Why Diets Make Us Fat
Why Diets Make Us Fat, by Sandra AAmodt, Ph.D.
This book totally changed how I look at weight loss. If you are thinking of going on a diet, my best advice is don’t do it. Stop thinking about thin, and start thinking about healthy, because the evidence on the efficacy of calorie restriction is grim. 45 million Americans will go on a diet this year and less than 5% will keep their weight off for more than five years. Most dieters will gain back even more weight. To put this in context, you have the same odds for keeping weight off for five years that you do surviving metastatic lung cancer.
Here are some of the highlights I took away from this book
If you have struggled with weight loss, you should know that it is not about willpower, it is about neuroscience.
Dr. Sandra AAmodt is a neuroscientist and biophysicist who studies weight loss. She was the lead scientist in the National Institute of Health funded “Biggest Loser Study.” Her findings from that study, along with her years of research, are outlined in this book.
Studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention repeatedly find the lowest mortality rates among people whose body mass index puts them in the “overweight” and “mildly obese” categories. Recent research suggests that losing weight doesn’t actually improve health biomarkers such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels for most people. But adding exercise, smoking cessation, eating more fruits and vegetables definitively improves health even without weight loss.
Your brain controls your weight by regulating hunger, activity and metabolism. Your brain has a sense of what you should weigh, called your “defended weight.” If you drop about 10 pounds below your normal weight, your brain is going to work to bring you back to what it thinks is your normal or correct weight, whether that is 120 pounds or 250 pounds. Your brain is wired this way to prevent starvation. Our brains have not caught up with the fact that we live in a world with an abundance of high calorie food. Instead, it still operates the way it did when we had to endure extended periods of time without much food.
If you have ever been on a diet that restricts calories, you will probably have noticed that your energy drops, you feel cold, and you can’t stop thinking about food. This is your brain doing its job to keep you at your defended weight. It is slowing your metabolism to save energy and increasing your desire for food so that you seek out more calories to get you back to “normal.” Repeated food deprivation (diets) changes dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the brain that govern how we respond to rewards that increase our motivation to seek out food. This explains binging.
Defended weight ranges can go up, but they can almost never go down. The more often someone goes on a diet, the more likely it is that they will actually see increased weight gain. Diets are stressful. Calorie restriction produces stress hormones that act on fat cells to increase abdominal fat. This is the type of fat that is associated with heart disease and diabetes.
Relying on “rules,” instead of hunger, makes us likely to eat more because we are more vulnerable to external cues like advertising.
Gut bacteria, genetics, sleep and stress are all important contributors to weight.
Dieting teaches us to ignore the body’s signals of hunger, which leads most people to overeat when the opportunity arises. Long-term deprivation leads to binge eating.
What to do
- Healthy is much better than thin and much more achievable
- Focus on not gaining weight instead of losing weight
- Exercise regularly. Is critical for good health.
- Make changes that can be maintained for life
- Practice mindful eating by paying attention to hunger and fullness cues; this is very important.
- Eating more plant based foods cooked at home
- Stop blaming people for their weight. Stop blaming yourself.