The time-honored approach to losing weight is to go on a diet and get more exercise– calories in, calories out. It sounds logical. It is logical. The problem is it usually doesn’t work. You shed a few pounds but almost always gain them back. Even if you manage to lose a little weight, it isn’t nearly as much as you wished.
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition recently published an analysis of the results of 29 different weight loss programs conducted by teams of professional nutritionists. The programs involved more than a thousand subjects. Each participant received regular counselling sessions on diet and exercise. The dieters consistently lost weight in the first 6 months of the programs but gained most of it back in two years. After five years, average weight loss was 3 percent of initial body weight.
As an example of what a 3 percent weight loss means, it’s not unusual these days for a person who weighs 150 pounds when they graduate from high school to end up weighing 200 at age 50. A three percent weight loss would reduce such a person’s weight to 194 pounds, better than nothing but nowhere near normal.
When you lose weight by dieting, your body fights back. The appetite control centers in your brain act like a thermostat that counteracts changes. Metabolic reactions come into play that increase your desire to eat and slow your metabolism. Invariably, you gain back most of the weight you lost, sometimes even more.
As futile as weight loss diets seem to be, we continue torturing ourselves. Approximately 45 million of Americans go on a diet every year, but we keep getting fatter. Half of us are overweight and a third are obese. If as Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, then we’re crazy to keep trying to lose weight by dieting.
People tend to blame obesity on lack of willpower, but that doesn’t make sense. The percentage of Americans who are overweight has doubled in the last 50 years. Why would so many of us lose our willpower? Researchers find no psychological differences between individuals who are overweight and those who aren’t. People with remarkable discipline in other aspects of their life often still have trouble with their weight.
Nobody wants to be fat. It’s not only unattractive, it raises the risk of diabetes; heart disease and stroke, wears out the hips, knees and back, causes infertility in women and reduces testosterone levels in men. Most overweight individuals would do virtually anything to have a healthy body weight.
Another Problem We Blamed on Diet: High Blood Cholesterol
Perhaps we should take a lesson from our success in dealing with another problem we blamed on our diet–high blood cholesterol. In the 1950’s researchers discovered that high levels of cholesterol in the blood raise the risk of heart attack. Many of our foods contain cholesterol, so some experts assumed, without proof, that high blood cholesterol comes from eating too many cholesterol-containing foods. They figured that if we could muster up the discipline to stop eating eggs, meat and dairy products, we could reduce our cholesterol level. It sounded logical. Government agencies and medical associations bought into it and started advising Americans to avoid cholesterol-containing foods, but like dieting to lose weight, it didn’t work. Research trials later showed that reducing dietary cholesterol does not prevent heart attacks; it doesn’t even lower blood cholesterol levels.
The level of cholesterol in your blood is not a matter of how much cholesterol you eat; your body makes its own cholesterol. It turns out that the cholesterol in food is difficult to digest. Most of it passes through your intestines and out in your stool. The level of cholesterol in your blood is regulated by your liver, which contains receptors that pull cholesterol out of the blood and excrete it in the stool. Your cholesterol level is determined not by what you eat but by how avidly those receptors remove cholesterol from your blood, and that’s where the problem is.
Scientists have discovered upwards of 1500 genetic variations in the receptors in people’s livers that remove cholesterol from the blood–the human gene pool is full of them. Some cause dangerously high levels of cholesterol; others barely affect it at all. As a result, a large portion of human population–perhaps 30 or 40 percent–have levels of cholesterol in their blood that raise their risk of heart attack–sometimes a lot, sometimes a little, sometimes only when combined with other risk factors such as cigarette smoking, diabetes, high blood pressure or obesity.
The good news is that the number of Americans having heart attacks has plummeted in the past 30 years, and it’s not because they’re eating less cholesterol. You can thank technology. In 1973, two American scientists, Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein, won Nobel prizes for discoveries that led to the development of a type of medication called a statin. One pill a day boosts the cholesterol receptors in the liver, lowers blood cholesterol levels and prevents heart attacks.
If you have high blood cholesterol, it’s not because you eat differently from everybody else. Trying to correct it by avoiding eggs, meat and dairy products won’t work. You can’t change your genes. You’re better off taking medication.
Is trying to lose weight by dieting a fool’s errand like trying to reduce cholesterol by avoiding eggs, meat and dairy products? Like high blood cholesterol, is it something best handled by taking medication?
Another Problem We Blame on Diet: High Blood Pressure
Until recently, strokes–damage to the brain caused by blockage of blood vessels—were the third most common cause of death in America. Most strokes are caused by high blood pressure.
Some people eat so much salt that it raises their blood pressure a little. For years doctors tried to treat high blood pressure by telling patients to avoid salt. However, high blood pressure is not caused by eating too much salt. Most folks can eat all the salt they want without it affecting their blood pressure. It’s the result of genetically programmed disturbances in the kidney that you can’t control by changing your diet.
If you have high blood pressure, you might be able to lower it a few points by restricting salt. However, this rarely lowers blood pressure enough to prevent strokes. Now we have safe, effective medications that lower blood pressure and prevents strokes. One or two pills a day will usually lower it to a safe level.
Thanks to blood pressure medication, the incidence of strokes in the United States has plummeted. It makes little sense to keep trying to treat high blood pressure by reducing your salt intake. You’re better off taking medication.
Is trying to lose weight by reducing calories like trying to lower blood pressure by avoiding salt-something that’s best handled by taking medication?
Trying to lose weight by eating less doesn’t work for the same reason low cholesterol diets don’t work for lowering blood cholesterol levels and low salt diets don’t work for lowering blood pressure. Our weight, like our cholesterol and blood pressure levels, is controlled by things that are difficult to change. Only in this case it’s not our genes that’s causing the problem, it’s our lifestyle.
While it’s true that some people are genetically more prone than others to weight gain, obesity was uncommon until the last 100 years. Now it’s an epidemic. Genes don’t change that fast. Something we’re doing or not doing is making us fat, and it’s proving to be almost as difficult to change as our genes.
The key to understanding what it is about our lifestyle that’s making so many of us fat lies in understanding what’s causing another modern-day epidemic, type 2 diabetes.
