The diet dilemma

Radley Balko reviews the latest findings from the front-lines of the obesity wars:

A comprehensive meta-study from UCLA of 31 other studies of dieters found that 83 percent of people who go on diets eventually put on more weight than before they started. What's more, the wear and tear associated with yo-yo weight loss and gain makes them much less healthy for trying. This would include the low-fat, high-fiber diet recommended by the U.S. government. [. . .]

All of which could mean that all of these calls from ant-fat activists and PR campaigns from the U.S. government encourage people to lose weight aren't just meddlesome. If 83 percent of people who try to lose weight fail, and are less healthy for trying, these sorts of messages could well be doing harm. As the dietitian in the Guardian article suggests, you're far better off just trying to get some cardiovascular exercise several times per week and not worrying so much about weight.

Among the many reasons for North Americans getting fatter is the huge change in our working lives over the past twenty years or so: more of us work in sedentary jobs, yet we still tend to eat as if we were going out to hew coal from the mine every morning. We're programmed by our upbringing to eat "three square meals" every day, and the meals we eat are almost certainly higher in calories than those our parents and grandparents prepared.

Dieting is a mug's game: we're fighting our own genes to avoid adding that extra layer of fat that our prehistoric ancestors needed to survive. To avoid the weight gain, we need to be more physically active. I say this as someone who knows that I'm carrying my own share of extra weight, so this isn't an exercise junkie preaching here . . .