Why Your Dieting Resolution Will Fail
Researchers have recently shown that a low-carbohydrate diet appears to be effective in helping overweight people shed pounds safely. In 2008, a study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, with the title, “Weight Loss With a Low-Carbohydrate, Mediterranean, or Low-Fat Diet.” The results seem reasonable conclusive, as participants lost more weight on the low-carb diet than on the others, without any sign of the health problems that some people assign to low-carb eating.
The results of this study are certainly encouraging. Now we know that a low-carbohydrate diet is generally the most effective. So that’s all you need to do. Just go on a low-carb diet and after a while you’ll get fit and healthy. Unfortunately, there’s more to it that that, and even the most effective diet ever won’t get you the results you need.
First, dieting alone doesn’t help you to build or even help you retain your muscle mass. As you may know, once people reach thirty or so years of age, we begin to start losing our muscles. An average person will lose 5-10 pounds of muscle per decade. And dieting does nothing to change that. A good diet will reduce the amount of fat over your shrinking muscles, but it won’t do anything to build new muscle, or even retain what you already have.
Secondly, the results cited in this study are lame. The participants were overweight men and women, or people with Type 2 diabetes. They were split up into three groups, one for each of the three diet approaches. Each person also received instructions and information related specifically to the type of diet they were on. Over the course of two years, each group of people got a total of 27 hours worth of meetings with a dietician who helped them stay with the plan. People who had trouble sticking to the plan got motivational phone calls as well.
So what were the actual weight-loss results during this study? When people stuck with it, the low-fat diet gave the worst results, followed by the Mediterranean diet, with the low-carbohydrate diet giving the best weight loss results. The diets also produced some encouraging changes in blood chemistry, such as lower levels of cholesterol. If you want actual numbers, the people on the low-carbohydrate diet lost just over 12 pounds across the two-year study.
This sounds good at first, but think about it. The best performing type of diet, with more support than most of us would have, caused a loss of just over a dozen in 24 months. One type of diet may be better than the others, and for overweight and diabetic people to lose weight safely is great. But that’s not a lot of weight to lose over 2 years, and would it really give you the body and fitness you’re looking for?
A healthy diet is surely a good first step, and a key element in building the body you want. But as this study shows, dieting alone isn’t enought. The key to superior health and fitness is A complete fitness plan.
