Does intermittent dieting equal long term results?
What is dieting?
Dieting is when you restrict yourself to small amounts or special kinds of food to lose weight.
Does dieting work?
Many people do lose weight when dieting. The problem is a diet is a temporary, short-term plan, not a long-term solution. Many regain lost weight after the diet ends.
What about intermittent dieting?
Continuous dieting is very restrictive and often difficult to maintain for the required length of time to hit goal weight levels. This has led to increased interest in intermittent energy restriction. An example of intermittent energy restriction is alternate-day fasting. This type of dieting involves a “fast day” with reduced or no energy consumed followed by an all you want “feast day”. Another intermittent energy restriction example is a 5 and 2 regime where you eat however you desire five days and fast on two days.
However, the greater problems with diets is seen at the six month mark when weight regain often occurs.
5 Steps for Heart Health, Starting Now
On the road to heart health, start with weight control. Reaching and maintaining a healthy weight promotes overall health and prevents many diseases, including heart disease. Living with extra weight, puts an increased burden on your heart muscle. Being overweight or obese puts you at increased risk for high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, certain cancers, and other health
Here are five additional steps you can take for heart health:
1. Exercise more.
Being inactive is a major risk factor for heart disease. Regular exercise, particularly aerobic exercise, has many heart related benefits. For example, exercise will strengthen your heart, improves circulation, and lowers blood pressure.
2. Cut back on salt.
Salt can hide in places you may not expect. Read food labels. For some individuals, a high sodium diet is linked to high blood pressure. High blood pressure puts excess work on the heart and can lead to stroke and heart failure.
3. Avoid trans fat.
Trans fat increase LDL cholesterol, increase triglycerides and lowers HDL cholesterol. The FDA no longer recognizes trans fats as “generally recognized as safe” for use in food. Read food labels and select heart healthy oil when cooking, such as olive oil or canola oil.
Lifestyle Changes vs. Diet to Lose Weight
In order to promote heart health, many times weight loss is required. With over two-thirds of the US adult population being overweight or obese, this is almost a given…even though there are exceptions. When you think about weight loss I think “diet” is the first thing that comes to mind. Plus, in some ways it is more appealing. It somehow equates to quick results. However, you do have another option – lifestyle changes.
Lifestyle changes are more effective long term than “going on a diet”. Let’s compare these two options.
Diet
There are many diet options.
Low-carb
Low-fat
High protein
Vegetarian
Blood type diet
The Zone Diet
South Beach Diet
Weight Watchers
Raw Food Diet
Jenny Craig
Dean Ornish Diet
Mediterranean Diet
Atkins Diet
…and the list goes on. Which one is right for? All the diet options are more likely to cause confusion as you determine which one is best. Plus, the word “diet” implies a short term fix. You’re not going to stay on a diet forever, right? This means after the diet ends, most people regain the weight and you are right back to square one.
For long term success, lifestyle changes are shown to have more lasting results.
Eating the Same Foods Can Help You Lose Weight
Do we have too many options when it comes to food? According to a study published August 2011 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, too many options may be one reason pounds are packed on.
On the flip side, the study found eating the same food over and over lead to boredom and a decrease in caloric intake.
Food Boredom is a Good Thing
Research indicates that repeat exposure to a particular food leads to disinterest. The response is called habituation and can lead to a decrease in caloric intake in the short term.
In the U.S. we are blessed with a wide variety of choices and all we have to do is enter a grocery store. The problem with variety doesn’t necessarily apply to having access to a wide variety of fruits and vegetables – not too many people can say they are overweight because they ate too many greens! – the problem comes from the overwhelming abundance of low-fat, low-nutrient options.
There is a ‘food addiction hypothesis’ that proposes some people overeat because they are not sensitive to normal habituation and require even more of a food to trigger disinterest.
There has not been a lot of research in this area to determine if the habituation process is different between individuals of a healthy weight versus those who are overweight.
The study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition aimed to study the long-term habituation in obese and non-obese women.
Habituation Equals Fewer Calories
Is a Lack of Chewing Causing You to Gain Weight?
Food digestion begins in the mouth, which is why how you chew your food can have an impact on not only digestion, but weight as well.
Chewing causes the mechanical breakdown of large food molecules into smaller particles. This increases the surface area of food exposed to digestive enzymes, such as salivary amylase that begins the digestion of carbohydrates in the mouth. A lingual lipase is also released in the mouth to begin the breakdown of fat.
How long do you chew your food?
Now, think about how long a bit of food stays in your mouth. Is it basically one or two bites and you’re swallowing? If so, does that give the digestive enzymes salivary amylase and lingual lipase very much time to do their job? Does that give you adequate time to break your food down into small particulars for increased surface area exposure? If you are like most people, probably not.
How does chewing impact your weight?
The Right Mindset for Weight Loss
Way too frequently people spend weeks losing weight, just to reach their goal, stop the diet, and then gradually regain the weight. It’s a terrible cycle to be stuck in.
A study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that individuals who successfully lost weight AND kept the weight off altered their principles after losing weight.
This was a telephone survey of 1165 adult who had successfully lost weight with some maintaining the weight loss. Researchers took the data and compiled a list of 36 behaviors at least 10% of the surveyed adults adapted.
Weight loss was defined as losing 10% or more body weight during the previous 12 months. So for a 200 pound individual this would equal a weight loss of 20 pounds.
Maintenance was defined as losing 10% or more body weight during the previous 12 months and keeping it off for one year or more.
How They Lost the Weight
