Is this the week for popping balloons or what? Because today we learn, courtesy of a study in the April issue of American Psychologist, that diets don't work! That's right -- what any fat person could have told you long ago, diets just do not work.
""You can initially lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back," said Traci Mann, UCLA associate professor of psychology and lead author of the study. "We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Sustained weight loss was found only in a small minority of participants, while complete weight regain was found in the majority. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people."...
"Several studies indicate that dieting is actually a consistent predictor of future weight gain," said Janet Tomiyama, a UCLA graduate student of psychology and co-author of the study. One study found that both men and women who participated in formal weight-loss programs gained significantly more weight over a two-year period than those who had not participated in a weight-loss program, she said....
Diet studies of less than two years are too short to show whether dieters have regained the weight they lost, Mann said.
"Even when you follow dieters four years, they're still regaining weight," she said.
One study of dieting obese patients followed them for varying lengths of time. Among those who were followed for fewer than two years, 23 percent gained back more weight than they had lost, while of those who were followed for at least two years, 83 percent gained back more weight than they had lost, Mann said. One study found that 50 percent of dieters weighed more than 11 pounds over their starting weight five years after the diet, she said.
Evidence suggests that repeatedly losing and gaining weight is linked to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and altered immune function. Mann and Tomiyama recommend that more research be conducted on the health effects of losing and gaining weight, noting that scientists do not fully understand how such weight cycling leads to adverse health effects."
Now, sit back and watch to see how widely this gets reported in the press. My guess -- hardly at all. Because we practice what we believe and the vast majority of people, including health care professionals, believe that obesity is due to gluttony and sloth and that the solution is easy -- eat less and exercise more. That almost no one manages to sustain a significant wight loss for more than a couple of years simply means they lack discipline and will, not that dieting itself is a problem rather than a solution. There's a multi-billion dollar industry built on that assumption.