I admire Gina Kolata’s writing. She’s a science writer for the NYTimes, and has a load of books to her credit, so I spent a little time this weekend skimming Rethinking Thin (2007), her examination of the current “obesity epidemic.” She spends a good deal of time recapping two studies (one short-term, one long-term) aimed at comparing (and, initially, debunking) some of the popular diet programs, in particular the Atkins low-carb regime. The short-term study, to everyone’s surprise, showed that the Atkins diet was more successful and didn’t elevate everyone’s bad cholesterol, as had been predicted. The study sparked a massive spike in interest in and adherence to the Atkins program (our house included). A second, longer-term study (two years) was initiated to try to verify the results of the first, and Kolata set out to document that study. The results could not have been more unpredicable — to Kolata, maybe, but not to the millions of us who have been on the diet treadmill for most of our lives.
No one [writes Kolata] could have been more determined than the dieters in the [second] study. They committed themselves to a two-year program. They kept food diaries. They exercised. They worked on avoiding thoughts and feelings and situations that tempted them to eat. And yet, as happens to dieters time and time agin, most ended up gaining back almost every pound so painfully lost.
At the final meeting for the study, Kolata writes, most of the dieters didn’t even show up. The bittersweet lesson?
In the end, the lesson is, once again, that no matter what the diet and matter how hard they try, most people will not be able to lose a lot of weight and keep it off. They can lose a lot of weight and keep it off briefly, they can lose some weight and keep it off for a longer time, they can learn to control their eating, and they can learn the joy of regular exercise. Those who do best seem to be those who learn to gauge portions and calories and to keep their housers as free as possible of food they cannot resist. The effort, the lifelong effort can be rewarding—people say they feel much better for it. But true thinness is likely to elude them…
This exchange made me particularly crazy:
I told a skinny friend about the dieters I had been following and the sad, but predictable, outcome of their attempts to lose weight. “Did they really really try?” he asked. I drew in my breath. It was like a slap. “Yes, of course they really, really tried,” I said.
Yes, thin people everywhere, we really, REALLY try. As a lifelong dieter who believes she has actually dieted herself into obesity (every success eventually ended in failure—and an extra 10 pounds), I am really angry about the current obesity focus. I find television shows like “The Biggest Loser” and “Fat Camp” humiliating. (Why do they make those people wear BICYCLE SHORTS?) And the segments on obesity surgery make me want to weep. Some of them actually border on mutilation. I fervently hope we’ll be able to look back some day on these public displays of obese people and compare them to medieval torture. (“What WERE we thinking?”) Perhaps, Kolata suggests, we need to reexamine the entire paradigm:
What, then, is wrong with this picture? Some scientists, including obesity researchers Jules Hirsch and Jeff Friedman, suggest an intriguing hypothesis. The origins of people’s recent weight gains may hive little to do with their current environment or with their willpower or lack of it, or with today’s social customs to snack and eat on the run or with any other popular belief. Instead, they say, we may be a new, heavier human race and our weight my have been set by events that took place very early in life, maybe even prenatally… Maybe something happened early in life—better nutrition, vaccines to provide freedom from viral infections that plagued children of previous generations, antibiotics to cure infections like strep throat or pneumonia—that precipitated changes in the brain’s control over weight… Higher weights could be an unintended consequence of the nation’s generally better health, or maybe even a contributor to it.
For another rebuttal of the obesity crisis, go here.
