Myths about weight loss

I gained six pounds over last few months. Maybe it was the holidays. At any rate, I'm not dieting. I'm waiting for them to drop off on their own. So far, I've dropped 2-1/2. As I’ve said in earlier posts, your body wants to be a certain weight.

Losing weight and keeping it off is next to impossible. Nevertheless, you see all kinds of advice on dieting, and most are myths. Here are some examples based on obesity research:

• Losing weight slowly works better than losing it quickly: Not true. Studies show that after three years everyone who had lost weight regained it irrespective of whether they’d lost it quickly or slowly.
• Avoiding snacks helps you maintain weight loss: There’s no evidence that snacks undermine weight loss.
• Building muscle speeds up your metabolism: Building muscle has almost no effect on resting metabolism, which is what your muscles are mostly doing (you aren’t running around flexing your muscles all day). If a 175-pound man adds 4-1/2 pounds of muscle, he’ll burn an extra 24 calories a day.

Sad but true: not only does your body slow its metabolism to compensate for weight loss, if you lose 10 percent or more of your weight by dieting, your muscles start using genes that make them more efficient. That is, they’ll burn 20 to 30 percent fewer calories for the same exercise. Your body wants to stay the same!

Is there hope? Not much. No diet or weight-loss regimen is guaranteed to work, but people can often maintain a loss of 5 percent of their weight. According to anecdotal evidence, people who succeed in keeping weight off do so by constant vigilance: controlling what they eat, exercising a lot, and putting up with hunger. Forget that!

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