Two thirds of people will not only re-gain ALL of the weight that they lose on a diet, they will regain more than they lost. This means that every time you go on a diet, you will probably gain weight! The latest research – and probably your own personal experience – shows that crash dieting eventually causes people to binge-eat fattening foods. Is this why 95% of people re-gain all the weight they lose when they diet? Quite possibly.

“Dieting… may be in part responsible for the current weight loss epidemic”

This quote is from the lead researcher of a study called “Does dieting make you fat: a twin study”. This research, conducted on 2000 sets of identical twins, found that even when people have the same genes, it is the frequency of dieting that predicted whether someone was overweight or not. Researchers have discovered that following a calorie restricted diet causes an increase in the stress hormone cortisol. This is problematic in itself, but even more disturbingly, dieting changes the DNA in the genes that control our appetite and stress response, and these changes remain even after returning to the pre-diet weight. The hormones that regulate appetite also remain unusually high eventually leading to stress-induced binge eating once there is a return to a high fat diet.

What does this mean for you?

If you starve yourself by, call it what you like: meal replacements, calorie counting or over-exercising, then your body goes into protection mode and sends out the mayday hormone cortisol. This changes you at your very core: your DNA.

Up until the mid-seventies, low calorie diets were known as semi-starvation diets!

Once you give up the starvation (which you will do; no-one can live on cup-a-soup and protein water forever) and start eating normally again, your levels of cortisol remain high. This makes you more prone to mood disorders such as depression and anxiety. The hormones that regulate your appetite, which once made you eat only when you were hungry and stop when you were full, are now in full flight famine mode. This makes it much harder to know when you are really hungry and to stop eating when you are full.  The combination of the two will now make you much more likely to reach for chocolate than carrots when you’re stressed as well as making it harder to say no when you come face to face with the fattening foods that you’re trying to avoid. Other research has shown that overweight women have higher cortisol levels over a 24 hour period and that this increase is associated with a preference for fattening foods such as fat and carbohydrates. The high cortisol levels are also associated with a greater waist circumference, independent of overall body mass index. So in summary: every time you go on a diet, your cortisol level increases, cortisol makes you want to eat carbohydrates and fat, you give up on the diet and regain the weight, you go on a diet… The first principle for effective weight loss is: DO NOT DIET