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Think there’s a great secret to losing weight? Fat chance.
Recent research and books have delved into our collective “wisdom” about weight loss and found that some of our more widely held beliefs are based on pretty skimpy science.
From the “caveman diet” to green-tea extract to cleanses, we cling to whatever the latest craze is in weight loss and are then shocked when we can’t shake the pounds.
But now even the most firmly held, physician-given advice about diet and exercise is proving it can’t hold up to scrutiny either. A lot of the advice being offered to the 33% of adults who are obese — and the countless others with a little too much extra around the middle — is misleading or even pointless.
Simply skipping your daily donut and exercising a few times a week might not be enough to shed weight and keep it off. This worries researchers who wonder if we won’t all be too discouraged to even try.
“We need to get serious as a country. We’re way off the tracks here,” said Dr. James L. Hardeman, author of “Appears Younger Than Stated Age.” “One of the things I tell my patients is that it may be difficult, but compared to being a patient in the ICU, it’s a walk in the park.”
To counter an obesity epidemic that only seems to be growing (Mexico and Israel have recently joined the ranks of fat-tastic nations), researchers and doctors like Hardeman are trying to set the record straight about weight.
Myth 1
A 30-minute workout a day, three days a week will help you lose weight
For decades doctors swore that if you just made time in your busy schedule three days a week for a 30-minute workout you’d lose weight. Mayor Bloomberg wants to nudge New Yorkers to take the stairs instead of the elevator. While doing a little exercise won’t hurt, it turns out that for weight loss it won’t really help.
Studies now show that exercising for a total of an hour a day, five to seven days a week, is necessary for maintaining your ideal weight.
“We’re still telling people three days for 30 minutes, and I think that’s because the doctors feel that that’s a good place to start,” said Mary D’Avila, a registered dietician at Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach, Calif.
Concerned that people will be so discouraged they’ll just stay on their couches, doctors still cling to the “every little bit helps” myth.
The idea behind the miracle of moderate exercise is that if someone burns 100 extra calories a day, he or she will lose a pound every 35 days. Over five years that person should lose 50 pounds. But studies have shown the true weight loss over five years is 10 pounds, according to a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January.
Among the biggest exercise whoppers is a reliance on Rover. Walking doesn’t burn as many calories as running, and walking your dog won’t help you shed pounds — unless Rover is a power-walker.
D’Avila advises people who are trying to lose weight to adhere to the “walk and talk” rule. If you can talk with some effort while walking, you’re doing great. If you can sing, you’re not exercising; you’re sauntering.
And nobody ever lost weight by sauntering.
Myth 2
Eating after 6 p.m. makes you gain weight
This myth was derived from the idea that your metabolism slows to a halt while you sleep. So the later you eat, the less time your body has to burn those calories.
This makes sense, until you realize that our bodies don’t work like light switches, turning on when we’re awake and off while we sleep, D’Avila said.
“While your metabolism slows down when you go to sleep, it doesn’t go away,” she said. “I have a lot of patients who are starving because they stop eating after 6 p.m., when there has never been any scientific evidence that suggests that this is something that should be avoided.”
“Look at Spain, where they eat dinner at 9 or 10 p.m. and they don’t have the obesity problem we have here,” she said.
Instead of watching when we eat, D’Avila suggests we watch what we eat — and how much. A dinner of fish and veggies consumed at 10 p.m. is far more nutritious and less fattening than a bag of Doritos inhaled in front of “The Daily Show.”
Also, consider how many calories you’ve consumed already that day before reaching for the pantry. If you’re eating because you’re hungry, that’s one thing; but if you’re just bored, maybe it’s time to go to bed.
Myth 3
Rapid weight loss is unsustainable
Any measure that results in quick, drastic weight loss is almost always referred to as a “yo-yo diet.” The general consensus among weight-loss experts is that if your weight plunges suddenly, it’s going to come back up with a vengeance.
We all know this to be true. Except it’s not, said Dr. Arne Astrup, co-author of a New England Journal of Medicine article published in January that analyzed a number of commonly held dieting beliefs and found many of them scientifically lacking.
“This belief implies gradual changes in diet and lifestyle should be permanent, and are better maintained long term when introduced gradually,” said Astrup, who also heads up the Department of Human Nutrition at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. “A number of observational studies and randomized clinical trials show the opposite is true.”
Astrup and his colleagues were criticized by some in the nutrition field who found the study’s commendation of bariatric surgery and diet pills unsettling. Even so, many were intrigued by the authors’ examination of clinical trials and scientific studies that found that greater initial weight loss is associated with greater long-term success.
“To warn people against rapid weight loss will take away the success of many people, and is therefore counterproductive for public health,” he said.
Myth 4
Weighing yourself daily will discourage you from losing weight
Respected weight-loss experts have long cautioned us to stay away from the scale. According to the going theory: Like the groundhog scared away by its own shadow, the crushing disappointment a dieter might experience when he steps on the scale will make him give up the fight altogether.
But science suggests otherwise. A study of more than 4,000 women aged 40-65 published in Preventive Medicine found that weighing yourself more frequently is associated with greater weight loss.
Subjects in the study who visited the scale daily lost twice as much weight as those who only weighed themselves weekly. Those who didn’t weigh themselves at all gained weight. And people who changed their weighing behavior during the study gained or lost weight depending on whether they decreased or increased their frequency of weighing themselves.
One thing to keep in mind before stepping on the scale, however, is that it pays to be consistent: Weigh yourself at around the same time every day, as your weight can fluctuate by a few pounds in a single day.
Also, pay attention to only one scale. If you’re being weighed by your doctor, stepping on the scale at the gym and weighing yourself at home, you might be surprised to find that all three scales vary. Which one is right? The one in your own bathroom.
“It’s the one you have access to more often,” D’Avila said.
Myth 5
Drinking eight glasses of water a day will curb your appetite
Even children know that you should drink at least eight glasses of water a day. It’s good for your health and it can help fill you up so that you don’t gorge on a whole sleeve of Girl Scout cookies. Right?
An article published the upcoming issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that the common wisdom spouted about your tap reducing your waistline just doesn’t hold water.
“Drinking water is often applied as a dietary means for weight loss and overweight/obesity prevention, but no evidence-based recommendation exists for this indication,” the authors wrote.
One reason for the pervasiveness of this myth may be that people who drink water during a meal are less likely to drink higher-calorie beverages — and therefore would lose weight compared to their soda-guzzling friends. But it’s not clear if that theory is true, and it also doesn’t mean water makes us too full for that plate of fries.
As for the amount of water we’re advised to drink, if you’re curious as to why we’ve always been told eight is the magic number, you’re not alone.
“We don’t have any standards. There has been no scientific evidence that supports six is better than four or eight is better than six,” D’Avila said.
In reality, the number of glasses of water needed per day varies from person to person.
“The important thing is to stay hydrated,” D’Avila said.
Myth 6
Snacking affects weight gain
A 2011 study of 257 women found that frequent snacking helps keep pounds away, while a study the following year suggests that removing all snack foods from your home can help you stay skinny. So, which is it?
The answer is both. And neither.
While it is possible that eating small meals and a few snacks could rev up your metabolism, weight loss really comes down to the number of calories you eat in a day and how sated you feel, D’Avila said.
“When we don’t eat, our bodies will conserve the calories so we don’t lose weight, but most people don’t consider their snacks as calories,” she said. “If you’re going over your daily caloric intake, you’re going to gain weight.”
Monitoring your snacks is not enough: One of the reasons we’re such a fat nation is that we consume too much food. Not a little too much. Ridiculously, embarrassingly too much.
The average American ate 530 more calories a day in 2000 than in 1970 — a 24.5% increase. The idea that cutting out your afternoon pastry or ordering your burger without the bun is going to be enough to slim down is missing the point. The average daily recommended calorie intake is 2,000 (though it varies per person). This means we are overeating, on average, an entire meal’s worth of calories.
So go ahead and snack. Or don’t. But unless you take stock of your entire caloric intake, you’re not doing your body any favors.
Myth 7
Weight gain is inevitable with age
Metabolism slows with age, but that is no excuse for sporting a large gut.
A 2011 study out of Harvard suggests that a range of lifestyle choices, from the kinds of foods you eat to the amount of exercise you do influence your weight as you age.
The study tracked more than 100,000 men and women for up to 20 years and found that people who ate more vegetables, fruits, nuts and whole grains were less likely to pack on pounds than people who ate a lot of potato chips, processed meats and unprocessed red meats.
Sleep also factored in. Weight gain was lowest among people who slept six to eight hours a night and was higher among those who slept less than six hours or more than eight hours.
“Casually accepting some weight gain can lead to massive weight gain over time, considering our largely sedentary lifestyles and the easy availability of quick, fatty meals,” said Hardeman who says he weighs the same now, at age 61, as he did when he was 18 (165 pounds).
“Weight gain is not ‘normal,’ and it’s going to have a big impact on the rest of your life,” he said.
Hardeman advises if you find at age 40 that you can’t quite eat the same things you did when you were younger, then stop eating them. Same goes for when you realize that you have to work a bit harder at the gym.
“It’s not like you wake up one day and find you’ve gain 35 pounds. It’s an insidious process,” he said. “Then you start getting arthritis or have a stroke and that makes you more sedentary. Before you realize it, you’ve dug yourself into a hole, and you’re 75, overweight and using a cane.”
Myth 8
Diets work
Whether you consume nothing but fruit juice or only eat foods readily available to our caveman ancestors, your diet isn’t going to work. Not in the long run, anyway.
“Going on a diet is one of America’s favorite pastimes. Diets typically entail temporarily altering eating patterns, losing a bit of weight, and then going back to old habits,” said Hardeman, a pulmonary and critical care physician in Fullerton, Calif. “Really, it all boils down to intake and output. People who stick to Atkins, South Beach and the Sugar Busters diets lose weight because they limit the intake of calories.”
But ultimately these magic-formula diets fail because they are unsustainable.
“The special diets are difficult to adhere to because they typically eliminate food groups (breads, rice, pasta, dairy, etc.) which make the diet incompatible with a modern food culture,” Astrup said. “So, for those who can live with these limitations it is fine, but for the majority of people we need something that is effective.”
Astrup said the reason diets that rely heavily on meat tend to work in the short term is that protein stimulates the satiety hormones released from the small intestine. He recently co-authored another study in the New England Journal of Medicine that found people were able to lose weight — and keep it off — if they increased their protein intake and decreased their carbs by modest amounts. Because, again, man cannot live on protein burgers alone.
“A lot of these magic formula diet books promise temporary change. It’s almost as if people don’t want to believe that doing more activity and adjusting their diet — it’s not a way, it’s the only way,” said Hardeman.
“Just because you’re sick of hearing about gravity doesn’t mean you won’t come down to earth when you jump in the air.”