Ninmecu said:
Do you know what the "Lite" meal used to be? A burger without a bun, 1 tomatto slice, bit of bacon if you paid the extra and a tall glass of water. Total carb content? Next to nothing. And it worked. These days we have the intelligent design of feeding insulin to diabetics under the pretense that once a diabetic takes insulin, the body becomes slightly less resistant to it, disregarding the fact that we constantly train the body to become /more/ insulin resistant by doing so, leading to greater adipose tissue deposits, leading to our current situation. We have doctors that recommend to obese patients to take a larger dose of insulin if they plan on eating that extra slice of cake rather than teaching them to limit carbohydrate intake in favor of a higher dietary fat intake. Which is, again, a topic for another time.
Oh man, don't get me started on that. I almost want to laugh when people with diabetes tell me they "Avoid rice and potatoes, but eat 'healthy' starches like whole grains". All those whole grains will turn into just as much blood glucose as an equivalent amount of rice/potatoes, just slower, sunshine.
chikusho said:
"You can initially lose 5 to 10 percent of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back," said Traci Mann, UCLAassociate professor of psychology and lead author of the study. "We found thatthe majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Sustained weightloss was found only in a small minority of participants, while complete weightregain was found in the majority. Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss orhealth benefits for the majority of people."
...
Another study, which examined a variety of lifestyle factorsand their relationship to changes in weight in more than 19,000 healthy older menover a four-year period, found that "one of the best predictors of weight gainover the four years was having lost weight on a diet at some point during theyears before the study started," Tomiyama said. In several studies, people incontrol groups who did not diet were not that much worse off ? and in manycases were better off ? than those who did diet, she said.
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/Dieting-Does-Not-Work-UCLA-Researchers-7832
Only your initial point was that obesity was "uncurable". Also, that link you're citing isn't exactly doing a good job proving your point. It's not a study in and of itself, simply an analysis of a number of studies, none of which are cited, which could have been conducted without appropriate standards, and don't even bother to distinguish between types of diets.
chikusho said:
No. But being in a constant state of anxiety over what you can and cannot eat is developing an eating disorder. And that's basically what it takes to deny yourself something that your body is hungering after - salt, fat, sugar and unhealthy foods. Being addicted to food and sugar is just as strong, if not stronger, than a heroin addiction. Only it's harder to kick, because you will literally die without sustenance, so you still have to give your body small portions of the substances.
The problem therein is you're assuming you need to be on some masochistic vegan "diet" to lose weight. Or assuming that you have to starve yourself and eat only lettuce and celery three meals a day.
Unsurprisingly, I find myself echoing Ninmecu's sentinments on salt and fat. I've gotten used to the fact that people look at me funny when I discuss nutrition because of propaganda(fat, salt, and red meat are the devil, grains and grain oils are great for you) spawned by people and corporations like Senator George McGovern, Ancel Keys, Colin Campbell, Proctor and Gamble and countless others.
But if you really look back in time at the literature, at all the nutritionists, scientists and statisticians who refused to toe the line and who were demonised or had funding instantly cut off, you'll realise how twisted the standard American diet is, and how
literally everything you know about nutrition is wrong. Did you know the human body
needs dietary fat to accomplish a host of biological functions? Did you know the body can burn fat as fuel instead of glucose?
I've been eating low carb for over a year now, and yes, I did initially have carb cravings and did backslide a bit, although I've never been one to put on weight. The point is, the hunger and carb cravings were just as bad as an obese person. But I stuck through it for a few months, slowly figuring out how to incorporate more butter, ghee, coconut oil, meat and vegetables into my diet, and eventually my palate, and the kind of food I enjoyed eating changed drastically.
Today, if you asked me to choose between a nice steak with an equal amount of lightly steamed, salted, buttered leafy greens and a deep-dish, stuffed crust pizza, I'd choose the former in an instant, based almost entirely on taste.
So maybe, just
maybe people don't understand that dieting isn't solely about calories in and calories out, but also about the quality of each calorie. Maybe that's why all those diets fail; because people are so busy cyclically self-starving and then binging on calorically-dense, low-satiety, low nutrient food that the government tells them is so good for them.
Maybe if they ate food that actually provided sufficient nutrients(rather than just empty calories), satiation and didn't get turned straight into fat(by the way, dietary fat isn't what makes you fat), people wouldn't be back-sliding on their "diets", or as I like to call it, their lifestyle.