WW, Nutrisystem and Jenny present: Dieting, Dieting and more Dieting!!

Dieting season is almost upon us! Soon everyone will be signing up for gyms, diet programs or just decide it's time to finally get rid of the weight. This means it's time for flashy ad campaigns for the diet industry to guilt you after you might have eaten too much this holiday season. This means another year of starting "good" and ending "bad."

However I like to  start with a good story, one that I already covered, the FDA is coming down hard on the lapband.  

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today announced that it has taken action against eight California surgical centers and the marketing firm 1-800-GET-THIN LLC, for misleading advertising of the Lap-Band, an FDA-approved device used for weight loss in obese adults.

But here's a story that made me throw up a little in my month. A fluff piece appearing in the New York Times gives the diet industry some free advertisment by covering three former fat divas and a basketball player (because men haven't yet reached the level of body dissatisfaction women have)  who not only want to you to join the dieting trio of Weight watchers, Jenny Craig, and Nutrisystem,  and lose weight but want stop hunger too.  And I am shocked, shocked to find Weight Watchers supporting Dr. Oz's weight loss program. 

THIS holiday season, three of the country's biggest diet companies are turning to three well-known divas to deliver public-minded messages about obesity and its opposite, hunger, along with the customary exhortations for people to begin shedding pounds as soon as the year's festivities end.

Hunger and food insecurity is of course an important issue even here in America and donating food (year round not just Christmas) is excellent. There are, in fact, many studies indicating that people who are food insecure (especially woman and girls) tend to be fat.  So I guess hunger and fatness are NOT polar opposites.

I think one of the best ways to stop hunger is to not diet, and to take money you would normally spend on diet programs and give it to actually stopping hunger.

Speaking of hunger and dieting. A new "study" about Weight Cycling indicates that if you are a mouse and weight cycle (actually eat a high fat diet followed fat diet) you'll be okay.  So mice, it is okay to eat high fat sometimes just make sure you also eat low fat.  I haven't seen this study yet. A pubmed search indicated one of the authors  had lots of studies on mice,  Weight cycling is not about how your body reacts from doing a high fat diet and then moving to a low fat one. It has to do with losing and gaining a large amount of weight repeatedly. All this proves again that if you are a mouse, don't eat a high fat diet. Other real indicators of the study may be that healthy eating, not weight loss fixes health indicators. Or that eating high fat 50% of the time won't affect your health. 

Also I see your study and raise you one done on human women that indicates a higher death rate among weight cyclers.  Here is another one done on middle age men. 

Let's go back to HAES again: eat right, exercise, love your body, and let your weight be what your body decides. Or let's all be like mice, and be subject to stupid laboratory experiments like eating low-fat.