January is traditionally the month for self-improvement. We stay up late to bring in the New Year, and then we vow to change for the better. I make a New Year's resolution every year, and every year it's the same thing: I will lose 15 pounds, I will look hot in my swimsuit come spring. Going by the fact that I make this resolution every year one could assume I never succeed — that would be a correct assumption.
Why don't I ever succeed? I've tried it all, and there are a lot of options out there. If you browse the shelves at any bookstore, watch TV for awhile or flip through any magazine you'll see a lot of sources offering you quick solutions. There are countless diet plans, each one claiming to help you lose the most weight in the least amount of time. Do any of them work, or are all these quick fixes too good to be true? I wanted to find out, so I got in touch with some local experts on the subject.
Healthy U NutritionMatters consultant Esther Park weighs in on the diet plans.
"I see a lot of patients who come to see me who have tried fad diets, and I would say from experience that they don't work in the long term," she said. "If it sounds too good to be true it probably is."
This is starting to sound familiar — what exactly is a fad diet? I've tried a lot of diets: There's the South Beach Diet, for which you have three phases, and in each phase you have specific limits on carbohydrates, sugars and certain foods. It didn't sound too terrible at first, but after about two weeks I gave this one up. It was too hard to pay attention to how many carbohydrates were in what and to gather together the foods I was allowed to eat. I asked Park about it.
"It is a fad diet, especially the first two weeks," Park said. "They omit a lot of major food groups. The main problem is you are losing out on the balance of health and pleasure."
Park said eating involves satisfying hunger, but also cravings. "You need to eat things you like to feel satisfied. Guess what happens when you're not satisfied? You keep eating," she said.
She was right about the keep on eating part. I'm pretty sure I wasn't supposed to follow my lean boiled chicken breast with five chocolate chip cookies. When South Beach was a no-go, I looked for something simpler. I decided the Special K Challenge sounded easy. No counting carbs or cooking special foods; all I do is replace two meals a day with a bowl of cereal. What's wrong with that?
Park says that using a diet which focuses on the consumption of one specific type of food is not normal eating and won't work in the long run.
"They work in the short term because when you're only allowed to eat one food, you are eating less," she said.
Park said one problem with diets is how they restrict what you can eat.
"These fad diets tell you not to eat carbohydrates or sugar or whatever else," she said. "There's always going to be a birthday party or something — you can't sustain a fad diet."
Olin Health Center nutritionist Ronda Bokram said she would never recommend a diet to someone.
"They don't work. If you look at research in dieting, it fails," she said. "Anytime you eliminate major food groups from your diet there's no way that it can be healthy."
OK, diets aren't so good. What about diet pills? I don't even have to do anything — just take the magic fat burning pill. Please, let it be true.
"They don't work. No pill will burn fat. Trust me, if there was any effective medication we would know about it, and doctors would use it," Park said. She added that diet pills can also be very dangerous, since they increase your heart rate dramatically.
These nutritionists are crushing my dreams.
The South Beach Diet was too complicated, and the Special K Challenge was too simple, so I began the search for something new. At this point I still had not realized that my whole line of thinking was flawed. I decided to try a holistic approach and began a diet where you eat only raw foods. Since almost everything is cooked, I could basically only eat fruit and vegetables. I allowed myself to include milk products as well, deciding that pasteurization wasn't the same as cooking.
This diet involved some of my favorite foods, so I thought I could handle it. I could, at least better than the other ones, but I still abandoned it before week three. I was back to my steady diet of chocolate and bagels.
Kristen Barnes, co-founder of the campus group Respecting and Understanding Body Image, or RUBI, said she thinks people go on fad diets because they are desperate to lose weight due to the pressure from the media and society emphasizing they need to be thin and not the need to be healthy.
"I haven't done a fad diet, but I definitely have had my own made-up sort of diets. It would be like mainly vegetable and fruit, stuff like that," said the 2005 graduate.
Barnes said people need to stop dieting and trying to be thin and focus more on being healthy.
"I don't think people realize how dangerous and harmful to your body diets can be," she said. "A lot of times they result in eating disorders if you take them to the extreme."
Bokram said dieting just makes people think about food all the time, and it makes them want to eat even more.
"People have the least amount of problems with their weight when they don't have limits on food," she said. "Once you start restricting something, you really want it, and you are messing with your relationship with food."
Instead of dieting, Bokram recommends regular activity paired with eating on a regular basis, which is every two to five hours.
"Learning to work with your internal cues for hunger, appetite and satiety is key," she said. "You need to be eating enough so that your metabolism stays as high as it can be, restricting and under-eating will ultimately work against you in many ways."
Brenda Lepisto supervises doctoral psychology students at MSU and has a private practice in East Lansing. She said dieting is likely to end up making you gain more weight.
"If you go on all these fad diets, you end up resetting your set metabolism point, and you have more problems losing weight," she said.
So dieting doesn't work — it's dangerous and counterproductive. From now on I'm going to eat when I'm hungry, and make sure I consume every major food group — at least until I can save up for one of those diets that delivers precooked meals to my front door.
