Last year, UCLA researchers published a report about long term weight loss.
News headlines quickly appeared: “Diet’s Don’t Work!”
To be clearer, they should’ve said (though maybe it wouldn’t have made as interesting a headline) is “Restricting calorie intake in order to lose weight does not result in sustained weight loss.”
From UCLA’s news release:
“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.”
Mann and her co-authors conducted the most comprehensive and rigorous analysis of diet studies, analyzing 31 long-term studies.
“What happens to people on diets in the long run?” Mann asked. “Would they have been better off to not go on a diet at all? We decided to dig up and analyze every study that followed people on diets for two to five years. We concluded most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all. Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back.”
People on diets typically lose 5 to 10 percent of their starting weight in the first six months, the researchers found. However, at least one-third to two-thirds of people on diets regain more weight than they lost within four or five years, and the true number may well be significantly higher, they said.
From separate articles, on the same study:
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.
“It appears that dieters who manage to sustain a weight loss are the rare exception, rather than the rule. Dieters who gain back more weight than they lost may very well be the norm, rather than an unlucky minority.”
Read the Reuters article here, or read the full report here (PDF), or read more about the UCLA researchers here.
(Before anyone plays it… “don’t diet, instead change your lifestyle…” means SHIT. The study examined an array of different weight loss programs. I don’t care what you call it. I don’t care how positive you are, how much family support you have, how motivated you are, how disciplined you are. Eventually your body is going to retaliate.)
Even weight-loss experts admit that initial weight loss is mostly a loss of water.
Furthermore, as I recently read in an article titled The Failure of Diets:
When people turn to diets as a means of weight loss, they are met with the strong opposing forces of both genetics and evolution. The body cannot distinguish intentional weight loss from starvation and becomes even more efficient at storing fat for survival purposes, frequently leading to higher than pre-diet weights.
In spite of extremely high rates of failure, dieting is seen as a positive behavior in our society. In a prospective study of high school girls, those who engaged in dieting behaviors were more likely to gain weight during this 4- year period than their non-dieting counterparts. In fact, Glen Gaesser, author of Big Fat Lies, concludes, “A number of studies have shown the inescapable consequence of repetitious cycles of weight loss and gain appear to be even greater accumulations of fat.”
If body size is largely determined by factors beyond the individual’s control, and the culturally-sanctioned route of dieting for weight loss fails 95% of the time and often leads to weight gain, then how can we… continue to sanction dieting as a positive behavior?
Says Gary Foster, Ph.D., clinical director of the Weight and Eating Disorders Program at the University of Pennsylvania:
Now listen to this:
Plasma levels of norepinephrine, insulin, and leptin can help to predict which patients will rebound after a successful weight loss program, a new study suggests.
“It is important to note, Dr. Masuo said, that the rebound rate is high even if dieters adhere to their weight loss regimens.”
“The results suggest that sympathetic overactivity and insulin resistance contribute to rebound after weight loss, she said.”
Dr. William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adds:
Why do we keep banging our heads? What good is it to lose weight if most of us are just going to gain it back again?
Am I saying it’s OK to eat poorly? No.
Am I saying we shouldn’t exercise. Hell no.
Am I saying we are helpless victims and should just accept our weight? No.
Am I saying there aren’t a lucky few people who have been successful at keeping weight off long-term? No. I know they exist. I’ve spoken to some of them. I can count them on one hand. I applaud them and hope they continue to be successful.
What I’m saying is traditional methods of losing weight don’t work in the long-term and it’s harmful to keep believing that they will.
“Eating less” may help you lose weight in the short-term, but this weight loss is not sustainable.
Update: I don’t want to hear any anecdotal stories about successful weight loss regimens unless you can say “kept it off for over 4 years.”
I also don’t want ANY advice on how to eat. Been there and done it so many times I could write my own fucking book.
Also, this post is not about losing 10 pounds “here and there.” This is about losing a lot of weight, and keeping it off.
More posts on this topic forthcoming.
Before you reply to this: if you missed my post on the topic last summer, please read it (and the responses) first.
