Could you define what you mean by dieting? If you are talking about ‘diets’ in the sense of reducing calories by some fad diet such as the Soup Diet, or the Krispy Kreme Diet, etc. then I would agree that it doesn’t work long term. Anyone who goes down that path I agree is headed for disaster.
If you are saying that ‘dieting’ in terms of taking a well balanced approach to food with moderate portions and moderate exercise then I would disagree with you. The study you cited discussed ‘diets’ and not eating sensibly–they are very different things.
So could you define what you mean by dieting?
Thanks
“Diets don’t work in the long term” and “Virtually nobody can voluntarily change their weight long term” are two very different statements.
It seems pretty clear there are two ways that “diet” is being used - one is to temporarily change your eating habits, usually until you hit a goal weight. This is not the “diet” that people in this thread are talking about. They’re talking about sustainable, permanent changes in diet and lifestyle.
Right. Because if you go back to the environment in which our kind evolved, the amount of physical activity required to obtain fatty or sugary foods was many multiples of what’s required of us today. You will most likely remain thin and fit if you follow these limitations: You can eat all the fatty stuff you can catch. That’s not much, and you expend a lot of energy to do so. You can eat all the sweet stuff you can find – in nature, not in a store. It’s not very much – ripe fruit in season, boiled tree sap, honey (if you are willing to risk bee stings).
Our life today is the opposite. What all these studies are saying is simply to go back to our roots: eat less fat, eat less sugar, engage in more physical activity. It’s oh, so simple. And oh, so difficult to do when you have a desk job, sit all day long and need to force yourself to run nowhere on a treadmill when you really want to do the opposite. When all those fatty and sweet things are there for the taking and millenia of evolution is telling you that you should eat them.
Nobody is disputing the fact that IF you reduce your caloric intake and IF you increase your activity level, you WILL lose weight.
What we’re talking about is whether merely telling people to do that is an effective way to combat the public health problem of obesity.
The answer, as Wesley Clark has shown, is a resounding “no”. It doesn’t work. It’s about as effective as telling addicts “Just stop doing drugs, geez!”.
No doubt, if an alcoholic stops drinking, or if a smoker stops smoking, they will become a lot healthier and be a lot better off.
But somehow, just telling them “hey, stop doing that!” is not effective. And yet, people seem to think that we obese people could stop any time we wanted. It’s just a matter of “willpower”, after all, right? And we all have infinite willpower, right?
Tell that to the gang smoking outside the bar next time you go.
True…but if that’s the case, does that necessarily mean that some people are obese because of evolution? Maybe they’re just an exception as well.
I always was wondering–is our perception of normal getting skewed? I was on another board reading about how it’s hard for normal women to find clothes someone talked about their problems as a 5’1/150 pound woman and said that they were in fact smaller than the average. In what world is that smaller than average? Or is it just me?
The problem is that making those changes “sustainable” many not be in the realm of possibility for many people.
They’ve found, for instance, that many people hit a period at six months into a major change in weight diet and lifestyle where they get utterly absurd cravings and urges to binge that are very hard to resist.
IMHO some people are obese because their bodies are very efficient and use less fuel than average which, as has been stated numerous times would have been an advantage in times of famine. Most of us who are fat are not suffering from any malady but are simply too sedentary and eat too much of the wrong things.
All too true, in my own experience. And if you try to change gradually, the results are so subtle and slow in appearing, you can easily get discouraged and go back to eating doughnuts for breakfast.