The Unhappy Marriage of Weight Loss and Dieting: Why Dieting Makes Us Fat

Next, you can develop your own micro-habit plan. The book provides detailed and in-depth guidance to help you create a plan that suits your lifestyle. Unlike dieting, micro-habit plans are highly flexible and completely tailored to you. After you've established your own micro-habit plan, we'll look at strategies for different situations, such as how to deal with holidays, snacks, temptations, peer pressure, dining out, and grocery shopping.

Some books offer recipes for weight loss meals, others provide lists of foods to eat and avoid, but this book teaches you how to change your behavior to permanently lose weight-far more valuable than the world's best recipes or the most comprehensive weight loss food lists. By changing your behavior, you can become the person you want to be.

The methods introduced in this book are all powerful and can help you make changes, while also being extremely simple and accessible to everyone.

Part One: Weight Loss Knowledge

Before we begin, to avoid ambiguity, we need to clarify the two meanings that people give to the word "diet".

1. Recipe (noun): A diet that is regularly provided or consumed.

2. Dieting (verb): Reducing food intake or eating only certain foods in order to lose weight.

Everyone has their own unique diet, but not everyone diets. I emphasize this definition because I don't want you to think I'm contradicting myself by opposing dieting while simultaneously suggesting you create a personalized diet for weight loss. Dieting means consciously changing your eating habits; it's a specific strategy to try and change your diet to lose weight, but unfortunately, it's not very effective. If you believe a certain diet is the ideal for weight loss, you don't necessarily need to diet to achieve it.

This book is not for those who can't stick to a diet. What I'll be introducing here is a more advanced strategy, completely different from dieting, much smarter, and with a higher success rate. Dieting is only for short-term weight loss, while we're trying to achieve long-term, tangible weight loss.

Chapter 1

Unhappy marriage due to weight loss and dieting

Dieting and detoxifying fruit and vegetable juices can effectively increase weight. Wait...what?

What?

People don't fail to see the solutions; they fail to see the problems.

------British author Gilbert K. Chesterton

(Gilbert K. Chesterton)

Dieting makes us fat

Be prepared, the following content will surprise you.

In 1986, scientists attempted to understand the effects of the "yo-yo dieting" on metabolism. This method is characterized by repeated weight gain and loss. To simulate this dieting behavior, scientists first restricted and then increased the calorie intake of several overweight rats, then repeated the process, completing a total of two rounds of dieting.

In the first round of dieting, the rats' average food intake was 50% of the control group, and they lost 131 grams. Then, the scientists increased the food intake, and after the rats regained their pre-diet weight, they reduced the food intake back to 50% for a second round of dieting. This time, the rats lost 133 grams. The weight loss was roughly the same in both rounds, right? Indeed, but how much weight is lost or gained-what dieters are most concerned about-was not the focus of this experiment. The scientists were interested in how long it took for the rats to lose a certain amount of weight in each round of dieting (with the diet exactly the same). The scientists wanted to see how this dieting method would affect the rats' metabolism if it altered their tendency to lose (or gain) weight. The experiment showed that the tendency did indeed change significantly, but not in a positive direction.

In the first round of weight loss, the rats lost 131 grams in 21 days. In the second round (with the same diet as the first), the rats took 46 days to lose a similar amount of weight, more than twice as long as in the first round. The situation regarding weight gain was even worse: after the first round of weight loss, the rats took 29 days to regain their original weight, while after the second round, they only took 10 days.

The repeated process of reducing and increasing weight more than doubled the rats' resistance to weight loss and nearly doubled their tendency to gain weight (measured by the time required for weight change under the same dietary conditions).

The repeated gains and losses in weight increased the rats' food utilization efficiency. Their bodies became more greedy for ingested energy, storing as much as possible as fat. This is the opposite of the goal of people (or rats) trying to lose weight, but it's a normal bodily response to hunger and semi-starvation. If you lived in a time of frequent famine, this efficient use of food could save your life. We now have abundant food and even artificially restrict our intake to lose weight, but if weight repeatedly increases and decreases, the body will still slow down its metabolism to avoid burning too many calories, because, in the body's view, the next meal may not be in sight.

This experiment is one of many that uses a yo-yo diet to alter the metabolism of rats, making them more prone to weight gain. Fortunately, this only works in rats and has nothing to do with humans, otherwise someone would have told us about it 30 years ago, right? No, this biological mechanism also affects us humans.

Everyone probably knows the following data, but few are aware of it. Researchers at UCLA reviewed the results of 31 long-term studies on dieting and found that 33%–66% of participants gained more weight after dieting than they lost during the diet. This data seems alarming, but the reality is likely much worse. Researchers obtained this data only after conducting follow-up surveys years after the experiments ended, and not everyone provided feedback. Who do you think would be least willing to report their weight changes? Certainly, those who regained the most weight and felt ashamed about it.

"Due to some methodological issues, these studies may have underestimated the side effects of dieting, and all these issues make the weight loss results appear to be more successful and longer-lasting than they actually are."