Read more at: theAtlantic.com
06/29/2016 / By slendernews
“My own history of yo-yo dieting started when I was 15 and lasted about three decades,” said Sandra Aamodt, a neuroscientist and the author of Why Diets Make Us Fat, on Saturday at Spotlight Health, a conference co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic. “I lost the same 15 pounds pretty much every year during that same period, and gained it back regular as clockwork.”
(Article by Julie Beck)
This is a classic tale—the diet that doesn’t take, the weight loss that comes right back. The most recent, extreme, highly publicized case was that of the study doneon contestants from the reality show The Biggest Loser, most of whom, six years after losing 100 to 200 pounds, had gained most of it back, and had significantly slowed metabolisms.
The study provided a dramatic example of how the body fights against weight loss. And sheer force of will is rarely sufficient to fight back.
Also on the committee is the executive system, which deals with planning and decision-making. “This is the area of the brain that you tend to think of as your secret weapon for weight loss,” Aamodt said. “Your secret weapon for weight loss takes a lot of vacations.” Willpower is very taxing for people—studies show that any task that you do that requires discipline and self-control makes it harder for you to resist urges later. The executive system doesn’t function as well when people are lonely, or stressed. “And guess what? It’s impaired when you’re hungry,” Aamodt said. “The basic answer to why people have so much trouble with dieting is they’re trying to use a system that tires easily to fight against brain systems that are always working, never take a day off.”
Also at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Kevin Hall, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (and an author on theBiggest Loser study) described another problem: When people go on a diet and begin to lose weight, their appetite increases substantially. And so people end up eating more calories without realizing it. “If you ask people if they’re doing anything different, they’ll say no,” Hall said. They feel like they’re exerting the same amount of effort toward their diet, because their appetite is so high that they’re still hungry even if they eat a little more. And it continues—“there’s an exponential decay of diet adherence,” Hall said.
“That’s probably just a biological response to repeated starvation,” Aamodt said.
None of this is encouraging. What are people supposed to do, just stop trying to lose weight? Well, yeah, maybe. Unless you want to diet for the rest of your life (while probably still feeling hungry a lot of the time). That’s what people do, who manage to successfully keep weight off. “They commit to counting calories forever, they exercise every day,” Aamodt said. “A large number of them are fitness professionals. That’s the level of commitment that it requires.”
Read more at: theAtlantic.com
Tagged Under: weight loss, Willpower