The most compelling reason we are given to diet to lose even "an extra five pounds" is that overweight is unhealthy, and dieting will make you healthier.

Diets is not the solution, even is unhealthy for us, large people.

Ernsberger reviews the data indicating that for various medical problems, losing weight often appears to reduce risk factors, but actual weight or degree of fatness is not well correlated with ill health, and the decrease in risk fators occurs much more rapidly than any loss of weight or fat. Individuals who actually have a disease (e.g., diabetes or hypercholesterolemia) appear to improve rapidly when losing weight, but longer-term studies show that these benefits are short-lived, and patients may wind up worse than they began.

The second myth exposed as false in this issue is the myth that dieting helps people to lose weight. Todd Heatherton and Jennifer Tickle examine the question of how effective diets are in promoting weight reduction over the long term. Despite the common belief that dieting results in weight reduction, the evidence shows that any losses that occur are ephemeral, and that as dieting has become increasingly widespread in North America, body weight has, on average, increased not decreased.

Given the failure of dieting to benefit health or reduce weight, it is not surprising to find, as Jennifer Mills, et al., document, that dieting does not make people any happier. Although there may be initial elevations in mood when one first embarks on a diet, this may merely reflect a "false hope" that dieitng will make one's life better somehow, a hope that will soon be dashed when weight is regained and health advantages are not apparent.

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In summary, the articles in this special issue disprove the myths about dieting as a means to better health, lower weight, improved mood and self-esteem, and diminished eating. On all of these fronts, then, dieting merely offers a false hope of change that is not likely to be realized.

"Until we have better data about the risks of being overweight and the benefits and risks of trying to lose weight, we should remember that the cure for obesity may be worse than the condition." David F. Williamson kicked off his editorial in the October 1999 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine by repreating Kassirer and Angell's memorable conclusion about an earlier American Cancer Society study.

Recall Albert Stunkard and M. McLaren-Hume's oft-cited statement summarizing their review of the weight loss literature: "Most obese people do not enter treatment for obesity; of those who do enter, most will not remain; of those who do remain, most will not lose weight; of those that do lose weight, most will regain weight." This was printed in the 1959 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Things have not changed since then. Many today still need to be convinced that weight may not be the problem and diets are not the solution. Why does it take so much courage to depart from the status quo?

Following the International No Diet Day, we give you here ten reason before begin your next diet programm:

10. DIETS DON'T WORK. Even if you lose weight, you will probably gain it all back, and you might gain back more than you lost.

9. DIETS ARE EXPENSIVE. If you didn't buy special diet products, you could save enough to get new clothes, which would improve your outlook right now.

8. DIETS ARE BORING. People on diets talk and think about food and practically nothing else. There's a lot more to life.

7. DIETS DON'T NECESSARILY IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH. Like the weight loss, health improvement is temporary. Dieting can actually cause health problems.

6. DIETS DON'T MAKE YOU BEAUTIFUL. Very few people will ever look like models. Glamour is a look, not a size. You don't have to be thin to be attractive.

5. DIETS ARE NOT SEXY. If you want to be more attractive, take care of your body and your appearance. Feeling healthy makes you look your best.

4. DIETS CAN TURN INTO EATING DISORDERS. The obsession to be thin can lead to anorexia, bulimia, bingeing, and compulsive exercising.

3. DIETS CAN MAKE YOU AFRAID OF FOOD. Food nourishes and comforts us, and gives us pleasure. Dieting can make food seem like your enemy, and can deprive you of all the positive things about food.

2. DIETS CAN ROB YOU OF ENERGY. If you want to lead a full and active life, you need good nutrition, and enough food to meet your body's needs.

And the number one reason to give up dieting:

1. Learning to love and accept yourself just as you are will give you self-confidence, better health, and a sense of wellbeing that will last a lifetime.

Putting oneself on a diet consisting of a significant reduction of calories has several emotional and physical risks. The effects of dieting we underline go to depression, irritability, fatigue, weakness, social withdrawal, reduced sex drive, semi-starvation neurosis and cardiac arrhythmias leading to sudden death (Servier Canada, Inc., 1991). After dieting, sense of appetite and satiety are lost, cravings for certain foods develop and there is increasing proeccupation on weight. The long term effects of dieting include nutritional deprivation, depression, anxiety, anger, mood swings, binge eating and chronic eating disorders (Ciliska, 1993b). Garner and Wooley (1991) are clear in their conclusions about the impact of the dietary treatment of obesity: 1) Virtually all programs appear to be able to demonstrate moderate success in promoting at least some short term weight loss; and 2) There is no evidence that clinically significant weight loss can be maintained over the long term by the vast majority of people.

• Most, if not all, eating disorders start from dieting
  
  Over a third of "normal dieters" progress to pathological eating, a 1995 study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders documented. For up to 4 percent of the population, according to the American Psychiatric Association, it takes the form of compulsive eating problems.The two most life-threatening eating disorders, focused on the quantity of food eaten, are anorexia nervosa and bulimia.

• Dieting
  
  Among girls who diet their risk for obesity is 3.24 times greater than for nondieters. Dieting among adults is similarly associated with an increased risk of long-term weight gain, according to studies by Allison Daee, R.D., and colleagues at the University of Missouri.
  The larger and more rapid the weight loss, the more profound and rapid the weight regain, according to research headed by Albert Stunkard, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and founder of the Weight and Eating Disorders Program.
  
  Dieting Builds Fat, our bodies are designed to adapt to stress. We stress our body by dieting and make it think it's nearing starvation, forcing it to break down fat to supply the energy we need for survival. Afterwards, as soon as the body's given any nourishment above starvation levels, it biologically reacts by putting on more fat, holding onto fat more vehemently, and conserving more of what we eat thereafter as fat.
  
  How can diets do all that? Diets appear to change a number of biological processes, and trigger fat-storing mechanisms, that are outside the dieter's control. Dieting does so especially intensely among those dieters genetically designed for survival during lean times. So, those with weight problems are not only most likely to diet, but also to suffer from the most detrimental physiological changes brought on by dieting.

  Multiple researchers have found that weight loss with dieting is at the expense of muscle mass and vital organs such as brain, heart, kidney and liver. In Clinical Nutrition and Dietetics (Prentice Hall, 1990), Frances Zeman, Ph.D., R.D., documented that skeletal muscle protein is broken down for energy at about 0.8 pound lean tissue per day during the first five to seven days of a low-calorie diet, and drops to a rate of about a quarter pound per day thereafter. The body then holds onto fat and eventually breaks it down at a much lower rate of 0.4 pound per day. Thus, up to 45 percent of weight loss from dieting comes not from losing fat but from the body cannibalizing its own muscle tissue, according to experts in Exercise and Sport Science Reviews (Academic Press, 1975).

  Worst of all, our diet-triggered survival propensities mean that weight then regained after dieting is preferentially as fat. Studies have shown it's largely gained as visceral fat around our organs and in the upper torso, which is associated with the greatest risk for heart disease, high blood pressure and type II diabetes. After dieting, especially repeated dieting, formerly fat people may look and weigh the same as naturally lean folks, but have high percentages of body fat -- technically they're still obese!

  Dieting completely alters fat metabolism, not just by changing the percentage and composition of body fat.

  As we've seen, it also hampers our ability to lose it again, and it raises insulin levels. (Insulin is the fat-building hormone, encouraging fat storage and resisting fat break down. High insulin levels prelude high blood pressure, abnormal blood cholesterol levels and atherosclerosis.)
  
  After dieting the lowered metabolism often doesn't return to its former level, so that with normal food intake the post-dieter quickly gains weight even more quickly than before. They documented studies finding people unable to eat more than 800 to 900 calories a day -- starvation levels, according to the World Health Organization -- after dieting, without gaining weight.
  A 1996 review of the National Weight Control Registry of successful long-term weight losers found that in order to maintain weight loss these people had to eat near semi-starvation levels, even though most were also exercising religiously. The average woman was eating 1,297 calories a day and the average man 1,725 calories, almost half of what would be considered normal for good health.
  
  What's been discovered to date concerning the causes of obesity leaves little doubt that it's much more complicated than it appears and considerable more research is needed.
  
  Even if obesity is a problem, many researchers question the concept that dieting or weight loss is the cure. Changing how someone looks on the outside will not change what's going on in the inside, nor will it change whatever health risk factors may be linked to his or her genes.

  Yet, obesity is the only condition we look to treat simply by changing appearances without addressing the physiological or genetic factors inside.

• Before the diet mania, the average American woman took in 3,000 to 5,000 calories a day; today that average woman eats less than 1,600 calories daily and is on some type of weight loss program, according to Frances Berg, M.S., in Women Afraid to Eat -- Breaking Free in Today's Weight-Obsessed World (Healthy Weight Network, 2000).

January 2006.
Fighting against Fat Discriminaiton in all ways.