Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | Re: The Dimona, Israel, diet study

The message of the Junkfood Science article I quoted is that no type of calorie-cutting regimen seems to get weight off and keep it off over the long term. The people who followed any of the diets studied and stayed on it for the whole two years lost weight initially and then started putting it back on even though they were - as far as anyone could tell - still being faithful to the program. The author attributes this to everyone having a natural weight which the body works very hard to maintain (what used to be called the "setpoint" theory). She seems to think there is a setpoint weight which is basically genetically determined and your body will lower its metabolic rate as you decrease calories in order to stay at your setpoint.

I think that view of the setpoint weight is too simplistic. Several years ago the theory was that we were all born with a setpoint weight but that it was possible to increase that setpoint by overeating enough to gain significant weight. In other words, I might have been born with a setpoint weight of 125 but as I overate and gained weight I drove my setpoint up. The problem, of course, is that once the setpoint goes up getting your weight below that setpoint weight is extremely difficult - your body will do almost anything to hold onto that weight.

I think there's a lot of truth to this but I think there's a missing part of the puzzle - why people eat more than their setpoint weight requires in the first place. Let's say you're a young woman who is 5 foot 5 inches tall and weighs 130 pounds. That's a perfectly healthy weight for that height but considered too heavy cosmetically. So you start dieting to lose weight. I think that if 130 is your setpoint weight you cause your body to panic when you starve yourself to go below it. That means your body fights to hang onto the weight and fights to make you eat more. The more you diet, the more your body wants to pack on weight. Eventually the struggle totally destroys your body's natural sense of what it should weigh and how much it should eat. So you eat based on the situation or on sight of food cues or out of boredom or for a million reasons other than because your body needs fuel to maintain what should have been your normal weight.

If I'm right then what this means is that the more we harangue our children about their weight and the more we deform their eating patterns out of fear of their getting fat, the more we may be setting them up for the very fate we fear they'll suffer. I'm not saying children should eat junk food 24/7 but making kids scared of food and of body fat probably isn't any better an idea physically than it is emotionally. And this can be a very serious problem for girls and young women who are often subjected to incredibly unrealistic expectations.

Exercise is probably the key to regaining and maintaining a healthy weight for most people. I can't find a link but somewhere out there is a program that tracks people who have lost a significant amount of weight (enough so they were considered clinically obese at their heaviest) and kept it off for at least two years (I think that's the criterion). Based on an article I read a few years ago the people being tracked used a bunch of different "diet" plans but the one thing they all had in common was exercise - they all exercised for at least an hour a day. If you believe in the setpoint theory this makes sense since the claim was always that the one thing that could truly re-adjust your metabolic rate was exercise.

So you may be right that losing weight requires a lifestyle change but just eating fewer calories or calories from different sources may very well not do it over the long run - if you have a real weight problem you have to add exercise to the mix. And not knowing that just makes people who try to lose weight strictly through a calorie restricted diet and fail feel worse and worse about themselves for no good reason.

This got really long but the general attitude toward obesity and weight loss drives me nuts. Of course it takes individual effort to lose weight. But when study after study indicates that no matter what weight loss program people try 98% of them cannot achieve and maintain a significant weight loss then there's more to the picture than just weak-willed gluttons who can't control themselves.

(Oh, and as for feeding cattle grain and antibiotics to fatten them up, my understanding is that the antibiotics are to prevent infections that can interfere with getting the cattle ready for market. As for grain, cattle are fed that to fatten up because letting them graze on grass means they're also getting exercise which slows their weight gain - sort of like when humans had to work to get their food. Cattle raisers used to feed cattle meat products to fatten them up (how gross is that). They don't do so now because that's considered the cause of the Mad Cow epidemic in England.)

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[Research tells us fourteen out of any ten individuals likes chocolate. - Sandra Boynton]

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