Main Page> Nutrition> Why Diets Don't Work
Often, when someone decides to go on a diet, they choose to cut out a food item or food group that they believe is making them gain weight. So for example, a person cuts bread out of their diet. For 2-3 days, they successfully avoid bread. Then they go out to a restaurant where bread is served and eat a few pieces. At the end of the dinner, they feel extremely guilty about eating bread and decide that the following day, not only will they cut out bread, but sugar as well. The cycle continues until the person is constantly obsessing about the diet, though not meeting any significant, long-term weight loss goals. Instead of dieting, we need to focus on life long changes. Make small, accomplishable changes each week and eventually, you will get to the healthy lifestyle you want. For example, this week, have a goal of adding vegetables to at least one meal per day. Once that goal has become part of your lifestyle, another change can be made. Goals for weight loss and life style changes need to be SMART: sustainable, measurable, attainable, realistic and have a time line. Lifestyle changes take time and require patience. Dieting will only make us more obsessed with food and leave us less likely to attain our goals. Focus on permanent lifestyle changes that make us feel happy and good.	The Minnesota Experiment "The Minnesota Experiment" was conducted in 1950 by Ancel Keys to study the effects of food deprivation. The Study: Selected 36 of the most physically and psychologically healthy men from a pool of over 100 men. For 3 months, track exactly what the men are eating. For the next 6 months, cut their calories in half. The men lost on average, about 25% of their former weight. For 3 months after that, rehabilitate them back to their normal lifestyle. After severely cutting calories for a 6 month period, the experimenters observed the following changes in the men. These changes continued well past the end of the study: The men became obsessed with food. They started hoarding all food-related items including things such as cookbooks The men would eat a meal that would have satisfied them before the study began, and now claimed to be hungry after eating that meal. The men either ate significantly slower or faster than they did at the beginning of the study. The men became more irritable and even had psychotic episodes in which one man even cut off three of his fingers (keep in mind that these men were deemed to be psychologically healthy at the start of the study). Though this study is over 50 years old and would not be a legal study to conduct today, it teaches us many things about food deprivation and the effects of dieting. Though many of us don't diet this strictly, cutting calories teaches us to become more obsessive with food. Once we come off the diet, we are likely to eat more than we did before the diet started.
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