‘Dieting makes you fat’ is the latest body-shaping scare

Press, 6 February 1986, Page 13

‘Dieting makes you fat’ is the latest body-shaping scare

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JANICE BREMER DIETITIAN

Dietitian Janice Bremer starts a new fortnightly column on developing your own personal food style. Today, the battle of the bulge: is there a diet for the ideal body shape?

Dieting is outmoded, especially if the diet is somebody else's and promises to slim you to somebody else’s body shape. Nevertheless dieting is now part of our foodstyle. “Time” magazine reports that 90 per cent of Americans think they are overweight and over 35 per cent want to lose more than seven kilograms. Surveys show over 30 per cent of young women diet regularly in attempting to lose weight and a staggering 80 per cent of girls in the fourth grade are dieting. Around 30 per cent of women and 16 per cent of men in America diet. We can see the evidence everywhere that dieting is taking a hold in New Zealand too. Slimming organisations flourish, diet books make the best-seller lists, diets in cans continue to be sold and other diet products have proved their marketability: diet drinks, arti-

ficial sweeteners, low fat dairy products and other kilojoule-reduced foods.

However, the only figures that seem to be improving in the dieting industry are the profits. “Time” reports that in the “battle of the bulge” Americans spent five billion dollars last year. The more you diet the less you can eat is the shock news in diet research.

All the facts are not yet clear but here is another excuse to abandon dieting, along with “diet plateaux,” genes, and metabolism. The fact that formerly overweight people need less energy to maintain the same weight as a leaner person is hard to live with.

In falling for the latest diet craze we are really just trying to convince ourselves we are doing something about our weight, instead of confronting a doctor or dietitian for individualised professional advice. Even the group diet

clubs have not eradicated the problem (nor has any other method of weight reduction). The support network of these groups is vital to achieving goal weights but maintenance of the weight loss is abysmal.

Some books give quite unbalanced diets which are their selling point the “Beverly Hills Diet” Ross Horne’s “New Diet Revolution,” the Atkins diet Rather exaggerated claims are made by others, such as the “F Plan,” and the “No-Diet Book,” others are very exaggerated in their limitation of choice such as the “Pritikin” diet It is absurd to consider a plate piled high with enormous amounts of vegetables as “normal” when used to appease an apparently insatiable (but probably hungry) appetite.

Diets fail in the long run because they are only a short term solution. They divert the focus away from the real issue: learning to eat normally. So dieting only delays the time when personal changes will have to be attempted.

Blanket advice can’t possibly suit everyone. We have energies other than those for physical needs. Emotional and intellectual needs require some respect Rigid diets with strict rules which do not consider changing energy needs are made to be broken.

In the short term, broken diets (“oh well! may as well start again

tomorrow”) are the first failing point After all, who can commit themselves to eating fish six times a week or cereals at every meal for the rest of their life? The second short term failing point is that dieting tends to lead to periods of starvation inflicted either by ourselves or the diet The subsequent hunger often leads to rebound binging as our bodies try to compensate. New evidence suggests that dieting may actually encourage overweight Continual dieting seems to increase the body’s ability to recover lost weight and its capacity to store fat.

Be wary When we start a very low energy diet the body will adjust by lowering the rate at which it burns the kilojoules required to keep body functions like breathing, blood flow and the vital organs going. In effect, the body becomes more efficient; someone who has been overweight needs fewer kilojoules to maintain the same weight as a lean person. On a crash diet, we lose muscle as well as fat The more severe the diet the more muscle is lost Muscle is more metabolically active than fatty tissue and uses more energy. Weight loss will be more successful if muscle is retained by accepting a slower rate of loss and not such a strict reduction of food intake.

Diet sales talk implies that most weight loss is

fat but in fact the initial big weight loss is of water and glycogen. Glycogen is our immediately available source of energy. When its supply is exhausted our bodies feel hunger and if it is not replenished with carbohydrate food (starchy foods, fruits or vegetables) we may begin to feel low and listless.

Foods low in starch and therefore also low in fibre are often excluded on crash diets and their vital nutrients with them. Some nutritionists now think that we may have a selective drive towards certain foods containing the nutrients we are missing. In this way a dietary imbalance may lead to overeating. So despite the fact that bodies adapt to changing energy needs and changing energy supplies, the quality of food remains important Weight and body shape are the personal aesthetic issues of our time which depend on self-motivation. Hairdressers and cosmet-

ics can put our hair and faces into fashion. A fashionable body image projected by models paid to work at keeping it that way is too difficult to achieve if you’re not made in the same mould and hope to carry out a successful and productive life in another occupation. A diet for body shaping is not a question of keeping to a “diet" but of creating a personal foodstyle that proves by trial and error it can keep weight controlled and can be lived with. • Make time for food: learn about it and the nutrients it provides.

® Eat three or more evenly spaced meals each day. • Have defined meal times to keep track of what you are eating. ® Take stock of what you are eating by keeping a record. • Adjust food to lose only one kilogram per fortnight so that metabolism is not dramatically altered when reducing.

‘The more you diet the less you can eat’

A dietary imbalance may lead to overeating