Encouraging Health

This article over on WebMD.com, “Diets Don’t Work Long-Term”, by Daniel J. DeNoon, verifies what has been rumored over the internet for years.

Don’t start a diet if you’re not prepared to follow it for the rest of your life! Those ‘lose weight quick’ schemes are just that. You lose 10, 20, 30 pounds only to gain them back after a few months? Thats because we dont’ think ‘long term’.

“Traci Mann, PhD, associate professor of psychology at UCLA, was teaching a seminar on the psychology of eating when she noticed something odd about diet studies. Few of the studies followed up on dieters for more than six months. Even fewer followed dieters for a year or more.

Mann wondered what, in the long term, really happens when people go on diets. So she and her students tracked down 31 studies that, one way or another, had at least one year of follow-up data. They were interested in just one number: the percentage of dieters who, over time, gain back more weight than they lose.”

Traci Mann has this to say on the subject of long-term lifestyle changes and weight loss:
” Why don’t diets work? Mann says there are two issues. The first is that it’s just plain hard for people to change their eating behaviors. And the second reason is that even if you do succeed at a diet, the rule of diminishing returns comes into play.

“When you keep to a reduced-calorie diet, your body makes metabolic adjustments that make it harder and harder for you to lose weight,” Mann says. “Your body becomes very efficient, and you have to eat less and less to continue to lose weight. If you had the will to go on a diet, the fact that it steadily becomes less and less effective makes it even harder to stick to it.” ”

The article ends by this statement: “Elements of this lifestyle change, she says, include moderating food intake, increasing physical activity, managing stress without food, and getting treatment for depression and other illnesses that get in the way.

Even though diets don’t work all by themselves, Mann agrees that there’s much people can do.

“I am not saying ‘Don’t diet’ — I’m just saying people should try to eat healthy food in moderation and exercise like mad,” she says.”

Personally, I’ve lost weight by eating a more vegetarian diet, cutting out so much red meat and carbohydrates and calories, in addition to walking 30-45 minutes a day. I lost 20 lbs, but gained it back when events beyond my control had me reverting to comfort food for nearly six months.

For losing weight, contact your health care physicial, discuss what lifestyle changes meet your needs and start on a new life.

lifestyle change, lose weight, calories, carbohydrates, long term weight loss

lifestyle change, lose weight, calories, carbohydrates, long term weight loss