Weight: 225.4 (-5.8)
Fat: 35.3% (-4.0%)
Meals: Not available
Exercise: Light Cardio (Treadmill 30:00 WL3 - 278 calories, 1.75 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back

I'm going to go out on a limb and say something that I think we all know but don't necessarily want to accept: Diets don't work.

Maybe you know someone who has lost weight on a diet. I do. Several in fact. And most diets are very effective in what they set out to do - restrict calories causing weight loss. With some exceptions, it doesn't matter which diet plan you follow. It could be a fad diet, a proven and time-tested system, or even just calorie counting. Most dieters lose weight while following that diet.

The problem is this: diets end. You set a goal, you set the diet rules, you start your diet. Sometimes the diet ends prematurely because some temptation breaks your willpower and you don't recover. But even if you successfully manage to reach your goal, chances are pretty strong that you're going to return to your old eating habits and patterns and you'll gain all that weight back. In fact, most people will gain weight over their diet's initial weight measurement.

Researching this blog post, I found a paper that appeared in American Psychologist that provides some interesting research into dieting. Interestingly, I wrote the title of this blog post before I discovered it. Regardless, here's what they had to say about weight regain:

The more time that elapses between the end of a diet and the follow-up, the more weight is regained. For example, in a study in which obese patients were starved in the hospital for an average of 38 days, patients were followed for varying lengths of time after the starvation period. Among patients who were followed for under two years, 23% gained back more weight than they had lost. Among patients who were followed for two or more years, 83% gained back more weight than they lost.

Later in the paper, they located 14 studies that followed diet participants for at least 4 years after their diet. The conclusion:

The average weight loss on these diets was 14 kg (30.8 lb), and by the long-term follow-up, participants had gained back all but 3 of those kilograms (6.6 lb).

Eight of the studies reported (or made it possible to compute) the percentage of participants who weighed more at follow-up than before they went on the diet. These rates averaged 41% and ranged from 29% (Pekkarinen & Mustajoki, 1997) to 64% (Wadden, Sternberg, Letizia, Stunkard, & Foster, 1989), including one study that found that 50% of the participants weighed more than 5 kg (11 lb) above their starting weight by five years after the diet (Foster, Kendall, Wadden, Stunkard, & Vogt, 1996).

The conclusion of the paper includes this extremely sober warning:

It appears that dieters who manage to sustain a weight loss are the rare exception, rather than the rule. Dieters who gain back more weight than they lost may very well be the norm, rather than an unlucky minority.

Brutal, huh? There's some recommendations there for future research, and a way to perhaps mitigate this regression which I'll discuss in my next blog post. But the fact remains, most folks who diet end up as heavy if not heavier than when they started. The truth is ugly.

I think there are several reasons that this occurs. Unlike the paper in which I quoted I have no research to back me up, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

  1. Most diets have a finish line. You set a goal, you meet the goal, you return to your old ways.
  2. Most dieters are focused on losing weight. They're not thinking about the long term and keeping that weight off.
  3. Most diets depend on denial. You give up your favorite foods, you give up eating out, you give up eating until you feel full.

Obviously if return to eating the same foods in the same portion sizes that you ate when you gained all that weight, you're going to regain all that weight as soon as you decide to stop dieting. And yet how many people lose substantial weight and return to their old eating habits? Without a long-term plan to maintain weight, crossing the finish line means the race is over. A successful diet focuses just as much on keeping the weight off as taking it off, if not more so.

Fast results are the key to keeping some diet participants interested. They need to see immediate results and are eager to reach their goals as fast as possible. To accomplish this, extreme calorie restriction is necessary. Unfortunately your body is smart and realizes when you've restricted your intake of calories. Slowing your metabolism, all the process that your body engages in that burn calories, helps achieve some kind of equilibrium with the calories you are consuming. Eventually you have to either restrict your diet even further, if that's even possible, or you have to start eating more. Now instead of maintaining your weight at your original calorie count, you are storing fat.

My biggest concern, what has caused me the most problems in the past, is that denial is a terrible thing. Everyone is capable of delayed gratification. Even children understand that if you give them a handful of candy now with the promise of more if they don't eat that, they'll wait to eat it. But give them that handful of candy and tell them that you're going to give it to the next kid, and they're going to either sneak a few candies or just gobble it all when you're not looking.

Diets suck so badly because you're not eating in a way that makes you happy. You're used to comfort foods. You're used to sampling the entire buffet. You're used to eating as much as you want, when you want, and what you want. As long as you want to keep eating that way, a diet is just a temporary denial. It's relatively easy to delay gratification; we want to lose weight really badly. We want to be skinny and attractive and healthy and fit. But once we get there, we want that food too.

Without changing this relationship we have with what we eat, diets will always be doomed to fail. You can have an incredibly strong willpower and a sincere desire to lose weight, but as long as you are unhappy with what you are eating and craving something else, you are only a temptation away from falling off the wagon. Knowing something is bad for you isn't the same thing as no longer wanting it.

I recognize that I need to change the way I view food. It's been a comfort and a pleasure. The feeling of being full is one that I enjoy. Taste and texture are far more important to me than calorie content and nutrients. Food is fuel, but it's difficult to remove ourselves from the emotions that we experience when we (over)indulge our sweet and savory cravings.

But knowing I need to change that doesn't tell me how to do that. And until I do, I'm in danger of doing all this for nothing.