Diets don't bother

Walk into any bookshop and notice: the shelves are full of diet books:

Yet, despite this the diet industry is in the middle of a backlash.

Two books challenged the concept of dieting, the first "The Diet Delusion" and then "Rethinking Thin", both of which challenged conventional wisdom about weight loss.

Now comes Geoffrey Cannon's "Dieting Makes You Fat" and he says that dieting causes the very condition it is meant to cure because the human body cannot distinguish between dieting and famine.

Humans are designed to respond to the threat of an irregular food supply by retaining body fat rather than burning it off.

The more humans diet, the more their bodies become trained to look for food, slow down their vital functions and conserve body fat.

And sweet foods were part of human evolution, not weak willpower because in the forest and Savannah sweetness was a way of finding safe foods

Cannon says that restricting calories is the worst possible way to achieve the body of your dreams. “If you have more body fat than you want, don’t even think of going on a diet,” he says.

“Be more physically active instead, and be patient because you need to train your body to build up lean tissue, which works more efficiently than body fat.”

He suggests that if you are active, then you can enjoy a balance of good food — even cake.

People who exercise regularly burn off 500-700 more calories a day than their sedentary counterparts because fit bodies burn off a lot of energy during the time they are resting, not only while they are exercising

Nor is Cannon the only one saying that diets don't work because while he was writing the update to his book research published by UCLA last year, concluded that diets don’t work either.

The study concluded that:dieters can initially lose 5%-10% of their weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back.

It was found that after dieting the majority of people regained all their weight, plus more and after five years only five percent had maintained any weight loss at all.

“People make the mistake of judging the success of a diet at the point that it is stopped,” says Cannon. “It’s madness.

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Dieting triggers the body to go into reversal. When people come off a regime, it’s a form of the bulimic syndrome.

They find they can’t stop eating restricting calorie intake by anything more than 200 calories a day will trigger a rebound effect, and the more drastic and long-lasting the diet, the worse the rebound once it ends.

In some studies, people coming off a diet were forced to eat up to 10,000 calories a day — and still reported feeling hungry.

“People often asked him ‘If this is all true, why haven’t I heard it before?’

His response is, ‘In whose interests is it to tell you?’

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The diet industry sells its wares on the basis of repeat custom — if a diet doesn’t work, it’s your fault.

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It’s time for a paradigm shift, no more diets, just more sensible exercise

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Unfortunately much of what our bodies do is beyond the control of our minds

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Meaning that we do not have control over our appetites

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To most people this idea that we don’t have control over our appetites is not an easy one.

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People are even more loath to admit the obvious that we have so little control over our minds in anyway at all

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Can you honestly say that you control the thoughts that come in and out of your head all day long?
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“Claims made by the diet industry appeal to our base desires Cannon says because. “The dieting business is fabulous. It sells dreams.

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But dreams rarely come true.”

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Particularly if the dream is based upon false ideas