Is being Overweight a Life Sentence?

Reality TV shows in which contestants lose enormous quantities of weight seem to suggest otherwise? In what can only be described as results vindicating those who are unable to lose weight, the release today in the Obesity Journal – 1st May 2016 – of the tests performed on those contestants seems to confirm the dismal performance of diets. In an article entitled The Science of Fat, Gina Kolata presents those findings.

Main picture: The most expensive artifact is the Space Station at USD 150 billion

Continue reading

Is it Worthwhile Counting Calories?

Maybe it’s a “female thing”, but I can positively confirm that none of my male friends would ever count calories whilst on diet. Partly this female fixation with calorie counting is a consequence of their doing the Weight Watchers diet whereas males would rather adopt a less stringent “wing it” approach. Normally that is the well-known Starvation Method. Which approach is preferable or is it neither?

Imagine measuring and weighing every morsel of food that passes one’s lips. I could not imagine Nigella Lawson measuring anything as she takes cooking to the other extreme: a dab of this, a glob of that. No two meals can possibly be the same.

Main picture: Why are the verboten foods so tempting while the good foods are so bland

Continue reading

The Diet Paradox Part 1: Sugar

For some apparently unfathomable reason, in the Western world since the 1970s the average BMI of the population has spiralled upwards while simultaneously the level of dieting, consumption of diet food and amount of exercise performed, whether in the form of gyming or running, has skyrocketed. How is this possible? Was this sheer co-incidence or happenstance or are there, within the current dieting regime, prospective candidates as the culprit.

 The current suspect is sugar. Like a rabbit trapped in a car’s headlights its apologists and defenders such as the sugar water industry – read Coke – are supine but not immobile. With sugar taxes looming after New York City’s courageous imposition of this punitive measure recently, their muted rational response is quite credible.

Main picture: Will sugar take the mantle as the new tobacco over the next decade or is it being unfairly cast as the villain in the piece?
Continue reading

Dieting: The Fat Debate

Studies reveal that 95%+ of people who diet never lose weight permanently. Fat which was previously vilified is now the redeemer.

The startling headline of this weeks’ Time Magazine reads: Eat Butter. Scientists labelled Fat the Enemy. Why they were wrong.

What a volte facie? What a heresy. Two generations of medical personnel will have to unlearn their mantra: Fat is bad. Fat will kill you.

Not surprisingly, we each have our own stories of our odyssey in this saga.

Continue reading