Dieting and Weight Loss Study
Robin mentioned reading about a meta-study about weightloss programs, and I found an article about it in the scotsman. Basically, it says that diets are useless, and the only useful weight loss comes through more exercise. The article asks, why do we diet, when we just gain the wait back again?
I'll tell you why we do it. The hint comes down in ( Read more... )
I forgot to mention in my original post that if you do the amount of exercise they're recommending, you get HUNGRY! (I happened to do it several days recently.) And, of course, if you increase your intake to cope with all this output, there go your results.
I also forgot to mention that the 1 hour of jogging is actually time spent doing the exercise itself. When you add in the suiting up, and the standing at street lights, and the showering, it becomes more like 90 minutes - all in all, the weekly equivalent of a part-time job!
Possibly the most useful part of any diet is that it makes you think about what you are eating. The researchers' findings about "yo-yo dieting", however, sadly echo the experiences of virtually everyone I know.
Overall I think our bodies were not intended for the lifestyles we subject them to. If we're really going to spend 7 hours a week "exercising", it seems like some lifestyle re-arrangement must be necessary.
The good news is, it's spring! And the 1/2 hour walk to class has once again become a uniformly pleasant activity.
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I entered this game with the opinion that I could make a significant impact by adding a reasonable amount of exercise, but I quickly found that everything I read told me the opposite. Half an hour on the elliptical is about equivalent to a can of coke. On the other hand exercise increases your resting metabolism and toned muscle burns energy faster than flab so it's part of the approach.
I found the Hacker's Diet to be quite enlightening. He points out that yes, you do have to literally starve yourself - eat less energy than you require - if you're going to lose weight. That simple math made all the difference to me. Of course I've been slipping. I've got to get back into the mindset, back to the gym, etc.
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Also, eating "good" foods (or not eating "bad" foods) doesn't make you lose weight. It's healthy to eat "good" foods, and "bad" foods tend to have more calories per appetite-reduction "unit". But "eating right" doesn't directly influence weight. The most weight-reducing diet I ever went on, actually, was the "don't eat dinner" diet. It was the easiest way to get my system used to having fewer calories in the day (because the evening time was the easiest time to be hungry).
I have generally found, though, that I can't lose weight while working, because being hungry really makes it hard to function at work. I also get both more stressed and more bored, and therefore hungry. Not to mention that I don't have time or energy to work out much. Being a student has been much better.
But there also seems to be another problem, which I think relates back to the first part of my comment. There certainly seem to be "barrier" weights which are difficult to cross. One can lose 5 or 10 kg and then get stuck around one point for months, even though they're eating the same, exercising the same, etc. My theory is that for a certain person, a certain lifestyle has an "equilibrium" point, and more changes are needed to pass it.
Coming back around to my original post, I think people try dieting because it shows direct result for short-term effort. But there are two problems with this: first, the diet is often simply not sustainable, sometimes for good reasons - even psychological ones (an acquaintance told me that she swore off chocolate for a month, but then she stopped, because she discovered that the loss of this enjoyment made her a much nastier person). The second problem is that even if the diet itself is sustainable, it will not result in sustained weight loss.
Increasing activity level is actually much easier in the long-term than making diet "sacrifices". But it requires up-front rearrangement of the daily schedule and shows very little short-term result. In addition, any kind of weight loss generally results in lower energy (during the weight loss period; being more physically fit will actually make you more energetic), and when you have low energy, it is easier (in the short term) to sit around hungry than to go out and move.
When it comes to dieting products and services, of course, there's a great market because they can show short-term success while blaming you for the lack of success in the long term. The problem is that the long term is frequently simply not sustainable.
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