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Dr Jason Fung: Why Caloric Reduction (“Eat less, Move more”) fails…
or The Cruel Hoax of the Low Fat Diet
I've recently read on Dr Jason Fung's website (in the section called “Calories”) his wonderful discussion/analysis of “Eat less, Move more” as a technique for losing weight. He explains that, since hormones are involved when people gain or try to lose weight, “Eat less, Move more” is too simplistic:
https://idmprogram.com/how-do-we-gain-weight-calories-part-1/
He shows from published studies (including one from 1917 entitled “A Biometric Study of Basal Metabolism in Man” and the famous Women’s Health Initiative Study) why Calorie Reduction won’t be effective long-term. (The success rate for someone losing 20lbs and keeping it off for 2 years by “Eat less, Move more” was quoted as 2% in the paper “The results of treatment for obesity: a review of the literature and report of a series” published as far back as 1959.)
If you restrict calorie intake, then the body’s metabolism slows down correspondingly and burns less energy to see you through the period of “famine”. (Such a slowdown can result in the person being unable to stay warm, their heart rate and blood pressure dropping, a marked inability to concentrate and a marked weakness during physical activity.) This is not a very pleasant experience at all, but metabolic slowdown is a good biological strategy for survival.
Even if Caloric Reduction shows weight loss initially, it will become less and less effective as time goes by. Eventually, weight loss plateaus and calorie reduction is necessary merely to avoid gaining weight. Apart from the rather unpleasant experience of metabolic slowdown, hormonal impulses (hunger caused by ghrelin and lack of satiety caused by peptide YY) are urging the person to eat. More often than not, when the person eventually succumbs to their screaming hormones, they end up putting on more weight than they lost. Failure of this too simplistic approach to weight loss is almost inevitable, and in addition to their health problems, the patient now feels a failure, too.
Despite metabolic slowdown being known since the above mentioned 1917 study, “Eat less, Move more” is still being pushed by the medical establishment and millions (or billions?) of $/£ are pumped into promoting it. Einstein said "If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes."
The amount of money, time and effort invested in barking up the wrong tree in terms of helping people lose weight is both obscene and bizarre. I recently read a published paper which blamed the rise in both obesity and diabetes on lack of low-fat dietary compliance by the general population. Perhaps prescribing an ineffective diet might be part of the problem?
