Altering your diet DOES work!

In spite of this report coming out of the University of California.

This is one of the gems in the story:

Dr Mann said: "We decided to dig up and analyse every study that followed people on diets for two to five years. We concluded most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all.

"Their weight would have been pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back.

"The benefits of dieting are simply too small and the potential harms of dieting are too large for it to be recommended as a safe and effective treatment for obesity."

So a safe and effective means of fighting obesity is What? Invasive surgery that removes 80% of an internal organ?!?! Maybe some drugs?? How about we quit giving those folks credit for having such an incredible lack of willpower that they had to have a doctor make it physically impossible for them to overeat instead of actually eating less. (And they still never get svelte!)

How about we wake up and realise that anyone telling you this stuff is probably trying to sell you something (like surgery or drugs). Your doctor doesn't make any money if you figure out how to eat well.

This kind of thing really does drive me a bit nuts. Let me give you a couple of bits of clarification, brought to you by the Groovy Uncle Pauly School of Common Freaking Sense (tm).

1) Diets do not fail. People fail at diets
2) Long term health is directly related to the development of long term habits.

So if you go on a diet for 3 months, drop 20 pounds, and then 3 months later you are heavier than you were when you started, you screwed up. Not the diet.

Buried in the story is this:

Last night, British experts said that fad diets do not work and that the key to maintaining a healthy weight is making gradual, long-term changes.

Dr Beckie Lang, of the Association for the Study of Obesity, said: "Maintaining a healthy weight isn't about going on a diet and coming off a diet when you reach your target weight. It is about adopting skills that change your eating habits for life."

This really isn't that tough to understand. Eat less food, move a little more. Go to Precision Nutrition, buy the package, read it, and implement it. Get on a bike, go for a walk, join a gym.

And if you are physically unable to do those things, figure out a way to change that. Quit coming up with excuses, and find what you can do that works.