A study showed average weight loss for dieters was six pounds a year, less than half the weight of this ham.
Without fail, many of us resolve every January to lose weight. And without fail, most of us don’t.
We stick with diets for a few days, or a few weeks. Some keep the weight off for months, or years. Then it starts to creep back on. Want proof? Check out Oprah’s latest mea culpa for falling off the wagon, and her plans to take the weight off again.
Sounds depressing, and the statistics bear that up. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese. Every year, we send diet books to the top of the best-seller charts in January. And every year, the books fall off the charts and we fall off our diets and go back to old habits, rather than shrugging off a misstep and getting back to healthier eating habits.
We like to eat. We don’t like to change.
In a one-year clinical trial that compared the effectiveness of four popular diet plans, Tufts University scientists found that each was equally effective — for those who stuck to the diet. The participants were assigned to either the Atkins Diet, Weight Watchers, the Zone Diet or Dean Ornish’s low-fat regime.
But here’s what leapt out at me in a 2005 summary of the study in Nutrition Perspectives, a publication of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the University of California, Davis: Average weight loss regardless of diet was six pounds. For the year.
Wow.
The official conclusion: Pick a diet that suits your eating habits, because it might be easier to stick to.
My conclusion: If the best I can hope for is six pounds a year, why bother?
And therein lies the problem so many dieters face. We want results, quickly, for the deprivation we feel. When they don’t happen soon enough, we shrug our shoulders and go back to nibbling a Hershey’s Kiss here, a handful of nuts there, and wonder why the pounds stay on.
Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University and the author of “What to Eat” (Northpoint Press, $16 ), gives her dieting advice succinctly: “Eat less, move more.”
If we all followed it, maybe we’d be closer to losing six pounds in a month, instead of six in a year.
But we want more when we diet. Many of us want a plan to tell us what to eat, because we know we’re not doing it right. Or we want a shortcut that turns out to be great at helping us drop water weight quickly, but not so good at teaching us how to develop the healthy eating habits that are the key to losing weight and keeping it off. That’s why so many diet books are published this time of year.
My advice: Follow the Marion Nestle diet. Or take sustainable food advocate Michael Pollan’s advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Want something more? Here’s a sampling of recent diet articles online:
ABC News asks three nutrition experts to evaluate diets most commonly searched for online, including the Flat Belly Diet, Mediterranean, Atkins, the Zone and South Beach.
The San Francisco Chronicle covers "Health at Every Size" (Benbella Books), which asks if dieting actually makes us gain weight.
Slate reviews Mark Bittman’s new “Food Matters” (Simon & Schuster), which combines the simple recipes that The New York Times columnist is known for with Michael Pollan’s advice to stick to an Earth friendly, heart healthy plant-based diet.
The Associated Press reports on massive weight loss by seven elephants at the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park. How did they lose 11,314 pounds and keep it off? Lots of hay, no more bread, corn and jelly beans. The high-fiber, low-carb crowd wins this one.
Oprah works with Bob Greene to go back to the Best Life diet, including recipes and her eating and exercise plan.
Diet on a dime — or less than $10 a day, anyway, with advice from the authors of “Diabetes Meals on $7 a Day — Or Less.”
