If diet programs had to withstand the same scrutiny as drugs, they would never be approved for public use.
For example, imagine taking an asthma medication that improves your breathing for a few weeks, but in the long run causes your lungs and breathing to get worse. Would you really embark on a diet if you knew it could cause you to gain weight?
There are some sobering studies that show dieting promotes weight gain:
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A team of UCLA researchers examined thirty-one long-term studies of dieting and concluded that dieting consistently led to weight gain – up to two-thirds of participants regained more weight than they lost.
Research on nearly seventeen thousand children ages nine to fourteen concluded that weight control diets are not only ineffective in the long run, but may actually promote weight gain.”
According to a five-year study, adolescents who dieted had twice the risk of becoming overweight as those who did not diet. Notably, the dieters did not weigh more than their non-dieting peers at the start of the study. This is an important detail because if the dieters weighed more, it would be a confounding factor (suggesting factors other than dieting, such as genetics).
Studies aside, what have your own experiences with dieting shown you?
Biologically, your body perceives the dieting process as a form of starvation. Your cells don’t know that you are voluntarily restricting your food intake. Your body goes into primal survival mode – metabolism slows down, and cravings for food increase. And with each diet, the body learns and adapts, causing you to gain weight again. As a result, many of our patients feel like failures – when it’s the diets that have failed them.
In addition, dieting can lead to eating disorders, the deadliest of all mental illnesses. Anorexia is often “dieting that went too far,” as patients and their parents say. Not all who diet become anorexics, because eating disorders are complex diseases with multifactorial causes, but for all anorexics, weight loss began when they decided to diet to lose a few pounds.
A normal diet with nutritious and enjoyable meals combined with an active lifestyle where you don’t worry about food, weight, shape or even exercise is the key to a healthy and happy life.
Read the full article here.
Carole Chidiac, MD.
Family Medicine Specialist, Medical Director.
Occupational Medicine
Eating disorders practitioner
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