Why diets don't work.
If I was trying to sell you an umbrella, and after doing a bit of research before buying the umbrella, you find that there is a 95-98 percent chance that the umbrella is not going to keep you dry, and is in fact going to leave you soaking wet, I’m guessing you wouldn’t buy it. It is clearly the shittiest umbrella the world has ever seen.
But, what if I told you that by failing to buy the umbrella, you were only letting yourself down? What if I told you that the umbrella was going to make you happy? What if I told you that the umbrella would make you more attractive and appealing as a human being? That buying the umbrella would make you popular and successful? What if it came in a slick, satisfying box, with some pictures of really dry-looking people slapped on the front, all smiling because of how dry they are. Then, what if Anthony Joshua, Rihanna, and Ellen Degeneres all came out from behind a curtain screaming “SURPRISE!”, clutching onto an umbrella of their own, telling you how wonderful they thought it was, how it had ‘worked wonders’ and how they will never EVER go back to the umbrellas they used to have? Would you be tempted then? I would.
Diets have a 95-98 percent failure rate. Meaning 95-98 percent of those who embark on a diet will regain all the weight back, and more.
These statistics have been reproduced time and time again.
In 1992, the National Institute of Health held a summit to review the efficacy of dieting and made the statement, “dieters are at risk of poor nutrition, possible development of eating disorders, and sometimes serious psychological consequences of repeated failed attempts to lose weight.” (2) In 2007, Professor at UCLA, Traci Mann, and her team conducted a review of scientific literature around diet studies that year. After reviewing 31 long-term studies, they found “two thirds of people have shown to regain more weight than they had lost” (3). In 2015, a large-scale study closely monitored 278,000 dieters over the course of 5 years, and found that 95-98 percent of the dieters either, didn’t lose weight at all, or regained all the weight they lost (and then some). (4)
It is blatantly clear. Diets. Do. Not. Work.bUt wAiT, HoW iS tHaT tRuE wHeN I SeE bEfOrE aNd aFtEr pIcTuReS oN iNsTaGraM aNd tHe dOcTOr tOld mY mUM tO gO oN wEiGHt wAtCHerS?
Yes, I know it is very counterintuitive, I would ask why the diet and weight-management industry is still forecast to be worth $269.2 billion by 2024 (5) despite the overwhelming evidence against them?Unfortunately, diet companies have extremely clever PR teams, who are masters at pulling attention from this abundant and BLATANT evidence, by making them seem both mandatory AND appealing. They don’t only worm their way inside the heads of peasants like you and me, but of doctors and healthcare professionals too. Don’t be fooled by a doctor’s authority and assume they are always right - diet culture has us all wrapped round its little finger.
But look, it’s all very well screaming "diets don't work!!!!" at you, but HOW and WHY do they not work? Because it sounds pretty plausible that a lower calorific intake and an increased exercise regime would automatically result in weight-loss. Ah, I thought you’d never ask: Let me take you back to approximately 400,000 BC...
When we were hunter-gatherers, our bodies could never be certain whether they were going to get food or not. It was dependent on the season; what prey was available, the weather, what crops were growing etc…So, when there was less food to be had (AKA famine), our bodies had to know how to deal with much less energy. If you let all the logs in a fire burn to ashes without any spare logs to top it up: the fire will go out, and in the context of our bodies, with no energy to top ourselves up, we die. Our hunter-gatherer bodies needed to hold onto as many ‘logs’ as possible in order to keep us alive. So, in famine, the speed of our metabolisms plummeted, and non-essential systems were switched off: the pituitary gland stopped producing FSH and LH hormones that stimulate periods (6) (hence the loss of periods that many female dieters, athletes and eating disorder patients experience today), our sex drive completely disappeared and ability to be aroused diminished: because famine is no time to bring a child into the world. Even the efficiency of essential systems, such as the digestive, cardiovascular and immune systems, was drastically reduced to conserve much needed energy. Any food we did manage to find was mostly stored as fat, to act as a back-up store of logs to burn when energy ran out. Then, when food was abundant again, and the danger of starvation was less apparent, over time our bodies were able to regain trust that they were going to receive the requisite amount of energy, meaning they no longer had to take these precautions to keep us alive. The metabolism was able to speed up again and business resumed as normal.
Obviously, we are no longer hunter-gatherers, but our bodies react in the exact same way.
Dieting, or reducing your intake, is putting your body through famine. This may seem like a stretch - but it is not. Not at all. Registered dietitian Caroline Dooner states in her book, “Even if you are eating, but not quite eating to satiation…the body reads that as a famine state” (7), which sends it into survival mode. Because the body is forced to burn energy at a much slower rate, with the new lowered metabolism, it becomes much harder to lose weight, even as you continue with a reduced intake.
Weight might drop at first, don’t get me wrong; If these diet FADs didn’t have any kind of short-term result, they wouldn’t be able to lure in their victims, but as metabolism slows down, weight loss plateaus, and more often than not (as we have discussed) not only does the weight-loss stop; the weight is put back on.
When the weight-loss attempt fails, our first go-to is our good old friend Self-Punishment, because that’s how diet culture keeps us in check: ‘DON’T QUIT.’ ‘NO EXCUSES.’ ‘PUSH HARDER.’ ’Look at all the examples of people who tried harder! These people used to look like you and be sad like you, but thanks to us, they are now oh-so happy and popular and successful, and most importantly: skinny!!’
We are left feeling shameful and inadequate.
Diet culture: 1
You: 0
Another common pattern found with weight-loss plans, is the classic binge-restrict cycle. It is, AGAIN, one of the body’s survival mechanisms (WOOHOO). The process is two-fold:
Firstly, there is an initial biochemical reaction that occurs in our bodies when we restrict which involves the increase in balance of hormones produced by adipose cells that regulate hunger signals in the brain. (8) So, essentially your body forces you to feel hungrier than usual when you diet. (Diet culture likes to brandish this automatic response as ‘CRAVINGS’ to ‘FIGHT’, but the body is literally just trying to prevent itself from going into survival mode.)
So, when we restrict our diet, whether that’s through amounts of food or types of food, we become fixated - literally obsessed - with whatever we aren’t allowing ourselves to have. Because, news-fucking-flash, our bodies are NOT designed to solely consume sweet potato and kale (as much as some influencers would like to argue). So, when we aren’t getting all the different nutrients we need, our bodies push to try and get us to consume those nutrients (and yes, that does include saturated fats).
This may seem extreme - but there is genuine evidence that with restriction, comes fixation. I mean, I can certainly vouch for the theory myself: I could spend a VERY long time watching BuzzFeed Tasty cooking videos. I watch in a trance, knowing that I’m not allowed to eat it, because the anorexia has taught me that I am undeserving of the majority of food I used to love (sO mUcH FuN).
One piece of the ‘genuine evidence’ I speak of, other than my self-absorbed anecdote, is a highly regarded study by a man called Ancel Keys:
During World War II, Mr Keys did a starvation study at the University of Minnesota. (9) He wanted to learn how best to rehabilitate starving people after the war. To work out how to rehabilitate starving people, he needed to starve some people first (ever so slightly unethical by today’s standards, but he helps prove my point so we move). 400 men applied to participate, and those who were most physically and mentally sound, and who were the most willing to commit to the goals of the experiment were chosen. The men stayed together in dorm-like rooms in a compound. They were allowed to leave, but the compound was their home and where they spent the majority of their time. They were first fed around 3,200 calories a day - considered a normal amount to eat back then - because it is (despite diet culture screaming otherwise), and they were given a walking allowance. Then, after a few weeks, the mens’ calories were dramatically cut to 1,800, which - please read with care - was considered semi-starvation.
Quick interjection: If your reaction to these amounts is the same as mine were, then you’ll be thinking ‘semi starvation my arse’. This is understandable, given that most of us are told to eat LESS than that by instagram influencers, healthcare professionals and fitness gurus. We are fed (no pun intended) so much bullshit information, that our perception has been completely warped around what is, and isn’t normal.
Remember: as intake is reduced, metabolism slows down. This means that as dieting and limiting what we eat has become the norm in the Western world (55% of both the UK and US population are on a diet right now), many of our bodies have become used to the lower intake, so we maintain on a smaller amount of food. It’s already completely fucked that everyone is taught to count calories practically as soon as we pop out of our mums’ vaginas, through the ridiculous ‘recommended daily amount’. But, to make matters even more infuriating: Marion Nestle, PhD and professor of nutrition and food studies at NYU, wrote in her scientific paper that even the 2000-calorie recommended adult daily amount,“is only enough to sustain children”. (10)
Children.
Back to the study...The men were semi-starved for 6 months… as a result, hormone production started to decline (as you experts already know now), their sex drive plummeted (again, as expected), and their unprecedented obsession with food sky-rocketed. 100% of the participants became completely fixated on talking, thinking and reading about food. They would buy cookbooks and read them for hours on end. Some of the men would drag the meals out for 2 hours, and mix their food with water to make them last longer. One man started eating scraps of food from bins, and another reported having dreams about eating his friends. After both of these men had threatened to commit suicide, they were sent to a psychiatric hospital to be fed normally and within 3 weeks, their psychological symptoms stopped. All of them. Just by eating a normal amount of food. If this isn’t enough, their blood vessels and hearts shrank, blood volume decreased, their skin became coarse, they lost their hair, they had constant ringing in their ears, they had muscle soreness, they developed body dysmorphia, anxiety and depression and some suffered from violent urges - one man literally chopped off on of his own fingers with an axe - despite being previously mentally sound.
The effects didn’t even stop when the experiment was over; after the men had been re-fed through a gradual increase of their calorific intake, Ancel Keys recruited 12 of the men to stay for an extra few months for ‘unrestricted rehabilitation’ (basically meaning the men no longer had a limit on the amount of food they were allowed to eat) in order to observe how the body naturally reacted to sustained starvation. On average, the men all ate 5,000 calories a day, but often their daily intake would rise to 11,500 calories a day. Their bodies had been deprived for so long, that the men maintained an obsession with food ‘for years after the experiment had ended’. Three of the participants even left their successful jobs to become chefs - even though none of them had any prior interest in cooking. (11)
All that - as a result of eating an amount of food that is presented as ‘healthy’ pretty much wherever you look. WHAT, I ask you, is healthy about any of that?
Nothing. Is the answer we are looking for. Absolutely nothing is healthy about trying to eat less and lose weight. A mass study, with 6.7 million participants in South Korea, found that people who had dieted for many years, and their weight had therefore fluctuated drastically from multiple failed weight-loss attempts, had a 53% higher risk of death from any cause, and a 14% higher risk of heart attacks and strokes, than people whose weight remained stable - no matter their body size. (12)
It is beyond infuriating. How how how are companies allowed to flog these ‘plans’, that are not only ineffective, but severely damaging both mentally and physically? If a car company started selling self-driving cars that just automatically crashed into nearby vehicles - that company would no longer be allowed to sell those cars. The company would also probably go bust. The worst part is, these diet companies actually KNOW how ineffective their schemes are - because they want people to keep coming back for more. If their plans worked, everyone would be happy as Larry, slipping into size 6 jeans and having sex with Ryan Gosling.
These plans are only lucrative because of the ongoing hatred people feel towards their bodies. It is a vicious cycle. We hate our bodies because we compare them to made up figures on our screens and adverts, we look for an external solution to sort that out, the solution sold to us doesn’t work (because it can’t), we are told that it is our fault, we villainize our bodies for its lack of cooperation, scold ourselves for our inadequacy and look for another external solution to sort our bodies out. I’ve got to take my hat off to them, it is a very clever business model: make everyone think they are a problem to solve and sell the solution. But it doesn’t just come at the price of £45 a month subscriptions, it comes at theprice of the Western world’s mental and physical health.Diets are a rickety fucking wagon with no destination. You are manipulated into hopping on board, only to be pushed back onto the road and then blamed for ‘falling off’. Diets simply do not work, and you really don’t have to board the shitty wagon. All you’ll be left with is cuts, bruises and a couple broken bones from the fall.
REFERENCES:
1) Fildes et al., “Probability of an Obese Person Attaining Normal Body Weight,” 2015
2) Laura Fraser, “Losing It, America’s Obsession with Weight and the Industry that Feeds on it” (USA, Dutton, 1997)
3) http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/Dieting-Does-Not-Work-UCLA-Researchers-7832
4) Christy Harrison, MPH, RD “Anti-Diet: Why Obsessing Over What You Eat is Bad for Your Health” (USA, Hachette Book Group Inc., 2019) [pg. 89]
6) https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stopped-or-missed-periods/
7) Caroline Dooner, “The F*ck It Diet” (Harper Collins Publishers, 2019) [pg. 16]
8) Megan Jayne Crabbe “Body Positive Power” (UK, Penguin Random House, 2017) [pg. 70]
9) Em Farrell, “A is for Anorexia: Anorexia Nervosa Explained” (London, Process Press Ltd., 2015) [pg. 30]
10) M. Nestle, “Why Does the FDA Recommend 2,000 Calories Per Day?” (Atlantic, August 4, 2011)
11) Caroline Dooner, “The F*ck It Diet” (Harper Collins Publishers, 2019) [pg. 23]
12) M. K. Kim et al., “Associations of Variability in Blood Pressure, Glucose and Cholesterol Concentrations, and Body Mass Index with Mortality and Cardiovascular Outcomes in the General Population”, Circulation, 138, no. 23 (December 4, 2018)
