BTW, I’d like to apologize to the OP for the drift from your original question.
Now I actually WILL apologize: Sorry about that.
To get back to that, I’ve only seen a single study that showed that diet pop consumption led to increased weight gain, and I read a layman-news summary, even at that - not the actual study or a professional summary of its results. But since these results are counter-intuitive, and reported only once, I’d want to have a lot more information about how that study was done (particularly blindings, control group selection (did they ASSIGN you to the diet/non-diet group, or let you pick), and sample size) before I drew any conclusions.
My initial impression on reading the news release was “huh - scientists have discovered that people more likely to gain weight are more likely to drink diet pop. How…incredibly obvious.” Sure, there are people who drink diet pop for the taste, but I bet that population is dwarfed by the ones who drink it for weight control. And in that population, you wouldn’t expect a few percent decrease in calories from a pop change to make all that much difference to their general trend toward increasing weight.
So what is ‘right’. I’m seeing signs that my metabolism wants to get balky and I don’t want it to. There are certain things I can’t do; run, do a lot of weights (some damage to the joint of my right thumb). I’ve never been overweight but I’m seeing a couple pounds wanting to creep onto me and I want them to go away and stay away.
I cringe when I see kids drinking chocolate milk. Please don’t tell me it has a role in weight loss. I will need a cite for that.
The only drink that should go in your body is water.
Seems to me that reducing caloric intake (by itself) should be much more effective for weight loss than exercising (by itself), because it’s just so much easier to eat a large number of calories than it is to burn them off.
Of course, that doesn’t take into account other effects like “exercise revs up your metabolism” and whatnot…
You hear it a lot: “So, you want to lose weight? You need to exercise more!” While it’s certainly possible to lose weight solely through exercise, it’s usually not practical for the average person. For most people, losing weight is achieved by modifying the diet. This means eating better/eating less. The primary purpose of exercise is for general health (e.g. jogging for better cardio vascular health).
The problem is if you dont exercise as well you can lose a greater ratio of muscle mass to fat when you diet, so you end up with less lean tissue, so you lower your metabolic rate. So if you ever start eating again, you gain weight even faster. Thats why they call it the yo-yo effect.
Im pretty sure thats right. Thats why the best bet is a combination.
Speaking as someone with some training in human behavior stats, this sounds extremely possible. Two points:
–correlation does not equal causality. In other words, a relationship does not mean one thing causes the other. It could be chance, or, more often, what is probably true in this case, that these are both effects of the same cause: dieting means drinking diet drinks, but it also means low chance of success.
–when you are talking about food, nothing is truly independent. I doubt there is any food that isn’t somehow connected with ethnicity, nationality, income level, or some other factor that could also affect your general health. It reminds me of some of the salmon-eating studies: that stuff is expensive in some of the places they checked, and more expensive means richer people buy it, which means in general access to better health care. That doesn’t mean salmon aren’t healthy to eat – there is other scientific evidence of the benefits of fish oils --but that the true effect probably isn’t known. There is NO true controlling for other variables is this sort of thing. Most of the time, they control for only linear effects (e.g., effects where you can say for every one unit of this stuff, life expectancy always goes down (or up) by this fixed amount of time). Linear effects can account for some of the relationship, but not all of it. In fact, removing the linear effect can sometimes make an effect stronger. When they do remove some non-linear effects, it is still always something predictably curved, leaving a lot of variance unexplained and uncontrolled.
Moral: ask yourself if the effect could have have some non-food explanation, like TimeWinder did, especially if there isn’t something experimental involved. If they’d taken two sets of overweight people, gave one group water and the other diet pepsi, and found a big difference, start to listen. If they isolate a chemical in diet pepsi clearly causing people to overeat, start to listen. Until then, say, 'huh! I’ll be interested to see more data."
Doctor Spiller has a good explanation for why, unless you bathe your teeth in diet soda constantly, they’re not really harmful to your teeth. Tooth decay is pretty much entirely due to sugars being converted to acid.
Well, yeah, you need to eat better/less. But exercise combined definitely DOES help, and it makes you more toned. You can lose weight and still be out of shape.
Other studies said that milk caused kids to gain weight, but it didn’t differentiate between types of milk and parents are told to give their kids full-fat milk while the kids are growing. Another one said there was little effect either way, but the most recent info is that it’s still being studied. So who knows - I think in the end it will turn out that milk does keep the belly flab down. Something’s done it for me and, given that the females on my mom’s side tended to get bigger in that area, it doesn’t seem to be the genes.
And the chocolate isn’t that bad, really. I use Nestle’s Quik; interestingly, there’s quite a bit of magnesium in chocolate powder. And, like I said, having had chocolate milk (for a whole 180 calories per glass using 1% milk) satisfies my sweet tooth and my chocolate craving so I don’t look for sweets or dessert after a meal.
Please explain why it is not possible to exercise more? Can people drive less and walk more. I know people who drive to work when it would be five minute walk. Society is incredibly lazy. We’ll do anything to get out of work. There are tons of things people can do everyday to increase their level of exercise. Here are a few
walk or ride a bike to work
park the car away from work and walk or bike the rest
buy a push mower
walk to the grocery store (and back)
do dishes by hand instead of by machine (standing is better exercise than sitting)
cancel your cable and go for walks
It’s a matter of choice not necessity. Its most important to change lifestyle for any form of self improvement.
Thanks for the links. Milk may be beneficial as a weight loss food for some people. I don’t know what to say about satiating your sweet tooth with chocolate milk. I would not recommend that to anyone. If its works for you, I’m glad. Chocolate as a food has its benefits ( cept for the child slave labour that harvests it) but its the sugar that kills it for me. Anyone interested in losing weight should avoid simple sugars at all costs.