“If you have gained extra pounds, it’s time to go on a diet,” most modern people are convinced. But psychologist Tracey Mann is sure that dietary restrictions will not help. She explains why diets don’t work and can even hurt.
There are no signs on the door of my Health and Nutrition Laboratory. Since I want to study people’s eating habits, I must hide the fact that I study how they eat. Otherwise, they will be shy and will not eat as usual. We tell research participants that we are interested in their memory, mood, how they communicate with friends, and as hospitable hosts, we are happy to offer them snacks.
I study nutrition in another lab called “real world”. I watch the daily lives of dieters, children eating in the school cafeteria, and even astronauts on the International Space Station. Over time, I was surprised to find that almost all of my ideas about food were wrong.
The three basic tenets of the commercial diet industry are also wrong: diets work, they’re healthy, obesity kills. In reality, diets don’t work and can cause harm, but obesity doesn’t kill. I also found out that the reason for gaining extra pounds is not due to a lack of self-control.
Scientists have concluded that the weight in 70% of cases is determined by genes
Genes greatly influence how much you will weigh at different times in your life. One classic study compared the weights of over 500 adopted children to those of their biological and adoptive parents. Obviously, if genes influence more than external conditions, then the weight of children should be comparable to the weight of biological parents. If, on the other hand, acquired eating habits are of greater importance, then there should be a weight similarity between children and adoptive parents. As a result, scientists found that weight correlates with the weight of biological relatives, and has nothing to do with the body weight of adoptive parents.
Personally, this example shocks me, but if it is not convincing enough for you, then here are the results of another study. It was attended by 93 pairs of twins, who were brought up separately from about five months of age until the age of 20-30, and 154 pairs of twins who grew up together. The results leave no room for doubt: the weight of the twins is almost the same, regardless of whether they were brought up together or separately.
Scientists have come to the conclusion that the weight in 70% of cases is determined by genes. Growth, by the way, in 80%.
In the last century, researchers have focused primarily on the results of the first three to six weeks of the diet – a period when body weight decreases relatively quickly. What happened to the patients next, no one tracked. It didn’t matter if they returned to their previous weight, gained even more mass, or continued to lose weight. These fundamental questions are ignored in most of the work on diets.
Commercial nutrition companies, which could provide detailed information on how their patients’ weight changes over the years, say they cannot collect this data. They also justify themselves by the fact that their customers do not need such information. But the most enchanting was the following argument: “If people are told about the real results of the diet, they will be disappointed in it.” At the very least, this is a recognition of the inefficiency of their own programs.
Authoritative scientific studies confirm that about half of the people who lose weight through diets, 4-5 years after their completion, weigh even more than at the beginning. Unfortunately, the futility of diets is underestimated by researchers who are too interested in demonstrating their effectiveness.
If the programs of nutrition companies really helped to get rid of excess weight for a long time, they would have gone bankrupt long ago. Their profit is generated by repeated customer requests. Richard Samber, longtime head of finance at Weight Watchers, compared dieting to the lottery: “If you don’t win, you play again. Maybe the second time it will work.
People who restrict themselves in food remember fewer words
Diet causes cognitive impairment, which has been experimentally proven more than once. In one of the studies, scientists collected two groups: in the first people adhered to a diet, in the second they did not. They asked the participants to complete the same tasks that required mental effort. It turned out that people who limit themselves to food remember fewer words than those who do not follow a special diet. Participants in the first group could not concentrate for a long time and reacted more slowly to the stimulus when performing tasks for speed.
In addition, the dieters showed a deterioration in the performance of the executive function of the brain that controls impulses. The executive function regulates the ability to concentrate on actual tasks. Because of such a failure, it is more difficult for a person to plan, make choices, resolve issues, and all this is necessary for effective self-control.
Cognitive changes are not due to malnutrition or malnutrition. Failures are associated with obsession with thoughts about food, which is observed in most people who limit themselves in nutrition. As one person, who has been eating according to a special system all his life, told me: “My head is 90% full of thoughts about diets and what I’m doing wrong.” As British comedian Vanessa Angle notes: “You can read the news about Syria and suddenly find in your head a trivial but revealing thought: “You shouldn’t have had this for breakfast.”
When we focus entirely on food and nutrition (and sometimes on weight), we cannot pay enough attention to other areas of life. And the stronger the obsession with food, the more difficult it is to think about something else and solve other mental problems. In one experiment, researchers tested the memory of weight loss and non-weight loss individuals before and after they ate a candy bar. The memory of the former suffered more, which is not surprising: after eating a candy bar, they continued to obsessively think about food.
Such problems with memory and decision making can prevent dieters from focusing on important daily activities. Many may think that those who lose weight are simply dumber than those who do not lose weight, so it is more difficult for them to solve problems. Not true. Experiments aimed at identifying cognitive impairments have shown that the level of intelligence in people who eat according to special systems and who do not limit themselves is approximately the same. One study compared the mental abilities of the same people during special and regular diets. It turned out that cognitive disorders occur only in the first case.
It’s not that supposedly stupid people follow diets, it’s that diets, among other things, make people dumber.
Another cognitive failure in a losing weight person is a violation of the perception of time. When you’re on a diet, you feel like time goes by more slowly. So it was with the participants in the famous half-starved Keys experiment and with other people who lost a large number of kilograms in the course of research on strict diets. In the process of losing weight, their perception of time was distorted. Scientists have found that any attempt to control any process causes the effect of slow perception of time.
I’ve heard the saying that dieting doesn’t lengthen life, it just starts to seem longer. Perhaps there is more truth in these words than you can imagine.
About the Developer
Tracey Mann teaches psychology at the University of Minnesota and has been studying eating behavior for over 20 years. Author of the book “Secrets of the Nutrition Laboratory”.