MSNBC has a health article claiming that weight loss is most effectively achieved via calorie restriction. The dreaded “calories in – calories out” phrase is peppered through-out.
Eight hundred and eleven participants were put on four different diets to see if low-fat or high-protein, etc. even matter in weight loss. This study says the type of diet doesn’t matter so much as calorie restriction.
For Pete’s sake… if it was THIS easy, would anyone still be fat? Calorie restriction is a very old idea. It has at least been around since the 80’s, when I recieved my dieting learner’s permit and was taking my first calorie restriction out for a spin. Did it cause weight loss? Sure! Was the weight loss sustainable? Nope. In my heaps of dieting experience, I’ve found that cutting calories is the most effective way to cause a famine response (sorry, folks… couldn’t find a link that described the famine response experience better that didn’t also circle back to dieting… sigh) from the body. Ya know… that bit when your body decides there must be a famine and starts you obsessing about food, feeling extreme hunger, the metabolism slows and the only way to lose weight is to continually accelerate calorie cutting until you are eventually eating nothing and still plateauing or even gaining weight. *headdesk*
What really makes me laugh (in frustration and anger) is that the most common advice for dealing with plateaus is to stick through it. Keep exercising more and eating less. Uh huh, so, we can deepen the famine response, gain more weight and buy more diet gimmicks? What a neat-o trick to make billions of dollars!
What I really don’t like about (any diet really, but… in this case, I’ll say…) calorie restriction is that it is imposing external measures for food intake, when our bodies are far more able to deal with this kinda thing in a healthy way. You see, we have this thing called “hunger”. It is a signal that our bodies need more fuel and/or nutrients. Some days a body will need more calories than others – a calorie restriction regime cannot take this into account – which can exacerbate the famine response. Nevermind that is has been known since forever that 95-99% of diets don’t work and that most people gain all the weight back with interest. Yes, calorie restriction is a diet – 95-99% likely to fail before five years are up. Of course, this study only followed participants for two years. *headdesk*
Interestingly:
Other experts were bothered that the dieters couldn’t keep the weight off even with close monitoring and a support system.
“Even these highly motivated, intelligent participants who were coached by expert professionals could not achieve the weight losses needed to reverse the obesity epidemic,” Martijn Katan of Amsterdam’s Free University wrote in an accompanying editorial.
What kind of journalist doesn’t dig more when you get this information? The dieters couldn’t keep the weight off? How many? What percentage? Did MSNBC even ask?
Beyond that, even this “key to weight-loss” (quoted straight from the bolded line further detailing the headline) cannot reverse the epidemic (that does not exist)?
As usual, the last few blurbs in the article shread the 95% of the story that came before it. LOL It is ridiculous to me that these “news pieces” are so popular and that too many folks are going to read this thing and cut calories because of it.
Our bodies are so much wiser than most people given them credit for. Real willpower in this society is listening to your body (or re-learning to do so, if you have forgotten – using the Intuitive Eating approach, for example) and not doing things that are likely to cause weight cycling (yo-yo weight loss) to the great detriment of your health.
–AngryGrayRainbows
Angry Gray Rainbows 
Yeah, every time someone comes out with a “new” diet that is supposed to make one magically thin, I can say “been there done that, didn’t work the last time”. The thing is, even my doctor buys into that calorie restriction leads to permanent weight loss, as long as you stick to the diet.
I told her I have personal proof that it doesn’t. I went on a doctor-supervised diet many years ago, and I stuck to it faithfully. 1500 calories a day and I lost 40 lbs in 4 months, then plateaued. So he cut me back to 1200 calories a day. I lost another 20 lbs in 4 months, and plateaued again. So he cut me back to 1000 calories a day (and did I mention that the less food I ate, the bitchier I became?), and I lost 10 lbs in 6 months. Then I plateaued for about a month, and started gaining weight. He wanted me to cut back to 800 calories a day. I told him thanks, but no thanks, I was going back to the 1500 calories a day. When I went back to 1500 calories a day, I regained that 70 lbs I lost, and another 40 before I quit gaining weight. I maintained that weight on 1800 calories a day until my next diet attempt. But according to my doctor, if you stick with the diet, it will work for permanent weight loss. I don’t know what world she’s living in, but it sure as hell isn’t the one in which I live.
Every time I’ve ever dieted, I’ve lost weight, but the weight has never stayed off. It’s always managed to find me again and bring a few more friends back with it. After my WLS failed 11 years ago, I said never again, no more diets, no more WLS. I was meant to be fat, and nothing I can do will ever change that. Hell, nothing the doctors can do will change it either, but it’s next to impossible to convince some of them of that (and I don’t know how many doctors who have put me on diets have labeled me noncompliant when I started gaining the weight back). I’ve been fat for 35 years, you’d think they’d believe me when I say dieting doesn’t do anything but make me fatter (all they have to do is look at my records to see how my weight has crept up over those 35 years, I started out at 235 lbs after my daughter was born, from 175 lbs when I got pregnant with her).
[…] Tara had the following feed-back regarding my last post: I am confused. Your body probrably has hundreds of thousands of Calories stored as fat, so why […]
Magically thinner is right! It seems to me that folks find fat so unacceptable that anything less than magical and immediate results is unacceptable for many people.
I hear you about docs not getting that bit about diets making you gain weight. There seems to me a lot of magical thinking around weight loss… regardless of all the science that shows that diets don’t work and they can cause lots of problems, docs, in large numbers, still seem to feel obligated to push diets and diety ideas. Ick.
I think it takes a lot of fortitude to stick to what you know is true when the whole world is skeptical. I propose that we keep telling them… maybe someday if enough of us do, they will start to hear us.
[…] or even just something that falls into the overweight category on the chart?? Overwhelmingly, science disagrees with this idea that diets can work – no, not even when we call it “weight restoration.” What kind of recovery […]