Dieting results in long term changes to hormones and muscle fibers.

[noamnety]

279. I thought the "don't bother" was implied

in posts like this: "Long term maintenance of weight loss is not possible unless you make it the most important thing in your life, and few people are willing to throw over family, friends and community for that." I don't know where you got the idea that it has to be the most important thing in your life or that you have to ditch all your meaningful relationships to maintain a weight loss. That idea is a little dysfunctional, no?

As for your study, no surprises there and I'm not sure of your point in posting it. If people share the same genes, have been raised together - most likely on the same diet since childhood with similar activity levels, and then grow up to live together so they most likely still have similar diets and other habits (like the twin smokers in your study), I would expect them to store weight in similar ways to each others, more similar than to a stranger. Yes.

Genetics, diet since childhood, activity levels since childhood, current diet and current activities all affect our bodies. Yes. So we live with the elements we can't control (genetics and previous environments we were raised in), and we control the current ones. I can't control whether I lose weight first in my chest, stomach or butt, I absolutely have control over whether fats are released into my blood stream to their maximum extent before I workout, I control whether I'm eating and workout out in a way to gain fat vs gain muscle. I know how to eat to gain fat, and if I get to a point where I want to bulk up with more muscles while reducing fat, I can do Occam's Protocol to convert the excess calories to muscle.

For anyone unfamiliar with Occam's Protocol, this is a good thread for watching a random person's progress as they try it for a month, along with specifics at least at the start of what they ate and how they worked out: http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=131097663