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Eat
without
Guilt
Why
Diets Don't Work: The Myths that Make us Massive
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| Yo-Yo
Dieting |
 We
starve ourselves on liquid diets, then we binge on all the foods
we have been deprived of and gain all the weight back - plus more.
The weight loss pills we eat increase our metabolism - temporarily.
However, when we stop taking them, our metabolism slows down. We
are on a constant roller coaster with no end in sight, praying that
the last plunge down will not be followed by another steep uphill
climb.
Why is the American
public so obsessed with dieting? Because we are the fattest nation
in the world! Approximately 85% of us are suffering from creeping
obesity. What's worse it's killing us! Over 400,000 Americans die
each year of heart disease. Millions more are suffering from other
ailments such as diabetes, cancer, back pain, and depression. All
of these problems are related to overfatness, obesity, and lack
of exercise.
Yet to everyone's
chagrin, not one of those miracle diets has made a dent in these
gloomy statistics. Not because we don't lose the weight - inevitably
the first miracle diet we go on works - but because we gain the
weight back and we alter our metabolism, making it harder to lose
weight the next time.
Despite past
failures, we succumb to the allure of advertising and the promises
of a new, thinner body. We trudge into the next weight loss clinic
the more expensive the better, swearing it will be the last time.
But as long as we turn to diets, it will never be the last time.
Diets are not making us leaner and healthier. They're making us
fatter and less healthy. The diets we put ourselves on are actually
doing more damage to our bodies than our bad eating habits and over
fatness. The inherent flaw in dieting is that we don't lose fat,
we lose weight.
New studies
have proven:
- Diets physically
damage our bodies!
- Diets make
us more obsessed with food!
- Diets make
us fatter!
Scientific research
has shown us what it takes for our bodies, to be healthy. Yet, this
knowledge has not filtered down to the public. A multitude of gimmicks
and health fads cloud the issue of balance, making it difficult
for the layman to distinguish the good from the bad.
 Let's
take our first peek behind the clouds to understand our body's natural
state of internal balance.To survive, our body must maintain a state
of chemical,mechanical, and electrical balance called homeostasis.
This mechanism works somewhat like the air conditioner in our home:
it has a set point, a thermostat, an "on" switch, and
an "off' switch. When the temperature rises above 70° (the
set point), the thermostat senses the rising temperature, triggers
the "on" switch, and the air conditioner runs until the
room temperature lowers to 70°. When the thermostat senses that
the set point has been minimum daily reached, it triggers the "off'
switch.
Our body is more complex, but it works in a similar way. We have
a different set point for each bodily function; we have a set point
for body temperature, another for the amount of sleep we need, and
yet another for appetite and food needs. Whenever we stray from
any of our set points in any way, our body considers the deviation
a threat to its survival and reacts by manipulating complex bodily
processes in an attempt to regain homeostasis (it hits the "on"
switch or the "off' switch until it reaches normalcy again).
Just as we need
a certain amount of sleep each day to maintain our homeostasis and
to function properly, our bodies need a certain amount of food for
energy each day. This food energy is measured in calories. We need
these calories to fuel all of our basic bodily functions - sleeping,
food digestion, breathing, walking, and talking to name a few. The
minimum daily requirement for a mid-life man is 1,600 calories,
and for a mid-life woman it's 1,200 calories. Any amount less than
the minimum is considered a reduced calorie diet. To our body, a
reduced calorie diet is the same as starvation, a deviation from
the set point, and is perceived as a mortal threat.
When we go on
a reduced calorie diet, we are disrupting our body's homeostasis,
and our body reacts in a number of ways.
Diets
Slow us Down
One way our
body responds to food deprivation is by slowing down. We become
listless and sedentary. The body acts as though we are living in
a time of famine and the population of the world is at stake. The
body conserves our energy so that we and our species may survive.
A striking illustration of the extremes to which the body will go
in order to conserve its resources is seen in the studies of malnourished
Biafran pregnant women who give birth to normal babies. Even though
the expectant mothers are starving, their bodies divert food energy
to their unborn babies. One way the body conserves energy is by
making the mother listless and sedentary - she spends most of her
pregnancy lying down. The fetus gets what it needs because the expectant
mother's metabolism decreases.
When we starve
ourselves involuntarily (famine) or voluntarily (dieting), our body
responds to this potential threat to survival by decreasing our
metabolism. Basically, this means that we slow down until we need
fewer calories to maintain our body's everyday processes (our minimum
daily requirement of calories decreases). In fact, if we are habitually
on diets, our metabolism will be chronically slow. Some habitual
dieters require only 700 calories per day to maintain their present
body composition! Habitual dieters are not without hope - with time,
the minimum daily requirement of calories can be increased.
Diets
Make Us Fatter
In addition,
when deprived of food, our body increases its efficiency by holding
on to every bit of food we put into it. Kelly Brownell, Ph.D., a
psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine,
has been doing research on this very principle. She wanted to find
out if there was a physiological factor that caused people to gain
weight faster after a diet and also lose weight slower in later
attempts at dieting. She did experiments on rats - putting them
on and off diets. The results were amazing! In her article entitled,
"Yo-Yo Dieting: Repeated attempts to lose weight can give you
a hefty problem," she reveals the following:
"The yo-yo
dieters needed 21 days to lose their excess weight during the first
cycle. But after they regained this weight and started the second
cycle, it took them 46 days to lose it again, even though their
diet was exactly the same. There was even a greater difference in
the time it took for the rats to put the weight back on. In the
first cycle, the animals needed 45 days to return to their obese
weight after they came off their diet. To regain the same weight
in the same cycle took only 14 days. Weight loss was two times slower
and regain was three times faster during the second round of yo-yo
dieting than during the first round."
It appeared
that our animals were responding to dieting by using food more efficiently.
They gained more body weight per gram of food eaten, and so were
able to maintain their weight on fewer calories. This formed the
comerstone of our "cycling hypothesis." We thought that
weight loss and regain enhanced the efficiency of food use, and
that weight would be lost more slowly and regained more rapidly
with successive cycles. Since the body needed fewer calories, the
same number of calories that led to stable weight, or even weight
loss, before dieting could produce a weight increase afterward.
Weight cycling could actually contribute to obesity.
Every time we
yo-yo, by going on a reduced calorie diet, weight loss becomes slower
and weight gain becomes faster. What's worse, when we gain the weight
back, we don't gain back muscle and bone, we gain back fat. We become
even fatter - the average dieter gains back 105% of the lost fat
within a year. Not only do we become fatter, we reduce our body's
lean body mass (muscles, heart, bones, and vital organs) but very
little fat.
Diets
Damage Our Bodies
Even with a
decreased metabolism and increased efficiency of food use, most
diets still don't give us enough calories to live on. With so few
calories, our body has to cannibalize our muscles and vital organs
just to get enough energy to make it through the day. This is how
quick weight loss diets get us to lose "weight" so fast
- much of the weight we're losing is muscle, vital organs, bone,
and water - but again, very little fat.
When we diet,
the body uses muscle and organ protein to burn as fuel instead of
precious body fat. Our body conserves body fat and saves it as the
last resource to burn, like a dragon zealously guarding its pile
of gold. This is a natural part of our body's survival mechanism.
Why? Researchers believe that the body does not want to let go of
its precious supply of fat because it is more important to our survival
than muscle, bone, etc. Fat is essential for our nerves, skin, day
to day energy, and protection. We can live without muscles (we could
lie in bed all day) and with thin bones (osteoporosis) but without
some body fat we would literally fall apart.
A perfect illustration
of this can be seen in the concentration camp survivors. When they
were liberated, they had hollow stomachs and were just "skin
and bones." It was found that they had surprisingly high amounts
of body fat, even though they'd lost a majority of their muscle
tissue, body fluids, and bone density.
This preference
for burning muscle and vital organ tissues instead of fat carries
with it some sad implications. First, muscle is more metabolically
active than fat. This means that the more muscle we have, the higher
our metabolism is, the higher our minimum daily requirement, and
thus the more food we need to eat (this is why professional athletes
and weight lifters can eat so much). If we have lost muscle mass
through dieting, and then gain the weight back in the form of fat,
we have decreased our metabolism and thereby made it more difficult
to lose weight again.
According to
the Berkeley Wellness Letter:
Yo-yo dieting
thus affords the body repeated opportunities to build up its efficiency
at storing energy - a function of fat cells. Muscle cells, on the
other hand, burn calories, so that along with lost muscle mass,
some of your body's calorie-burning potential disappears.
Losing muscle
and vital organs is also very dangerous to our body. Anorexics and
severe dieters, such as Karen Carpenter, die of heart attacks because
their heart muscle is cannibalized.
Diets
Create Cravings
In addition
to increasing the efficiency of food use and fat conservation, our
body triggers our appetite in an attempt to regain the original
set point of food intake. It does this by giving us all sorts of
cravings for fatty foods, that is: you'll become hungrier, not because
you have a neurotic need to eat more, but because your body can't
tell the difference between a diet and starvation and is making
you hungry for the calories you've been missing.
Not only do
diets increase our desire to binge, they increase our desire to
binge on fat specifically. The psychologist who studied the effects
of yo-yo dieting on rats also found that it wasn't merely the metabolism
that caused this change in weight, but that there seemed to be an
actual change in food preferences. They found that the yo-yo dieters
strongly preferred more fat in their food after dieting.
Diets don't
work because they make our bodies more efficient in saving and storing
fat, they slow us down, they make us hungry, and they make us fatter.
Do
you still want to go on a diet?
Chapter 2 Eat
Without Guilt 1991 Norma Goodridge Furman, Stash Furman et al.revised
September 15, 1997
Brownell, Kelly
(PhD) (1988) Yo Yo Dieting: Repeated attempts to lose weight can
give you a hefty problem. Psychology Today, January 1988, pp.20,
22-23.
U.S. Dept. of
Health, Education, and Welfare (1966) Obesity and Health. Wash.,
DC: US. DHEW, PHS Publication No. 1485.
Wellness Letter
(Jan. 1989) Yo Yo Dieting. Berkeley: University of California Vol.
5, Issue 4, Page 5.
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