WHY DIETS DON'T WORK

Why diets don't work

Dieting is a losing battle. As you reduce your food intake as part of a diet to lose weight, your body puts itself on 'famine alert'. It gets the impression that food is scarce and therefore it slow down your metabolism to get the best use of the small amount of food it is receiving. If, for example, you crash diet for a week and then go back to your normal pattern of eating, you will be consuming your normal diet with a slower metabolism which means you will regain the lost weight and maybe even put on new weight.




Exploding the Diet Myths


Are these statements true or false?


1. If you eat less you will lose weight.
2. Eating any form of fat is unhealthy and must be avoided.
3. Snacking between meals will make you put on weight.
4. Foods that are labelled 'low fat' will help you slim.
5. You must stick to a reduced diet to become thinner.
6. If you skip breakfast you'll lose weight because it reduces your, daily calorie intake.
7. You must exercise at a high intensity to lose fat.
8. Margarine is better for you than butter.
ALL OF THE ABOVE ARE FALSE 


Eat little and often

With most diets, you will lose only a small amount of fat before your body's fat protection mechanism swings into action. In this state of £amine, your body will hold on to fat, break down muscle and lose water. But, if you eat little and often, your body 'knows' that food is plentiful. It doesn't need to store any excess in case there is a shortage and it can keep your metabolism at a good level.

What is a calorie?

A calorie, in scientific terms, is a unit of heat and is the energy-producing property of food. The idea has been that if the number of calories going into your body is less than the calories being used up by bodily activity and exercise, then you will lose weight. Nowadays, though, we know that the type of calorie is also an important factor in this equation and we need to consider its source - whether it's from fat, protein or carbohydrate.

Fat or energy

Food can be converted into fat or energy. You can either store what you eat, which means you will probably put on weight, or you can use it as you expend energy in life's activities. Whether food is burned or stored is determined by a number of chemical reactions which are activated by enzymes, which in turn are dependent upon vitamins and minerals. However, not all types of foods are easy to convert into energy and when their conversion is not possible the body stores them as fat, which is a sign that it is not metabolising the food properly.

Crash diets

When you go on a diet your body cannot distinguish between a diet and a journey through the desert. It doesn't know whether the small portion of food you have just given it will be the last food it's going to get for a long while. So its defence mechanisms step in and it holds on to any food it comes across.

A little bit won't hurt

Imagine that you have been dieting for a couple of days and a friend brings you a cake. You decide to take a taste of the cake on the basis that 'a little bit won't hurt'. Once you begin to eat you find you can't stop and before you realise it you've eaten half the cake! Instantly damaging emotions such as guilt and anger take over. But your response was a simple and quite natural, biological urge. Your body prepared itself for the possibility that the cake might be a last chance to stock up. It triggered into action a cocktail of chemicals which are programmed to act on your behalf in terms of survival but not in terms of your waistline. Quite simply, trying to lose weight rapidly by crash dieting is against your body's programming. It requires you to be in a biologically unnatural state where energy intake is less than energy expenditure. Your mind and body quickly hear alarm bells and resort to strong tactics to persuade you to eat normally.

Listen to your hunger urges

Instead of crash dieting try working in harmony with your body and its natural urges of hunger - you will be able to eat well, stay healthy and maintain your ideal body weight. A study published by the 'American Journal of Clinical Nutrition' in 1996 showed that keeping our weight stable over long periods of time is linked with the best health. It is fine to lose excess weight but the problem is what is termed 'weight cycling', where weight is lost, then gained, then lost again and so on. Studies have shown that weight variations caused by yo-yo dieting may be associated with health problems such as increased risk of diabetes, high blood pressure and increased mortality risk from coronary heart disease.

Women have more fat cells than men

A man has 26 billion fat cells, or adipocytes, in his body while the female average is 35 billion. Fat comprises 27% of an average woman's total bodyweight but for a man comprises only 15%. There are biological reasons for women to have more fat on their bodies than men. Fat is essential for reproduction and therefore nature keeps fat stored on the female frame just in case a pregnancy begins. It is also necessary for ovulation - it's known that girls don't begin to menstruate until their bodies are composed of at least 17% fat. Some women who have taken dieting to the extreme over a long period of time have found that they couldn't conceive. Athletes, gymnasts and anorexics can also find, albeit for different reasons, that their periods will stop if their body fat stores fall too low. A study published in the medical journal 'The Lancet' in 1998 showed that men prefer women to be curvaceous - curves signify fertility and health which men find attractive.
The message from the author of the study, Dr Tovee of Newcastle University's Psychology Department, is that 'women are much better putting on too much weight than losing too much weight'.

Weight and the menopause

As the ovaries produce less and less oestrogen during the menopause, body fat becomes an alternative manufacturing plant for this vital hormone: oestrogen helps the older woman combat the risk of osteoporosis. Fat produces oestrogen all our lives, which is why low-and no-fat diets, so often recommended to slimmers, are a big mistake for women throughout their lives. During and post menopause, body fat is even more vital to good health and it can be quite natural to be a few kilograms (half a stone) over the pre-menopausal weight. However, the balance is delicate: too much body fat post menopause and you run the risk of having too much oestrogen in your body - a state known as oestrogen dominance - and that has health risks, such as breast cancer, attached to it.
Not surprisingly it is now believed that being the right weight for height is very important in ensuring the post-menopausal woman has enough fat for the production of oestrogen. The body mass index (BMI) is the best way to determine this. Several studies have shown that BMI is a reliable indicator of osteoporosis risk. One demonstrated that women aged 45 to 59 whO had suffered fractures had an average BMI of 22.5, while those without fractures had an average BMI of 25.3. As the BMI falls, bone density declines even in the absence of fractures. It seems that losing a significant amount of weight quickly may be particularly relevant to loss of bone mass. Nature may have tipped the scales against women in their fight against fat but has also protected itself from the vanities of the female by making it harder for women to lose weight than men.

When dieting becoms a way of life

When you begin to diet it's not always easy to know when to stop. Dieting becomes a way of life and it's possible to feel 'naked' or 'unprotected' when you aren't on one. This mindset can make you set unrealistic goals. To aim to shed every gram of excess fat is to make the hurdle too high to jump, not just in terms of willpower, but, as we've just discussed, in health terms too.

We can't all be a size 10

Marilyn Monroe

Of course to be obese is dangerous. To be over-weight to the point of possibly damaging your health is daft and must be tackled, but how many of us are naturally a size 10? For a start not all of us have the bone structure and general body frame for that - in fact the average size for women in the UK is 16. As nature has already determined your size, trying to be any smaller is probably a waste of time. An interesting study looked at a random sample of 1,053 women aged 30-74 and found that only 25% were satisfied with their weight. A staggering 71% of the women wanted to be thinner and yet 73% of them were at their normal weight. Many attempted dieting even when they were at their medically correct weight.

Thin v. curvaceous - a dictate of fashion?

A desire for a sylph-like body is by no means universal, nor has it always been with us. Big women in Fiji and Arabia, for example, are considered to be attractive, while the West's greatest ever sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, was a size 16. Time was when curves like hers were highly desirable, but now, with waif-like supermodels to emulate, women expect to be so thin that millions remain on a permanent diet. Of course, there are health risks in being excessively overweight, but it seems that our society has now swung too far the other way, with many women literally starving themselves to some extent every day.

By Dr Marilyn Glenville in the book " Natural Alternatives to Dieting", published in Great Britain in 1999 by Kyle Cathie Limited, London, excerpts from pages 16 to 19. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

Dr Marilyn Glenville, PhD is a nutritional therapist, psychologist, broadcaster and author of the internationally best-selling "Natural Alternatives to HRT". She obtained her doctorate from Cambridge University. She is the Chair of the Governing Council for the British Association of Nutritional Therapists and the Chair of Foresight (the association for the promotion of pre-conceptual care) as well as a scientific adviser to the Society for the Promotion of Nutritional Therapy.