, a classic body-fat test, applies the buoyancy principle of which ancient Greek thinker?

Archimedes showed that a submerged body is pushed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces. Weighing someone in air and again underwater reveals how dense their body is.

Which Romantic poet kept his weight down with days of biscuits and soda water, then potatoes drenched in vinegar?

Lord Byron's weight swung between 9.5 and 14 stone, and he began strict dieting when he went up to Cambridge. A friend said he gobbled the vinegary mess 'like a famished dog'.

Which actor lost 62 pounds to play a gaunt, sleepless factory worker in the 2004 thriller The Machinist?

Christian Bale got down to 120 pounds for the part and wanted to reach 99. The filmmakers refused to let him go any lower because of the risk to his health.

Which dance workout began when Colombian instructor Beto Pérez forgot his usual music and used Latin tapes instead?

Zumba was first called 'Rumbacize' by Pérez, who improvised with salsa and merengue cassettes in the city of Cali. He launched it as a brand in 2001 with fitness videos sold by infomercial.

William Banting, whose 1863 Letter on Corpulence made 'banting' a byword for dieting, worked in which trade?

Undertaker to the Royal Household, his family firm buried George III, George IV and the Duke of Wellington. In Swedish, 'banta' is still the main verb for being on a diet.

Which physiologist ran the Seven Countries Study and popularised the Mediterranean diet with his wife Margaret?

Ancel Keys also devised the K-ration for combat soldiers, first packed in sealed Cracker Jack boxes. His study found the men least likely to develop heart disease living in Crete.

Cardiologist Arthur Agatston named his bestselling 2003 diet after which neighbourhood near his Florida practice?

South Beach replaced the plan's first name, the Modified Carbohydrate Diet. Patients had been passing round photocopies of it for years before the book appeared.

Which diet drug treatment was pulled from the US market in 1997 after reports of heart valve disease?

Fen-phen paired fenfluramine with phentermine, and it was the first of the two that harmed heart valves. The legal damages that followed came to more than 13 billion dollars.

Which artificial sweetener was found by accident in 1879 when a chemist working on coal tar tasted his hand?

Saccharin was made by Constantin Fahlberg in Ira Remsen's laboratory at Johns Hopkins. Fahlberg patented it on his own and grew wealthy, and Remsen called him a scoundrel.

The Master Cleanse, or lemonade diet, swaps meals for lemon juice, cayenne pepper and which sweetener?

Maple syrup supplies the calories in a fast that permits no food at all. The regime also calls for a salt-water flush every morning.

Professor Mark Haub lost 27 pounds in 2010 on a calorie-counted junk-food plan nicknamed after which snack?

Twinkies and similar treats, eaten every three hours, were his way of showing students that calorie counting matters most in weight loss. His body mass index fell back into the normal range.

Exercise scientists rate activities in METs, where one MET is the energy a person uses while doing what?

Sitting quietly burns about one calorie per kilogram of body weight every hour. Walking at a slow pace rates 2 METs, meaning twice as much.

Jenny Craig and her husband Sidney founded the Jenny Craig weight-loss company in 1983 in which country?

Australia was the starting point, in Melbourne, and the company only began operating in the United States two years later. At its peak it had more than 700 centres.

Which Italian physician weighed himself, his food and his waste on a special chair for thirty years?

Santorio Santorio found that for every eight pounds he took in, only three came out as waste. He put the missing weight down to 'insensible perspiration' through the skin and the breath.

Which American physician's 1918 bestseller Diet and Health taught women to slim down by counting calories?

Lulu Hunt Peters sold two million copies and topped the non-fiction list in 1924 and 1925. The calorie was so unfamiliar that her book explained how to pronounce the word.