Low fat, low carb, Paleo, keto, Mediterranean, Japanese, mono, intermittent fasting—the list is endless. For many decades, our culture has idealized thinness and considered being overweight (we’ll talk about it later) not only unaesthetic, but also undeniably unhealthy. No wonder that literally every middle-aged woman (30-50 years old) has been on a diet in the last few years. A weight-health study of over 100,000 women found that less than 1% of very large women were able to achieve a «normal» weight in terms of today’s guidelines. At the same time, among those who lost weight, even if not to the “ideal”, but by significant amounts, there was not an improvement, but a deterioration in health, while among those who lost weight to the norm, an improvement in health was recorded in a minority.
So maybe something is wrong with the rules?
Some medical experts are now saying what many of us desperately wanted to hear: It’s very difficult to lose weight in the long run for reasons that have nothing to do with willpower, but most importantly, it makes little to no sense.
“The dominant message that people get from society, medical organizations and the media is that weight and health are connected. But there really isn’t strong evidence that weight gain automatically leads to poor health,” says Jeffrey Hunger*, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Miami University, Ohio.
* (Hunger in translation from English is hunger. Agree, a speaking surname!)
“If you’re overweight, you need to lose weight to protect your joints from arthritis and your heart from overwork. Familiar? Yes, but this, to put it mildly, is not entirely true. I will say thesis: weight is usually gained and reduced gradually, and your joints, muscles (and heart muscle too) are trained to «work» with just such a weight. Dropping pounds drastically means creating problems. This is the first. The second and perhaps the most important thing is that no one tells you what you risk when you lose weight, and what is your personal normal weight. You are stupidly driven into the framework of standards. Add to this companies with financial interests in distributing low-fat products, from diet food vendors to pharmaceutical companies producing various drugs to reduce appetite and burn calories, think the authors of books on weight loss. I would not be afraid to call it the «anti-fat» sect, because everything is based on the exclusive belief that weight should be calculated according to a certain formula (by the way, does it bother you that there are thousands of these formulas?), Without any intelligible explanation, Why is it so, why is it necessary.
Let me prove the absurdity of these norms with one phrase: do you really believe that in an ideal world all women weigh the same with the same height? Some sort of Stepford wives?
Here are eight important facts that the study confirmed.
1. Weight is not an indicator of health
Doctors worry that obese women are «cardiometabolically unhealthy» — a shortened term that covers blood pressure, cholesterol, triglyceride and blood glucose levels, as well as other indicators of the health of the heart and arteries.
But researchers at UCLA and the University of Minnesota evaluated nearly two dozen studies and concluded that «there is no clear link between weight loss and health outcomes.» In other words, the weight loss did not lead to significant reductions in blood pressure, diabetes risk, or cholesterol levels. Doctors studied data from more than 40,000 participants and found that almost half of the people classified as «overweight» (and more than a quarter labeled «obese») had perfectly healthy lipid and blood glucose levels, meaning that their heart and blood vessels were in perfect order. Meanwhile, 30% of «normal weight» participants had unhealthy levels of these markers.
