Writer William Leith's The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict describes the frustrations of people who try various diets only to discover that the weight they lose quickly returns when the diet ends, often with a vengeance.
Does dieting make you fat?
Lose 15 pounds, gain back 20, that sort of thing.
Leith set off on a quest to examine all the many diets over the decades, from Atkins to Scarsdale, and from grapefruits to vinegar, only to collide with one of the oldest frustrations of weight-loss and weight-gain — that dispiriting Sisyphean effect in which dieters gain back more weight than they lost.
Leith says that most of his life he has battled his bulging body, going from fat to slim, then podgy, then back to slim, but not as slim as before, then back to plump — sometimes to gargantuan. Four years ago, after trying a variety of faddish diets, the six-foot-plus Leith ended up weighing 240 pounds, which he says made him appear "obese."
"Why, when I got fat again, was I always fatter than I'd been the time before?" Leith asks in an excerpt that appeared in Britain's Daily Telegraph. "And why, when I got slimmer, was I never as slim as I'd been the time before?"
His quest took him to California where he encountered Dr. Traci Mann, a social psychologist at the University of California in Los Angeles. Mann led a team of researchers who examined some 30 long-term studies of diets, the results of which appeared this month in American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychological Association.
Not only did she and her UCLA team determine that diets most often result in weight gain, but that a constant weight-loss, weight-gain cycle exerts a devastating toll on the body that is linked to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and altered immune function.
Diet or not
"What happens to people on diets in the long run?" Mann asked. "Would they have been better off not to go on a diet at all? We decided to dig up and analyze every study that followed people on diets for two to five years. We concluded most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all. Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back."
Mann addresses the serious issue of how Medicare in the United States is considering defining obesity as an illness, which would open the door to funding treatments for obesity.
"We are recommending that Medicare should not fund weight-loss programs as a treatment for obesity," Mann said. "The benefits of dieting are too small and the potential harm is too large for dieting to be recommended as a safe, effective treatment for obesity."
Better, she says, is the standard, un-faddish regimen of moderate food intake and regular exercise.
"Eating in moderation is a good idea for everybody, and so is exercise," Mann said. "This is not what we looked at in this study. Exercise may well be the key factor leading to sustained weight loss. Studies consistently find that people who reported the most exercise also had the most weight loss."
Hunters and gatherers
Back in 1983, Geoffrey Cannon and Hetty Einzig wrote a book titled Dieting Makes You Fat, which reaches back to the hunter-gatherer stage of human development to explain the peculiarities of the weight-gain, weight-loss cycle.
Cannon suggests that the problem may be more psychological than physical, that in our hunter-gatherer stage we became programmed to over-eat when food was available. He wrote a letter to the British Journal of Nutrition in 2005 in which he said:
"After a period of food deprivation, our bodies developed mechanisms to store calories by over-riding signals of satiety and increasing hunger signals — even when they were not necessary. Your body forces you to store calories in anticipation of the next period of food deprivation — even if it never comes."
Cannon suggests that modern diets have much the same effect on people who try various diets. The problem today, he explains, is the abundance of easily obtainable, calorie-dense food together with an abundance of modern conveniences that encourage a more sedentary lifestyle.
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External Links
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- Laval University research chair on obesity
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- A parent's guide to healthy eating and activity
- International Food Information Council: trans fats
- Web MD: trans fats
- Surfwax.com: articles on trans fats
- Omega-3:
- American Heart Association
- Omega-3 fatty acids: the Mayo clinic
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration
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