I get frequent emails from RealAge – you know, health news for people with no attention span, which suits me just fine most days. Usually I read and delete but yesterday I got fed up with the words “a new study” or “recent research” that they throw out there all the time.
One of yesterday’s tidbits interested/annoyed me enough to go looking for the original research.
According to the abstract, the researchers’ hypotheses were:
that dieting, or the restriction of caloric intake, is ineffective because it increases chronic psychological stress and cortisol production—two factors that are known to cause weight gain; and to examine the respective roles of the two main behaviors that comprise dieting—monitoring one’s caloric intake and restricting one’s caloric intake—on psychological and biological stress indicators.
Basically they wanted to prove that dieting fails because both reducing calories and tracking calories increase stress levels.
121 women were split into four groups:
- monitoring & restricting – ate 1200 calories/day and tracked their caloric intake
- monitoring only – tracked their calories but ate normally
- restricting only – were given 1200 calories per day in prepared food so not tracking was needed
- control – ate normally and did not track calories
The results?
Restricting calories increased the total output of cortisol, and monitoring calories increased perceived stress.
The RealAge advice based on this one study?
So while it’s good to think about what you’re putting in your mouth, don’t obsess about it. Watch portion sizes, choose healthy foods, be aware of how many times you visit the snack cupboard, but don’t make things too difficult.
I do get the point about stress and obsessing and fully accept that starvation is bad, but I think the overall advice is pretty poor. And I’m especially pissed off that they make it sound like “eating more” and “winging it” are going to help you reduce belly fat! BELLY FAT: every woman’s enemy. I can’t believe that an editor didn’t stand back from both the headline and the advice and think, “Oh no – that could do more harm than good to overweight people who are completely out of touch with how much food they really need. And using the belly fat thing is probably a little too emotive.” You’d think. You really would.
Pamela Peeke has come up with a much more reasoned response. And yes, I think it’s reasoned because I’ve had similar thoughts myself.
I hadn’t realised quite how angry that one little email made me. Maybe we should do some research into the effect of poorly thought out health advice on cortisol levels then we could follow it up with a really helpful headline and a “tip of the week”.
Flatten your belly with this reading habit.
If you want to lose belly fat, don’t read snippets of health advice on the internet.
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