Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

by Sandra Aamodt

Considerable evidence shows that dieting—willfully eating less to lose weight—rarely works in the long run, while its unintended side effects do a lot of harm.

Just as the body needs a certain amount of sleep, the brain has a body weight range that it prefers and will defend for each individual. The brain’s weight-regulation system will maintain a stable, healthy weight for most people, if it is allowed to do its job without interference.

When research shows that a particular diet “works,” we need to check how long the study lasted to know whether the loss is likely to be temporary. Most diet studies last only six months, and few of them follow participants for longer than a year, due to limited funding and perhaps anxiety about documenting the long-term failure rates.

After one of my talks, a doctor told me that it felt unethical not to recommend dieting to her obese patients, but when I asked her about the ethics of prescribing a treatment with such a high failure rate, she fell silent.

Weight-based prejudice is notable for its openness. People often feel comfortable making direct comments about other people’s bodies, ranging from unrequested advice on weight loss to mooing at pedestrians out of car windows.

Medical professionals have strong weight-related prejudices, with 69 percent of people in the overweight or obese categories reporting discrimination from doctors.

Anyone who believes that an obese person could become thin simply by following the lifestyle of a thin person is ignoring the power of the energy-balance system or “weight thermostat” centered in the hypothalamus.

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The diet industry has adopted a strategy of taking credit for weight loss and then blaming the predictable regain on individual lack of willpower when it actually results from the brain’s energy-balance system working correctly to reverse weight loss.

But most “calories in/calories out” arguments about weight loss ignore vast individual differences in how bodies handle energy.

Weight is as heritable as height, though it’s easier to see the genetic influences on height because it doesn’t change much in adulthood.

many obesity researchers have financial ties to drug companies or diet clinics.