Weight on their minds
Sue Williams
Published: March 11, 2013 - 8:27AM High-protein, low-carb, no fat. Or how about as much as you can eat with the addition of some miracle product that inexplicably expels the excess from the system?
Published: March 11, 2013 - 8:27AM High-protein, low-carb, no fat. Or how about as much as you can eat with the addition of some miracle product that inexplicably expels the excess from the system?
As most of us grow steadily larger, many weird and wonderful diets have become the ones we are told are the next sure thing - think the Atkins diet, the cabbage soup diet, the grapefruit diet and the South Beach diet. Yet weight gain, obesity and their related problems, such as diabetes and heart disease, continue to soar in the West.
Nutritionist Dr Rosemary Stanton says the only realistic way people will lose weight and keep it off is by eating good, healthy food and exercising. ''There are no miracles in weight loss,'' she says.
Stanton has been working with the federal government's National Health and Medical Research Council on the recent update of its dietary guidelines. The bad news is no surprise: there are no quick fixes.
''If people just cut down on junk food - we've found that junk food and drinks contribute more than 40 per cent to an average child's daily intake, and 36 per cent to that of an adult - there's a lot of wriggle room,'' she says.
So what of the more established diets, the ones most people wanting to lose weight might be tempted to try? Pulse has followed four people on four different popular diets. They were:
The CSIRO total wellbeing diet: This is a low-fat, higher-protein, nutritionally balanced structured eating plan, with recommended recipes and exercise.
The Weight Watchers regime: In this eating plan every food item is assigned points according to protein, carbs, fat and fibre, and dieters eat within a daily points allowance.
The Dukan diet: Conceived by French neurologist Dr Pierre Dukan, it has four phases, from the first seven days, when dieters eat only protein, to the final phase, in which only protein is eaten one day a week for life.
The 5:2 Diet: This is based on intermittent fasting. Dieters eat normally for five days a week, then consume 500 calories or less for the other two non-consecutive days.
Experts have mixed views about the ability of these diets to strip weight off in a healthy, sustainable way.
Stanton says that while the CSIRO diet has been studied by scientists, she is concerned about the amount of red and processed meat it recommends. It's the same with the Dukan diet, which is also ''ridiculously low in carbs. That's not really a diet you should follow for any length of time,'' Stanton says.
The 5:2 diet has one advantage in that it might remind people what it's like to go hungry, but, generally, it's no good if its followers simply gorge on bad food the rest of the time.
As for Weight Watchers: ''That's fairly well balanced, but its greatest asset is that it gives people support, which is much cheaper than paying a dietitian.''
The Heart Foundation doesn't endorse any particular diet because individuals are all so different, nutrition manager Barbara Eden says. ''But we are concerned about particular diets as they leave out essential food groups, so people miss out on some macro- and micronutrients and won't have enough things like iron and calcium and dietary fibre,'' she says.
For those reasons, the Dukan Diet and the 5:2 Diet are the ones Eden favours the least. She says people should try to aim to eat from the five food groups every day.
While Weight Watchers diet plans tend to be well balanced and include physical activity, and the CSIRO has a lot of scientific backing for its diet, Eden still has concerns.
''So many people go on diets and then immediately put the weight back on - or more - when they come off them,'' she says. ''There's no substitute for changing eating patterns slowly over time to make a permanent, sustainable difference.''
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