Living on a diet is not easy. Even so, we can estimate that 4 out of 10 readers of this column have tried to lose weight in the last 5 years. Among 10 who managed the feat of reducing the pointer of the scale, 8 regained the pounds lost in the first year. And, amazingly, so many others had an even worse fate.
Em 1983, “Dieting Makes You Fat” [A dieta te faz engordar, Virgin Books, R$ 72,45 em ebook na Amazon; R$ 336 págs.], by Geoffrey Cannon and Hetty Einzig, foreshadowed an apparent paradox: 1 in 3 dieters tend to gain more weight in the future than they initially lost. Hence the provocative title of the bestseller.
Three decades have passed and the subject remains hot.
Calorie restriction is still a central component of the treatment of overweight and obese people, despite its highly variable success rate.
On the other hand, we have enough evidence to affirm that individuals with normal weight who follow diets are more likely to gain weight throughout their lives.
This finding comes from different types of studies. In a survey of twins, those who reported restrictive dieting during adolescence — compared to those who didn’t — had a higher risk of being overweight at age 25.
Elite athletes who routinely need to drop weight to compete, such as boxers and weightlifters, tend to exhibit greater body mass than their peers involved in modalities that do not demand strict weight control.
In one of the most classic diet studies—the “Minnesota Starvation Experiment”—healthy men were subjected to austere calorie restriction for 6 months, which resulted in a 25% loss of body weight. Some participants were able to eat ad libitum for 2 subsequent months. The researchers noticed that the volunteers’ feelings of hunger reached higher levels than at the beginning of the study, remaining so for weeks, even after the complete recovery of the lost weight.
The explanations for these results lie at the origin of our species.
Our genes have been sculpted over millions of years of evolution by the hammer of food unpredictability. This forged us to be economic, savers. In such a way that an abrupt drop in body weight — via calorie restriction, for example — triggers a vigorous physiological response, towards the recovery of the lost weight.
When we lose weight, we eliminate fat and muscle. And the low stores of both tissues, interpreted by our brain as a risk to survival, triggers the hunger signal. This explains, by the way, why we often sabotage diets.
It so happens that the hunger button remains activated even when we recover all the initially lost fat.
The voracity for food only eases with the recovery of muscle mass, which occurs more slowly than fat – often when we are already fatter than before the diet.
This mechanism — called fat overshooting — helps explain why restrictive diets can make us fat in the future.
The cycle of weight loss and gain (more gain than loss, strictly speaking) — popularly known as the accordion effect — is associated with increased cardiovascular and mortality risks, in addition to self-image disorders, eating disorders and anxiety.
Despite the ubiquitous social pressure for a thin body, the attempt to slim people of normal weight is clinically incoherent. And it may well produce the opposite of what is intended.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release five free accesses of any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
