Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

227 Pages·2016·1.48 MB·English

by  Sandra Aamodt

CURRENT
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2016 by Sandra Aamodt
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech,
and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying
with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without
permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Aamodt, Sandra.
Title: Why diets make us fat : the unintended consequences of our obsession with weight loss / Sandra
Aamodt, Ph.D.
Description: New York, New York : Current, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2016] | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by
publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048708 (print) | LCCN 2015048518 (ebook) | ISBN 9780698186668 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781591847694 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Weight loss—Psychological aspects | Weight gain. | Food habits—Psychological aspects
Classification: LCC RM222.2 (print) | LCC RM222.2 .A225 2016 (ebook) | DDC 613.2/5—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048708
Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual
reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for
consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision. Neither the
author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any
information or suggestion in this book.
Version_1
For Elizabeth
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Part One The Trouble with Diets
The Diet Roller Coaster
1
Willpower Runs Out
2
How Diets Lead to Weight Gain
3
The Weight of Beauty
4
Our Brains Fight Weight Loss
5
Part Two Why We Gain Weight
Early Life and Adult Weight
6
Stress, Shame, and Stigma
7
When Calories Don’t Count
8
Blame Your Ancestors
9
Follow the Money
10
Part Three A Better Way
Eat with Attention and Joy
11
Sleepwalking Through Dinner
12
Healthy Is Better Than Thin
13
Change Your Lifestyle, Change Your Health
14
Good Habits Beat Good Intentions
15
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Introduction
S
everal years ago, my husband and I visited friends who had two teenage
daughters. Both girls were smart, beautiful, and well loved, but only one was
thin. Her sister had started gaining weight at puberty, and their parents couldn’t
figure out what to do. They’d tried talking to her about portion control and
exercise. They’d tried cooking her special food. Nothing slowed her progression
from skinny child to voluptuous woman.
Their well-meaning concern was making the situation worse. She was
reluctant to sit down for meals with the family—and ate almost nothing when
she did. But her father told me that food was disappearing from the refrigerator
in the middle of the night, and her weight gain continued. Rather than making
her thin, her parents’ anxiety was pushing her toward an eating disorder and
increasing her odds of gaining more weight.
I understood her feelings because I was that teenage girl myself several
decades ago, hating myself because I couldn’t satisfy my culture’s expectations
for my body. Because I grew up to be a neuroscientist, I also knew about the
biology behind her struggles. Considerable evidence shows that dieting—
willfully eating less to lose weight—rarely works in the long run, while its
unintended side effects do a lot of harm.
When I discovered this evidence, after three decades of losing the same
fifteen pounds again and again, it transformed my relationship with food. At first
I wasn’t sure that changing my approach would work for me, so I tried an
experiment. As my New Year’s resolution in 2010, I vowed to go an entire year
without dieting or weighing myself and to exercise every day. I was so pleased
with the results that I’ve maintained all three habits ever since. My weight used
to bounce around a fifty-pound range as I starved or binged my way through the
first half of my adult life, but now it remains stable even though I don’t worry
about calories anymore. And the research suggests that my experience is typical.
If diets worked, we’d all be thin by now. Instead we have enlisted hundreds
of millions of people into a war we can’t win, fighting not against an external
enemy but against our own bodies. In the United States, 108 million people went
on a diet last year—and half of them were within the normal weight range when
they started. Yet research shows that dieters almost always regain their lost
weight within a few years, no matter which diet plan they follow. In fact, they
often regain more weight than they’ve lost. On average, people who go on a diet
end up heavier five years later than people of the same initial weight who didn’t
diet.
Many people are convinced that unless they control their appetite, they will
gain weight, get sick, and die young. This common belief gets it backward.
Dieting often makes people fatter and less healthy in the long run because it
impairs their ability to recognize hunger, which increases vulnerability to
emotional eating and food marketing. Research suggests that the resulting cycle
of repeatedly losing weight and gaining it back is no better for health than
maintaining a higher weight with a healthy lifestyle. Fitness can overcome most
of the health risks associated with obesity and also help prevent future weight
gain, but only if people don’t quit exercising when they discover that it isn’t
making them lose weight.
By understanding how the brain regulates weight, we can stop struggling to
defeat this control system and learn how to let it help us instead. Just as the body
needs a certain amount of sleep, the brain has a body weight range that it prefers
and will defend for each individual. The brain’s weight-regulation system will
maintain a stable, healthy weight for most people, if it is allowed to do its job
without interference. This system mainly operates beneath conscious awareness,
influencing hunger and activity in many ways and also changing metabolism by
modifying the amount of energy that muscles burn. Lasting weight loss is hard to
achieve because when dieting makes a heavy person thinner, the brain responds
exactly as it would if a thin person were starving. The result is a powerful
mechanism to keep body weight within a certain range.
The belief that dieting will control weight is not only mistaken but also
dangerous. I wrote this book because I’ve seen too many healthy children turn
into diet-obsessed teenagers who are headed for a lifetime of weight cycling and
struggles with food. Parents often unwittingly contribute to these problems by
hassling kids about their weight or by setting an example of constant anxiety
around meals. With the help of a good therapist, our friends’ daughter found a
better way to relate to food. I want us all to do that, for our children and for
ourselves.
Our obsession with weight loss hasn’t made us thin or healthy, so it’s time to
try another way. If dieting has failed you, that’s not because you’re a failure but
because your brain is working correctly. To find out what to do instead, read on.
Part One
________