Diets Don't Work
Forget injuries. Never forget kindness.
Confucius
To a nutritionist, the word diet means what an individual usually eats and drinks. To almost everyone else, the word diet means restricting calories or eating unusual foods in order to lose weight, as in "I'm on a diet."
It's logical to think that consuming less food than usual will produce weight loss since overeating (and underexercising) is generally identified as the reason for weight gain. Although logical, consuming fewer calories than usual works only when people are in a continuous state of near starvation, for example, in environments where food is scarce. When food is plentiful, however, people are unable not to eat what the want for very long. Thus, all diets fail in the long run. Here's why...
- Semi-starvation turns on biological mechanisms designed to conserve both body fat and energy expenditure when calories are scarce. When someone goes on a low-calorie/semi-starvation diet, the body responds by holding on to fat that it has stored. This is the reason that people lose only about 10% of their body weight regardless of the kind of diet they try. Calorie-restricting diets initially produce a loss of a few pounds (mostly due to water loss), but within several weeks the body resists further weight loss even if calorie-restriction is maintained. You would have to be locked up in a closet and given only a piece of bread and some water every day for calorie-restriction to work.
- The dieter's focus is on food and not increasing physical activity. Increasing energy expenditure, rather than decreasing energy intake, is the key to successful weight
loss and long-term healthy weight management.
- When continued adherence to a calorie-restricting diet does not produce commensurate reduction in weight loss, dieters become disillusioned and discouraged and stop following the plan and return to their usual eating patterns. Any weight lost while on the diet tends to be regained within two years.
- Eating-plan dieters become bored eating the same required foods. This is especially true of diets recommending principally one kind of food (e.g. liquid diet programs, grapefruit, steak, papaya, cottage cheese).
- Dieters become frustrated not being able to eat the kinds and quantities of foods they like.
- Dieters are constantly hungry. They become obsessed with food. They even dream about food.
- Prepackaged, special diet foods can be expensive.
Popular weight loss programs generally are low-calorie, low-carbohydrate, or low-fat. When diet programs work, it's because they reduce the number of calories consumed and not because of the types and proportions of food consumed (Click here for research on this). Any diet plan that reduces calories consumed by about 500 per day will lead to a loss of about a pound a week until the body's weight loss resistance mechanisms kick in.
