Diet is a Dirty Word

Diet is a dirty word

Balancing act ... don't confuse being healthy with being thin. Photo: Natalie Boog

Ultra-strict eating habits will get you nowhere, writes Lissa Christopher.

The notion that diets - restrictive, rigid eating regimes - are an effective way to lose weight and keep it off should have been laid to rest years ago.

In 2007, for example, Traci Mann and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a study on the effectiveness of diets that was considered so exhaustive no further analysis was required. It was published in American Psychologist and concluded that ''dieting does not lead to sustained weight loss in the majority of individuals''. It found, in fact, that in the longer term, diets left most participants fatter than before they started.

The diet myth, however, continues to be peddled and dozens of ''new'' diets are published every year, particularly in the New Year's resolution-infested month of January. Here are but a few from this January: The Carb Lovers Diet, Crazy Sexy Diet, The New Abs Diet, The Now Eat This! Diet, The Self-Compassion Diet … We could fill this entire story with the names of diets published since 2007. The director of the Butterfly Foundation and author of If Not Dieting, Then What?, Dr Rick Kausman, says the idea that diets do more harm than good is slowly gaining momentum but is up against strong opposition.

''Dieting culture remains strong,'' he says. ''Diets are very seductive and there is a lot of money to be made from them. It's of benefit to diet businesses to keep people feeling like it's their fault a diet hasn't worked rather than a problem with dieting … And they're marketed like they're easy: 'Look at these people who have succeeded with our diet.'''

The dropouts, however, are overlooked, as is the distressing, obsessive thinking dieting tends to generate, he says.
Kausman and others, such as Dr Amanda Sainsbury-Salis, who lost 30 kilograms and has kept if off for more than a decade, promote a softly-softly approach to reaching a healthy weight that is increasingly winning converts.  They advocate principles that include eating a broad range of foods and forbidding yourself nothing, getting back in touch with your body's hunger and satiety signals, moving more, being patient with yourself and focusing on health rather than idealised, magazine-style thinness.

''The other challenge with getting this message to the masses is that I and others [with a similar approach] haven't got a quick-fix message,'' Kausman says.  ''I have to say to people, 'Sorry, but this is going to take a bit of work'. I can't offer you magic … but this does get easier with practice, unlike dieting, which just gets harder.''

Don't Go Hungry for Life, Dr Amanda Sainsbury-Salis If Not Dieting, Then What?, Dr Rick Kausman.
Both pf these books are available from Amazon.  Click here to purchase