The average American female starts her first diet at age 10. Among American women, nearly half are on diets, struggling to lose an average of 11 intractable pounds. In all, 65 million Americans are engaged in self-starvation at any given time.
Overfed Americans spend $20 billion a year on diet books, foods, pills, support groups and gimmicks they hope will make them look underfed. Yet despite all this dieting, fatness in the United States has been increasing steadily over the last three decades.
”One`s entire life becomes one of dieting,” John Foreyt, a psychologist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told a gathering of 15,000 dietitians recently in San Francisco. Ticking off statistics showing the futility of dieting for most people, and flashing gruesome slides showing the dangerous successes of dieting among anorexics, he urged dietitians to think twice about putting their clients on diets. And he dismissed as ”frauds” and ”charlatans” many of the diet books and diet programs on the market.
”Dieting leads to bingeing,” Foreyt said. ”Bingeing leads to guilt. Guilt leads to dieting. . . . You begin an endless cycle of dieting, dieting, dieting.”
So what`s an overweight person to do? Here`s advice from university- and hospital-based physicians, registered dietitians and psychologists-people who aren`t selling a product or earning royalties for their programs. Some of it comes from presentations at the American Dietetic Association`s 71st annual meeting.
– Eat breakfast: Mom was right. Not only will it make you feel better but eating breakfast will help you lose weight, according to a recent study at Vanderbilt University, presented at the dietitians` conference.
Dietitians put non-breakfast eaters on a 1,200-calorie-a-day diet. One group was given the calories in two meals (lunch and dinner); the other in three meals (including breakfast). The dieters who continued to skip the morning meal lost an average of 12.5 pounds after 12 weeks. But those who ate breakfast lost an average of 19.6 pounds. The breakfast eaters ate less fat and engaged in less binge eating than the others.
The dietitians also recommend low-fat, low-calorie snacking. Spreading calories throughout the day, they say, prevents the big swings in blood-sugar levels that can trigger the irresistible cravings that undo so many diets. Try fruit, vegetables, frozen juice bars, low-fat crackers, breads, bagels, pretzels, air-popped popcorn and skim milk.
– Don`t yo-yo diet: University of Pennsylvania psychologist Kelly Brownell offered dramatic laboratory proof of the dieting-causes-fat hypothesis earlier this year, when he reported on his now-famous experiments with yo-yo dieting in mice.
The first time the mice gained weight, it took them 21 days to lose it. But it took them more than twice as long-46 days-to lose the weight the second time, even though their diets were exactly the same. In the first yo-yo cycle, it took the animals 45 days to regain their weight after their first diet. But regaining the same weight in the second cycle took only 14 days.
Foreyt has since duplicated Brownell`s experiment, with the same results. Most weight-loss experts believe the same principles operate in human dieters. To avoid yo-yoing, experts in the weight-loss business say you should shed pounds very, very gradually. Women should lose no more than one or two pounds a week. Men should lose no more than two or three pounds a week.
– Eat white meat: A new USDA study presented at the conference showed that chicken breasts are less fatty today than they were in 1979, while chicken thighs are fattier. Since white meat has less fat to begin with, the study strengthens the argument for increasing consumption of white meat.
The USDA also reported that trimming away visible fat, cutting off the skin and using low-fat cooking methods can reduce the fat in your chicken by 1 to 3 grams, or 9 to 27 calories per serving.
– Exercise: You can be a couch potato or you can be thin. But unless you have got the kind of maladaptive metabolism that would make you the first to die in any serious famine, you can`t be both. Weight-loss experts from Stanford to Harvard say exercising is the easiest, safest and most effective way to lose weight.
There`s good news and bad news about exercise, though. To lose weight without cutting calories, there appears to be a threshhold of about an hour of exercise a day for many people. Exercise less than that without changing your eating habits and you`ll lose inches, gain strength, improve your cardiovascular health, reduce your risk of certain cancers and feel great-but you might not weigh any less.
But combine exercise (say for a half-hour three times a week) with calorie-cutting, and you`re bound to see results on the scale. – Use your arms: Studies show you can double your caloric expenditure without increasing your heart rate by adding arm movements to your exercise regimen. Aerobic exercises that effectively work all four limbs include low-impact aerobic dance and swimming. You can also swing your arms vigorously when you walk or run, or pump light hand weights when you ride your exercise bike.
– Be nutrition-conscious, not calorie-conscious: Diets fail because long- term deprivation of food is torture. So don`t just limit foods, add new ones.
Experiment with grains like amaranth or quinoa, native South American cereals available in health food stores. Try couscous pudding for dessert, tabbouleh for a salad. Learn recipes for dips based on garbanzo beans and eggplant instead of cream. Try recipes with tofu.
The USDA study found that most women in this country are deficient in iron, calcium, zinc, folacin, magnesium and vitamin B-6. The reason: dieting. The solution: Plan meals based more on the nutrients foods do contain than on the calories they don`t.
– Eat less fat: The fat calories you eat may be more important than the total calories you eat. Some studies suggest that it`s possible to gain weight on a low-calorie diet that`s high in fat.
Public health authorities now urge Americans to eat a diet that derives less than 30 percent of its total calories from fat to reduce heart disease and cancer risks. Some experts think the guideline should be as low as 20 percent.
To figure out how fatty food is, look at the nutrition information on packages. The labels often list both the total calories and grams of fat per serving. Each gram of fat contains 9 calories, so multiply the grams of fat by 9 and compare that to the total calories. A food serving that has 100 total calories and 5 grams of fat, then, is nearly 50 percent fat, since 5 grams of fat supply 45 fat calories.
– Keep drinking (moderately): There are lots of reasons not to drink: It can lead to alcoholism, liver damage, traffic fatalities, lost brain cells, a possible increased risk of breast cancer in women and obnoxious behavior, to mention a few negative outcomes.
But to lose weight is apparently not one of the reasons you should give up alcohol. A recent study showed that women who drink moderately weigh less than women who abstain. One possible reason: Your body has to burn extra calories to repair the liver and other damage the alcohol causes.
– Be realistic: Not everyone can look like a teen-age Soviet gymnast. Your goal should be a weight that you can maintain, and at which you can still enjoy life.
If you can`t do it on your own, a group like Overeaters Anonymous may help. Or try a hospital-based program. At the American Dietetic Association meeting, a University of Massachusetts dietitian reported on a study of 157 patients seen at a hospital clinic for weight loss. Contacted a year after they`d stopped the program, nearly two-thirds of the clients had either maintained or lost additional weight-an impressive record in the weight-loss business. –
