Why chasing an hourglass figure is a fool's errand.

 

ursus@zdeneksasek.com | Deposit Photos

It's close enough to New Year's that we can talk about resolutions, right? And people still automatically write "I will lose weight this year" as one of their resolutions, right?

Perhaps capitalizing on this trend, BBC Science Focus magazine has an article in its latest issue called, "Key weight-loss mystery solved: New research suggests fat cells have a 'memory'". (I would love to give y'all a link to this article, but it looks like you have to subscribe to see the articles in the latest issue. I have access through Apple News+, which I have found to be a decent news aggregator.)

The article quotes Dr. Ferdinand von Meyenn, assistant professor at ETH Zurich's Department of Health Sciences and Technology, on a recent study conducted by him and his team. They looked at a group of people, some of whom were "living with obesity" (their phrase) and some who weren't, who had lost 25 percent of their body mass index, and compared the differences in DNA sequences in their fat tissue before and after the weight loss. What they discovered -- brace yourselves -- is this: "The body really fights against [weight loss] and wantes to return to its original weight. The adipose tissue is programmed to want to regain that weight." 

As a reformed yo-yo dieter, I am here to say: No shit.

He goes on to say that people who lose weight and can't keep it off aren't weak: "There really is an underlying molecular mechanism driving gaining the weight back."

As the same reformed yo-yo dieter: Also no shit. 

We have discussed this several times here on hearth/myth. To save you from trawling through years of posts, I will give you the link once again to Wikipedia's article about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, which was conducted toward the end of World War II. The idea was to find the best diet for people who endured starvation during the war to make them healthy again. But first, the researchers had to create starving people. So they recruited a bunch of guys and put them on a starvation diet. Long-term dieters would recognize the result: many of the experiment subjects quit, many others cheated, and a significant number developed mental illnesses ranging from depression to hysteria: "Participants exhibited a preoccupation with food, both during the starvation period and the rehabilitation phase. Sexual interest was drastically reduced, and the volunteers showed signs of social withdrawal and isolation."

The point being that yeah, fat cells want to be fat again. Duh.

You would think that could be circumvented by getting rid of the excess fat cells. That procedure is called liposuction, and it was all the rage in, oh, the '80s or '90s. It sounded great 'til people started getting infections from having it done in sketchy clinics. Nowadays, it's recognized as plastic surgery and not a weight loss option, and patients are advised that if they don't watch their diet, the weight can come back -- because as it happens, it's not just the fat cells themselves that remember how big and robust they used to be. Our bodies have developed a system over centuries to survive famine -- it's called adaptive thermogenesis -- and they interpret diets as just another famine. Which is why all those guys in the starvation experiment went kinda crazy. Also, vacuuming out some fat cells doesn't do away with your body's ability to make more fat cells to replace them.

Dr. von Meyenn says we should be focusing on obesity prevention instead of trying to cure it after it has already happened. That's not much help for those of us for whom prevention is too late.

Here is the one thing I know for sure to be true, after decades of dieting: Diets don't work. And chasing that hourglass figure will probably just leave you disappointed, depressed, and thinking about food all the time. And that's no way to live.

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These moments of anti-dieting blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

A body image myth, debunked.

John Hain | CC0 | Pixabay

For the past several months, I've been working with a dietitian to get my eating back on track. Recently I had a revelation that I want to share with you.

I want to make it clear upfront that I'm not looking for dieting advice. I've been dieting off and on for 50 years. No kidding. At the age of eleven, tired of my brother teasing me about being fat, I went on my first diet. I lost 20 pounds that summer. Of course, later on, it all came back -- and then some.

By the time my kids were tweens, I'd yo-yo-dieted enough times to know that dieting doesn't work. And I told the girls that. Too bad I didn't follow my own advice.

Over five decades, I've counted calories and fat grams; I've done NutriSystem (800 pre-packaged calories a day!); I've done Weight Watchers a whole bunch of times. Almost always, I've lost weight. Often I would lose 30 or 40 or 50 lbs. in less than six months. I am really, really good at losing weight. I've had a lot of practice.

But then I'd plateau forever, and I'd get sick of eating so little with no results. So I'd drop the diet and the weight would come back.

It happened so many times that I ended up hating my metabolism. I'd joke about my Eastern European peasant genes that were so good at getting through my ancestors through famines. But really, I felt like my body was betraying me. I couldn't control it, and I hated it.

So anyway, the dietitian recommended to me this book called The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy. The author is Caroline Dooner. It took her a lot less time to get fed up with diet culture, and to conclude that dieting doesn't work, than it took me. But she connected the dots in a way I hadn't thought about before, and it only took her repeating it 20 or 30 times before I finally got it.

Here is what I realized at last: My body hasn't been betraying me when it packs on pounds after I drop the latest diet. My body has been trying to keep me alive.

Dooner cites a World-War-II-era study on starvation. The aim was to learn how to rehabilitate starving people, once the war was over. So they recruited 36 mentally and physically healthy conscientious objectors. At first the men received about 3,200 calories per day -- which was considered normal for men back then. A few months later, the men's diets were cut in half, to about 1,600 calories per day. In those days, 1,600 calories a day was considered semi-starvation; today, we consider 1,200 to 1,500 calories a day to be adequate for people on a diet.

Think about that for a minute.

And then think about what happened to those semi-starved guys: They lost interest in everything except food. Their heart rates slowed down, they were cold all the time, and they had other physical ailments. All of them suffered from depression and anxiety. Their sex drives deserted them. And they experienced body dysmorphia -- in other words, they had wrong ideas about the size and shape of their own bodies and others'. When the experimenters began feeding them again, the guys who got a lot of food -- 5,000 or even 10,000 calories per day -- made the best recoveries. And even then, some of the subjects said they felt hungry for months or years after the experiment was over.

You can extrapolate a lot from this. I mean, just about everybody's been on a diet at some point, which means we've all practiced self-starvation. And a lot of us have yo-yo'd back to where we started, and then some. And most, if not all, of us have believed ourselves to be weak-willed and lazy when it happens -- not to mention judgmental of others.

Expand that to our national preoccupation with what we're eating and what everybody else is eating. And a diet industry that makes more money every time a dieter fails. And a medical establishment that thinks anyone overweight ought to be on a diet. And you might begin to wonder whether our obesity epidemic hasn't been caused by chronic dieting (among other factors, of course).

As for me, I've started by apologizing to my body. Instead of hating it, now I'm grateful to it for keeping me alive. And I'm never going to deliberately starve myself again.

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These moments of well-fed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.