Dieting overview

back to healthread back to diet page The other side of dieting

Dieting is really an abuse of the "starvation relief" system in which the body will maintain keep you alive with less food than you need for a while. But it does so by cannibalizing itself because it can only obtain energy (simple sugar) from stored body fat. Thus it helps itself (in a condition of starvation or semi starvation) from its own organs (source of protein, B12 and iron) and muscle tissue which feeds you when you don't eat and also reduces the amount of calories you need per day- something which someone who feels restricted on a diet may not want to happen. This cannibalizing of organs is of course, not healthy for the organs and has been proven to raise the risk for many maladies including heart disease, liver damage and gall bladder damage. It works well to keep you from dying if there is no food available. It may not work well at all to produce good health and longevity if there IS food available and you do it for long term.

Dieting was invented back when they knew a lot less about how the body works than they do now. Advocates of diets usually give examples of the health of people "living a primitive existence" as a proof of the benefits of calorie restriction, restriction of certain food groups etc. What they are forgetting, of course, is that before 1920, the average life span was about 35-40 years and about 3/4 of the children born never made it to adulthood so that those who DID live were extraordinarily strong.

One problem with weight control in general is determining what IS a good weight for each individual. This seems to vary greatly and be heavily influenced by many factors including heredity, athleticism, environment, background and interestingly enough, how much you have dieted in your life (dieting tends to raise the body's set-point when regain happens). The so called BMI scale, never meant to be anything other than a quick gage for medical providers to alert them to examine for the so called "obesity diseases", is totally lacking as far as determining a healthy weight. The scale is not much better. Some say a better gage is bodyfat percentage but it's difficult to measure bodyfat percentage accurately (scales like Tanita can be as much as 20 points too high and dunking which is reasonably accurate, is cumbersome and not very available).

At this point, it appears that the only way of permanently keeping weight down to the figure YOU want (which is usually different from what your body wants) is severe calorie restriction (for example, Richard Simmons has written that he cannot eat more than 1400 calories a day without gaining - and he works out 2 hours or more a day) or surgically altering your digestive system to not work well, cause digestive issues and perhaps causing you to want to eat drastically less calories (as in Weight Loss surgery) - however, the long term results of these surgeries other than discomfort or health issues are not impressive as far as maintaining a so called "ideal weight" - in one study only 7 percent of patients kept all the weight they lost off with gastric bypass - Hebrew U, 1993.

Bottom line is no one, neither surgeons nor the AMA guarantees long term weight loss with even something so drastic as surgery (and obesity researcher, Rudy Leibel calls it a "draconian solution"). As far as calorie restriction, a small percentage of folks can do it for long periods, but then, there is no evidence that this is a healthy way of life and some evidence that calorie restriction may actually cause long term problems like osteoporosis, anemia and more (The food Institute of the UK found in several studies, that long term dieting can cause permanent brain damage -well, the brain is a good source of protein incase you don't eat enough)..

Because of the lack of a gage of a HEALTHY weight, the schema of H.A.E.S. was developed (Health at Every Size). This calls for advocating healthy food choices (as recommended by the FDA and the state of the science), avoiding junk and fast food and chemicals like transfat and food additives, and eating in moderation to satiety without regards for maintaining a certain weight. There are many studies showing that people die, not from obesity, but from disease caused by poor food choices and sedentary lifestyle (McGinnis-Foege- "300,000 people a year die from disease in which poor food choices and sedentary lifestyle is a factor"- 1993, JAMA 270 - Nov 10, 1993 pp 2207-2212). This makes H.A.E.S. a reasonable and healthy way of life for all individuals regardless of size.