Is Your Yo-yo Diet Making Things Worse?

Sticking to your diet can be hard, but coming off it can make things even harder in the long run. Every time you gain your weight back, it seems even more difficult to lose, and this can be a risk to your psychological wellbeing and lead to depression. According to New York City based dietician Jackie Newgent, R.D. this is because ‘no matter how you drop pounds – whether it’s through dieting, exercise, or a combination of both – you will inevitably lose some muscle, and that slows down your basal metabolic rate’.

 

The yoyo diet was evaluated by researchers at the University of Melbourne, who helped 50 obese adults through eight weeks of an extreme 500 – 550 calories per day, to the point where the test subjects had lost an average of 30 pounds. The researchers then supported the dieters for a year to help them to stick to their new dietary habits, but the participants actually regained an average of 11 pounds, and reported feeling more food-obsessed and hungry than they had before they’d started dieting.

 

The researchers found that the participants had a 20% higher lever of an appetite -stimulating hormone, whilst the appetite suppressing hormones which the body produces naturally were considerably lower than normal. Joseph Proietto, professor of medicine, was one of the researchers, and described the effect as a ‘co-ordinated defence mechanism with multiple components all directed toward making us put on weight’. This means that essentially the patients’ bodies had launched a ‘fight’ against dieting, as it is believed by many biologists that the human body has been designed to survive long periods of starvation.

 

Another study based around the concept of ‘yoyo dieting’ has shown that it can negatively impact your emotional and psychological wellness, leading to conditions such as depression and guilt. It showed that when you stop dieting, it tends to bring up feelings of failure, so you ultimately put the weight back on again. Then by yo-yoing, or continuing the cycle, you could end up believing that you really are a failure, which not only impacts on your weight loss but could affect your social relationships. Many dieters feel under pressure to avoid social situations and express embarrassment about admitting to others that they’re back on a diet, which causes them to quit and resent others for their weight gain.

 

What it all boils down to is that you should be looking at ways to achieve weight control, rather than watching your weight rise and fall. It really is a case of ‘everything in moderation’ over drastic action, and, this way, your weight and your wellness will be secure.

Is Your Yo-yo Diet Making Things Worse?

Categories: diet, Information, Weight Cycling

Yo-Yo Dieters Don’t Lack Weight Loss Willpower

Yo-yo dieting, or weight cycling often makes you think of a lack of willpower, and has multiple wellness risks to your immune system, body esteem, body composition and your metabolic rate, but new research suggests that yo-yo dieters are just as likely to stick with a diet and/or exercise programme as those whose weight hasn’t bounced around over the years.

 

For the study, 439 overweight, postmenopausal women, who were not physically active, were randomly assigned to a weight loss diet and/or moderate or vigorous aerobic exercise for 45 minutes a day, five days a week. Just under one-fifth of the women were classified as ‘severe weight cyclers’, having lost at least 20 pounds 3 times previously and a quarter of the women were moderate weight cyclers, as they’d lost 10 pounds at least 3 times. There was a control group of women who didn’t change their diets or exercise habits for reasons of comparison.

 

The women with a history of yo-yo dieting were heavier and had less favourable metabolic and hormonal profiles than the other women, but these differences did not stem from weight cycling itself, but rather their higher BMI, larger waistlines, and greater percentage of body fat. The results were that, in terms of weight loss and improvements in their metabolic and hormonal profiles, the women with a history of weight cycling had fared at least as well as the other women.

 

However, what does this prove? Surely if a weight-cycler has lost and gained weight before, they’ll just gain this weight back again. According to researcher Anne McTiernan, MD, PhD, and a member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre’s Public Health Sciences Division, the team is in the process of analysing the long-term findings of the study as they ‘have been able to follow many of the women out to a couple of years’ says McTiernan. She concluded that if you are a yo-yo dieter, you should keep trying to lose weight nevertheless, because ‘If nothing else, losing weight again gives you a period of time at a lower weight, which improves your health for however long you keep the weight off.’

Yo-Yo Dieters Don’t Lack Weight Loss Willpower

Categories: Dieting, Information, Weight Cycling