More reasons not to diet

This post is a follow-up to an earlier one about dieting, which basically says that your body wants to be a certain weight, which is why you regain the weight you lost. Sandra Aamodt, a neuroscientist, tells us the same thing: “The root of the problem [inability to lose weight and keep it off] is not willpower but neuroscience.” When your weight drops below what is normal for your body, your body not only burns fewer calories but also produces more hunger-inducing hormones. When you lose weight, your brain declares a state of starvation emergency and institutes these corrective measures.  “The brain’s weight-regulation system considers your set point to be the correct weight for you, whether or not your doctor agrees.” 

Dieting just makes matters worse. After about five years, 41 percent of dieters gain back more weight than they lose. For example, in a study of 4,000 twins, researchers found that dieters were more likely to gain weight than their non-dieting identical twins. Even worse, studies show that dieters are more likely than non-dieters to become obese over the next one to 15 years. For example, a study of elite athletes who dieted to qualify for their weight classes (boxers and wrestlers) were three times more likely to be obese by age 60 than their peers who competed in other sports.

What’s more, we’ve been taught to believe that being fat can be deadly—that you’ll develop diabetes or heart problems and die an early death. In fact, there’s little evidence that dieting improves health. For example, in a 2013 six-year study of obese and overweight people with diabetes, researchers compared those who dieted with those who didn’t and found that the dieters had a similar number of heart attacks, strokes, and deaths from heart disease as those who didn’t diet. More recently researchers who studied a group of overweight diabetics for 19 years found that intentional weight loss had no effect on mortality. Yet another study showed no relationship between health improvements and amount of weight lost.

Thus based on all the evidence, according to Aamodt, “Dieting is rarely effective, doesn’t reliably improve health, and does more harm than good.” So stop it.

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