Clearing the Path for Successful Weight Management

Dieters striving for success in their efforts to manage their weight may have more than just unwanted pounds to lose. First, they have to shed some common myths about dieting.

Myths about dieting instil false hopes in people striving to manage their weight, misleading them to formulate lofty expectations that only serve to frustrate their efforts and stunt their progress.

Indeed, there is little evidence - if any at all - to support three common myths about dieting, as reviewed in a recent edition of Healthy Weight Journal. Demystifying the myths about dieting and learning the trust about the effects of calorie restriction are important steps in beginning to give up dieting and start eating normally as part of a healthy lifestyle that supports success at weight management.

Myth #1: Dieting makes you thin

Most people who lose weight by dieting eventually regain the pounds, and most gain back even more than they lost. A review by the National Institutes of health of all published studies on the efficacy of weight loss treatments indicates that people, regardless of their weight, lost an average of only 10 pounds over many weeks and months of dieting (and for many of these people, 10 pounds was a trivial amount of weight). Further, most of the weight lost was regained within one year, and almost all of the weight, for all of the people, was regained within five years.

What’s the reason for the lack of success? The authors of the article speculate that one reason may be the body’s natural reaction against weight loss. That’s not to say that we can’t optimize our natural tendencies in the weight arena, but the fact remains that genes predispose some people to obesity, particularly when they are in an environment that promotes overfeeding.

And that leads us to the second reason for the lack of success most people see with dieting. The inability to lose significant amounts of weight, or maintain weight loss, through dieting likely has a lot to do with the overeating that occurs when people go off the diet. You’ve heard it here before: If dieters think they’ve eaten foods they shouldn’t (which usually means beloved, high-calorie foods), they usually abandon their diets and splurge on large quantities of “forbidden” foods.

Myth #2: Dieters eat less than non-dieters

Not so. Studies show that restrained eaters (or dieters) often consume more snacks and eat more frequently than unrestrained eaters (normal eaters). Overeating and increased hunger occur after periods of physical and psychological deprivation induced by periods of food restriction. The consequence? Very often, it’s a binge.

Myth #3: Dieting makes you happier

Wrong again. Instead, the outcome of dieting seems to be the opposite - feelings of depression, anxiety and frustration. The fluid loss and empty stomach in the early stages of dieting are, in effect, come-ons. They offer encouragement to the dieter, but within a short period of time, the “baggage” attached to dieting begins to produce negative effects. The dieter can’t eat when, where or what she wants. Socializing becomes unappealing if the dieter is determined to stick with her diet. Some dieters become irritable and energy-depleted due to hunger. And obsession with food and eating begin to cloud the dieter’s ability to think about other things.

It’s not hard to see why Americans are struggling with an obesity epidemic, given that for several decades, most of the American population seemed to be permanently “on a diet.” Fortunately, more and more of us - and the health professionals who work with us - are getting the message that diets don’t work. As we have long promoted at Green Mountain, if we change our focus to health, we will take care of our weight. As important is the fact that achieving and maintain a state of health can be an enjoyable process. The keys are normal eating that includes the foods you love in amounts that leave you satisfied without feeling stuffed, regular physical activity that you enjoy, effective stress management, and feeling good about ourselves and our bodies, no matter what our weight. It helps to remember, as one speaker noted at a recent conference we attended, “Life is too short for self-hate and celery sticks!”

©2006 Green Mountain at Fox Run, Ludlow, Vermont. Alan H. Wayler, PhD is director of health communications and senior nutritionist at Green Mountain at Fox Run For over 34 years, Green Mountain at Fox Run has developed a healthy weight loss program http://www.fitwoman.com/weightloss program.htm, exclusively for women. The non-diet focus on lifestyle change helpls to foster long-term success. Learn more about this all-women’s weight loss retreat http://www.fitwoman.com and begin to understand why this is not just another fat farm http://www.fitwoman.com/fat-farm.htm or health spa.

Share This

Body-Mass index is a ratio of your weight to your height. Too low of a BMI may indicate that you are underweight - undernourished or suffering some kind of illness that leads to unintentional weight loss. Conversely, a higher than normal BMI correlates with being overweight.

What Conditions Are Associated With High BMI?

Having a high BMI correlates with a higher risk for conditions including:

-cardiovascular disease

-high blood pressure

-osteoarthritis

-some cancers

-diabetes

But there’s a limit to how useful the BMI is in telling you about the state of your health.

So What’s The Limit?

David S. is a 40-year-old art director; he weighs 240 pounds and is 6 foot tall. According to his insurance agent’s BMI calculator, David’s BMI is 32.5, well above the threshold for obesity. David chuckles as he recounts the story of talking with his insurance company about insurance: “Before I went to see her, she must have thought I was a candidate for a heart attack. When I visited, she realized that I wasn’t about to have a heart attack, but I think she almost did!”

In his spare time, David is a body builder. He lifts weights nearly every day, gets regular aerobic exercise in the forms of bicycling and karate, and eats well-balanced meals emphasizing lean meats, vegetables and fiber-bearing carbohydrates. Despite his BMI, his cholesterol levels are healthy, his blood pressure that of an average 25 year old, and his activity level - well, it’s obviously pretty good.

While we’re not all like David, there are two take-home lessons from his story:

1) BMI may not be a good indicator of your health and fitness.

2) A given BMI number suggests that you might be at risk for certain diseases, but it doesn’t guarantee it.

A high BMI does not mean that you have diabetes, cancer, or high blood pressure, nor that you are destined to have one of those conditions. It suggests that you may be at risk, but that’s all.

Because it presumes a certain ratio of body-fat to muscle, it may not accurately reflect whether you have a healthy metabolism, what condition your heart is in, and how you look and feel.

So what indicators should you consider in addition to BMI in trying to determine your state of fitness and what changes you might want to take in your activities and diet? Other risk factors for diseases like diabetes and cancer include:

-diet

-physical activity

-body fat

-circumference

-blood pressure

-blood sugar

-blood cholesterol

-family history

-gender/ethnicity

Just like BMI, no one of these indicators guarantees that you will have, or avoid having, a particular condition. David’s father has a genetic condition that leads to very high cholesterol; David has no cholesterol issues at all. In contrast, another designer, Laurie M., has no family history of high cholesterol, and yet she been taking medication for high cholesterol since she turned 20.

Balance Is Key:

So how do you take all these factors into consideration in designing an exercise and nutritional program that’s right for you? The key is balance. If your BMI is high and you have other risk factors indicating risk for particular diseases, then work with your health care provider to change your exercise type and level, modify your diet, and add medications if needed to reduce the chances of developing the disease in question. If your BMI is high, but your other indicators suggest that you’re healthy, it may be a matter of your comfort - do you like how you feel? are you able to accomplish the activities that matter to you? If so, check with your physician to see whether maintaining your current weight and diet might be just what you need!

Calle EE, et al. “BMI and mortality in prospective cohort of U.S. adults” New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 341 pages 1097-1105, 1999
Centers for Disease Control, “Using the BMI-for-Age Charts,” http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/growthcharts/training/modules/module1/text, 2005

Garrow JS and Webster J. “Quetelet’s index (W/H2) as a measure of fatness,” International Journal of Obesity Volume 9 pages147-153, 1985
Gallagher D, et al. How useful is BMI for comparison of body fatness across age, sex and ethnic groups? American Journal of Epidemiology Volume143, p 228-239, 1999

National Institutes of Health, “Clinical Guidelines on the Identification, Evaluation, and Treatment of Overweight and Obesity in Adults,” 1998

Copyright (C) Shoppe.MD and Ian Mason, 2004-2005

Ian Mason, owner of PhenForum.com, your source for weight loss support, diet advice and exercise tips for your long term health.

Ian is a fat-to-fit student of health, weight loss, exercise, and several martial arts; maintaining several websites in an effort to help provide up-to-date and helpful information for other who share his interests in health of body and mind.

Share This

Carbohydrates are the single most important food you can eat.

That statement probably goes against everything you’ve ever heard, so let me explain.

If you don’t believe me, take this little test. Think of a carb!

If you’re like most Americans, bread, pasta, soft drinks, French fries, sugar, and similar foods probably flew into your mind. Yes, these foods are carbs — highly processed and refined ones.

And if these are the kinds of carbs you consume on a regular basis, let me warn you, (unless you regularly run marathons), you’re most likely either overweight or heading down the road to weight gain.

You may like them, you may consider them “comfort foods,” you may think that they couldn’t be so bad since they are so predominant in our current diet. But the biological bottom line is that human beings have not evolved to metabolize these types of carbohydrates.

They slow down your metabolism and contribute to every one of the major diseases associated with aging including diabetes, heart disease, dementia and cancer.

In most, cases they are also “empty” calorie foods-the worst possible combination — high caloric foods, low in nutrients. They deprive you of vital nutrients as well as burden your body with the task of digesting food molecules that aren’t giving you anything you need.

Eating them (especially in excess) is a prescription for weight gain. But they’re not the end of the carb story. If you’re like most people, you may not realize that the wide world of carbs is actually much, much bigger than this limited crowd of processed carbs.

In contrast, natural carbohydrates, which come to your table just like Mother Nature made them, contain many essential nutrients and specialized chemicals that turn up your metabolism via newly discovered plant chemicals call phytonutrients.

So you have a choice: use phytonutrients to spark your metabolism into action, or drown your metabolism with indigestible nutrient-poor carbs.

Our genetic nutritional template goes back 20,000 years. Our ancestors foraged for wild food, like wild berries, grasses, roots, and mushrooms to find life-giving phytonutrients that all humans are designed by nature to eat.

On a recent vacation I found myself in a sea of phytonutrients in the wild islands of Southeast Alaska. I was foraging along with the grizzly bears for bog cranberries, blueberries, nagoonberries, raspberries, and strawberries. These scrumptious berries, bursting with phytonutrients, were smaller, richer in color and taste, (and lower in sugar) than their domestic berry cousins.

Here’s a tip: The greater variety and the deeper the color of plant foods you eat, the higher their concentration of phytonutrients. The key is to learn which phytonutrient-dense foods can prevent disease and promote weight loss.

Want phytonutrient power?

Here ’s a small sample of the many superfoods that contain these powerful phytonutrients: isoflavones in soy foods, lignans in flax seeds, catechins in green tea, polyphenols in cocoa (yes, chocolate!), glucosinolates in broccoli, carnosol in rosemary, and resveratrol in red wine.

And there are hundreds more that can help you unlock the secret to natural weight loss. All of these compounds — and dozens more — will help you fight disease and obesity. These special compounds literally communicate with your genes and turn on messages of health and weight loss. They are key to the success people experience in losing weight on a program I’ve developed during my 20-years practicing medicine, called UltraMetabolism.

Before you reach for that Cinnabon, know that phytonutrients only occur in whole, unrefined, unprocessed plant foods. All vegetables (and many fruits) score high in phytonutrients, while processed carbs, like bread and pasta, have virtually none.

Here’s a shorthand to distinguish between the metabolism boosters and the processed carbs that will only weigh you down:

Anything that has been packaged or put through a machine is processed (like a potato chip). Anything that comes right out of the earth is natural (like a plum).

Don’t let all the terminology — high fat, low-fat, high-carb, low-carb, high glycemic index, low glycemic index, complex carbs and simple carbs — confuse you. The key is eating whole, real, unprocessed, food found as close to nature as possible. Now you know why your grandmother always told you to eat your vegetables!

Folk wisdom passed down the generations showed how to give the body what it needs. In the early twenty-first century, that wisdom is being confirmed in the research of leading edge scientists. So you can follow these recommendations I offer with total confidence that the latest medical science backs them up.

This new science reveals why you should never do what some ill-advised diets suggest: cut out all carbs. Not a good idea-because you also cut out all the phytonutrients (and the fiber) that only comes from whole plant foods.

Along with their obesity fighting chemicals, vitamins, and minerals to accelerate your metabolism, most whole carbohydrates are filled with healthy plant fiber to slow the absorption of sugar into your bloodstream.

And for super fast weight loss, you’ll want to eat some special “super” fiber foods which I use as my secret weapon with many patients who have had difficulty losing weight. Once you incorporate them into your diet, you’ll feel full, experience steady energy, and will never be tempted to overeat.

Here’s a guarantee: If you’ve been consuming highly processed foods such as sodas, chips, and crackers, and you decide to boost your intake of those powerful phytonutrients that I’ve reviewed, you’ll be taking the first step towards re-programming your body for automatic weight loss and health.

My dirty little secret as a doctor is that I never treat anybody specifically to lose weight; I simply help them become healthy using these and other techniques and the weight automatically comes off.

So remember, eat your carbs, but make them the right carbs!

Copyright 2006 Mark Hyman MD

Mark Hyman, M.D. is a NY Times bestselling author, lecturer, and practicing physician. Discover how you can program your body to automatically lose weight and find out what special super fiber can help by grabbing an exclusive sneak preview of UltraMetabolism at http://www.ultrametabolism.com/article5

Share This