Your diet is about learning how to live & eat right!
What is clear, however, is that dieting isn’t just a matter
of willpower, says A. Janet Tomiyama, director of the UCLA Dieting,
Stress, and Health Laboratory.
“Something society doesn’t quite grasp yet is that weight is
really, really hard to control,” she says. “When somebody gains weight
or their diet fails, they blame themselves rather than the thousands of
forces that are conspiring to keep that weight on and to make you gain
more weight.”
A big part of the explanation lies in genetics; some
people’s bodies store fat more readily than others, says Lofton. But
there are plenty of other variables, including their activity level, how
much sleep a person is getting, and what medications they’re taking.
There’s evidence, for example, that a poor night’s sleep
disrupts levels of hunger-controlling hormones, leading to an increased appetite.
And people who regularly work night shifts tend to gain more weight
over time than daytime workers. “That can be really confusing for the
body and people’s eating habits, if they’re working the overnight shift
and sleeping poorly,” says Linda Antinoro, a registered dietician in the
Nutrition and Wellness Service at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in
Boston.
A person’s job is just one part of their food environment—the context in which people make decisions about what to eat. For many Americans, what’s most readily available are so-called ultra-processed foods.
Researchers are still trying to figure out whether the additives and
preservatives in these foods can affect our metabolisms, Lofton says.
Hall and his colleagues are investigating the role that a
person’s food environment plays in weight gain. In one experiment,
participants who were offered ultra-processed foods
such as Honey Nut Cheerios and margarine wound up eating about 500
calories per day more than people given whole foods such as apple slices
and olive oil. This effect is particularly striking since the meals in
each diet had the same amounts of fat, sugar, and other nutrients.
However, Hall acknowledges, cutting out ultra-processed food
isn’t exactly simple; not everybody has the time, money, or easy access
to fresh produce. “One of the reasons why ultra-processed foods are so
popular is because they’re so darn convenient,” he says. “They are
typically engineered to be quite tasty, they have a long shelf life,
they don’t require a lot of skill or equipment to prepare, and they
don’t take very much time to prepare.”
Why your body resists weight loss
On top of all of this, dieting itself triggers changes in
the body that fight against weight loss. When a person slashes their
calorie intake, Tomiyama says, their body reacts as if it were enduring a
famine. “Your body evolutionarily thinks, ‘Oh no, we’re in starvation
mode…we have to get really efficient,’” she says. In other words: the
dieter’s metabolism slows down, and they wind up burning fewer calories.
Hall and his colleagues have seen this firsthand with people
who participated in the extreme weight-loss competition “The Biggest
Loser.” While competing, the participants shed more than 120 pounds on
average. Six years later, though, most had regained a fair amount of
weight. Yet their resting metabolisms still remained sluggish. The
people who’d kept the most weight off were those who’d increased their activity level by the greatest amount. In a surprising twist, though, they were also the participants whose metabolisms had slowed the most.
“It seems like in those folks, the lifestyle interventions
that they had continued in order to keep the weight off were still being
met by this continual resistance by the body,” Hall says.
Dieting also causes a person’s appetite to increase.
“You start to notice food more, and so it’s not just your body but also
your brain that’s working toward getting you to eat more whenever you
start depriving your body of calories,” Tomiyama says.
She and her team have also seen that dieting is just plain
stressful. People who’d reduced their calorie intake had higher levels
of the stress hormone cortisol
than those who hadn’t. Being stressed only makes it harder to lose
weight. “One of cortisol’s jobs is to signal your body to deposit energy
as fat, especially in the belly region,” Tomiyama says.
And fat-shaming just compounds the problem,
she adds. “When you’re treated unfairly or experience discrimination
because of your size, that’s ironically triggering these processes in
your body that make you gain even more weight that’s going to put you at
even more risk for fat-shaming and weight stigma,” she says.
What you should do instead of dieting
Realistically speaking, Antinoro says, fad diets are rarely
sustainable over the long haul. “We ask the question, ‘Is that doable
for your lifestyle? Could you see yourself never having carbs for the
rest of your foreseeable life?’” she says.
Still, it’s not surprising that diets remain entrenched in American culture.
“Socially there’s pressure to lose weight, physicians are
pushing you to lose weight, and so it makes sense why people would want
to do something about it,” Tomiyama says. “Everybody’s screaming at them
to.”
Layered on top of this are the compliments dieters tend to
receive as soon as they begin to lose weight. And with almost any fad
diet, Hall says, there will be compelling success stories. For many
people, though, dieting is ultimately a discouraging experience.
“I do want people to get away from that term of ‘diet,’”
Antinoro says. “It implies you’re on or off, you’re good or bad, it’s
black or white.” Instead, she suggests, think about health-oriented
steps you can take in your daily life—even if they never change your
pant size.
“It doesn’t always change the on-the-scale weight, but
you’re seeing other markers that change in a healthy way,” Antinoro
says. “Maybe it’s, ‘My blood pressure is better and I don’t need these
three medicines,’ or, ‘I can play with my kids more and I’m not tired
and am sleeping better.’”
Tomiyama recommends focusing your efforts on four key areas:
stress management, getting good sleep, moving more, and adding more
unprocessed foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables to your diet when
possible.
“You’ll notice I’m not talking about taking away the
Snickers; I’m saying get more kale and strawberries,” Tomiyama says. “As
soon as you start thinking of it as depriving yourself, that’s going to
set off the stress processes.”
Start small, she advises. Pick an action you can do in the
space of 10 minutes, whether that means going for a quick walk, eating
an apple, stretching before bed, or reading a chapter of a book to
destress. “Let’s just forget about the number on the scale,” Tomiyama
says. “These are things that are going to help your health regardless of
the number on the scale.”
One approach that’s gaining momentum is called Health at Every Size,
which is aimed at building healthy eating and exercise habits and
cultivating respect for people of all weights. More studies will be
needed to assess the effectiveness of HAES for different groups. However, Tomiyama says, emerging research indicates that these interventions can be beneficial for health even if—or perhaps exactly because—the focus isn’t placed on weight loss.
Changing one’s relationship with food isn’t always easy, and
some aspects of what and how we eat or move or sleep aren’t entirely
within our control. The COVID-19 pandemic has only underscored this
reality.
“All the indicators show that our diets have become worse
during the pandemic, people are engaging in less physical activity,
stress levels are through the roof,” Tomiyama says. “This is such a
tough time for so many people, and it’s going to be all the more
important to have compassion for yourself and not get into this
blame-and-shame cycle that can result from dieting.”
Kate Baggaley has been contributing regularly to Popular
Science since 2017. She frequently covers nature, climate, and the
COVID-19 pandemic, but has also reported on many other aspects of
science, including space, paleontology, and health. She has a soft spot
for birds, deep sea critters, and all kinds of gorgeous creepy crawlies.
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This
post originally appeared on Popular Science and was published January
3, 2022. This article is republished here with permission.
