Sandra Aamodt, a neuroscientist and author of "Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequence of Our Obsession with Weight Loss," said dieters are fighting an uphill battle against the natural instincts of their bodies to keep weight on.
“You can’t lose weight on a diet,” she said. “The brain has a coordinated defensive response against weight loss."
But one expert has criticized coverage of the Biggest Loser study. Dr. Michael Joyner is a medical researcher at the Mayo Clinic. He pointed out that, yes, many of the 14 contestants regained weight. But eight of them regained at most half the weight they had lost. One person had lost still more weight.
"Almost everyone who loses weight, no matter what method they use, is going to gain a lot of it back again," Joyner wrote on the site Health News Review. " A better headline, then, might have read something along the lines of, “Biggest Loser results similar to weight loss surgery for many dieters.”
He also cautioned that 14 individuals is a tiny sample to study and they had an unusual experience in being on a reality show.
A Better Approach
So should dieters just give up trying to be slimmer and healthier? Of course not. Just change the approach, the experts said on Forum.
“We try to not to even use that term ‘diet,’ said Katie Ferraro, a registered dietitian and professor at UC San Francisco's School of Nursing. “What works for you may not work for another individual. Most diets are short term fixes.”
Ferraro said the key is “retraining our brains to listen to hunger and satiety cues” like we did as babies.
If people want to slim down, the focus should instead be on being mindful about eating when hungry and stopping when full. Exercise is also key, said Aamodt , who tried this combined approach for a year.
Every time she was about to eat something, she said she would stop and check in with her body to see how her stomach was feeling.
“Was there something else going on?” she would ask herself. “Was I bored or avoiding something, or was I hungry?”
Aamodt said the approach helped her lose weight and maintain it ever since because it doesn’t fight the instincts of the body -- unlike dieting, which can trigger the brain to make you want to eat more.
“There is no coordinated brain response to keep you from exercising,” Aamodt said. “There is no coordinated brain response trying to keep you from eating vegetables. ... Why in the world are we focusing on the one outcome measure that we know that will be opposed dramatically by our physiology? Why is that the correct thing to focus on?”
Ferraro said most of what people spend on diet books and diet drugs is a waste of money. She said it would be more beneficial to help people learn how to prepare food for themselves so they don’t eat out as much where they have less control over the ingredients used.
Avoiding processed foods is a healthy idea, the experts said. But they cautioned that just because a food is “organic” does not mean it is necessarily good for health or weight loss.
“Organic junk food is still junk food,” Ferraro said. “These are just organic versions of the foods we shouldn’t eat much of anyway.”
Ferraro said she wouldn’t want to discourage someone from eating conventional fruits and veggies and instead eat organic junk food.
So perhaps what the Biggest Loser study really showed was that it will be the diet industry that will slim down the most in the future if people change their approach to weight loss.
