Diets Don’t Work
I did something recently that was a long time coming. I gave a Grand Rounds presentation at the hospital that I currently work at. I was scared out of my mind and anxious for months about it. But It is also the thing that I am most proud of doing thus far in my dietetic career.
It all started when I first started working as an RD (Registered Dietitian), which wasn’t that long ago. I lucked into working at an eating disorder program, among other things, at my first job. And It was like a whole knew world was opened up to me that I had learned NOTHING about in my schooling.
Right away I was like, “what the fuck?!” Because we were teaching the patients with the eating disorders the exact opposite of what we were teaching the patients in the hospital with other diseases or issues.
I was teaching the eating disorder patients to not worry about their weight or shape. And I was teaching the person in the hospital, with cancer, to loose weight for their health.
That’s when I learned about Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size ®. And this is part of what I learned and what I presented to some of the Doctors and staff at my hospital:
- Any kind of dieting, aka restricting, for weight loss, does not help people to loose weight, it promotes weight gain in the long term.
- Part of the reason for this is that calories in vs. calories out does not work because our resting metabolic rate (RMR) lowers when we restrict. Meaning you could be eating only 1500 kcals per day but if your RMR is low due to restricting than the amount of calories used by the body could be much lowered to say about 600 kcals per day.
- Restricting also leads to nutrient deficiencies.
- Restricting also affects our mental health and often leads to depression, anxiety, mood swings, sleep issues, difficulty concentrating, and all the other things that our brain does for us.
- Restricting can and often does lead to eating disorders and increased disordered eating behaviors.
- We don’t need to try to loose weight because obesity is not the health problem it has been made out to be.
- A persons BMI does not lead to adverse health effects or increase their risk for adverse health effects.
- low socioeconomic status increase risk for adverse health effects
- Weight cycling (weight going up and down from multiple weight loss attempts) increase risk for adverse health effects.
- Weight stigma (meaning the internalization that a certain weight or body shape is better and negative attitudes towards higher weights that leads to discrimination and bullying and low self esteem and shame about someone’s body) increase adverse health effects.
- pursuing a healthy relationship with food, exercise, and our bodies DOES PROMOTE POSITIVE HEALTH OUTCOMES, not loosing weight.
We put too much of an emphasize of weight in our health care, and the pursuit of weight loss is harming us not helping us!
For more info on this read these articles:
