DIETING MAKES YOU FAT: A Guide to Energy, Food, Fitness and Health

A clear, well-based reiteration of the case against reducing diets and for exercise as the means for weight control and improved health. Cannon (editor of New Health magazine) and Einzig have three concerns: the ill effects of reducing diets on the human body; the poor quality of most people's daily diet; and definitions of new ways to ""lose fat and gain health."" Reducing diets, the authors tell us, slow metabolic rate (thereby making it harder to lose weight) and can cause a body to lose lean tissue, not just fat. Thus, diets may not only not help a dieter lose weight, but can perpetuate a weight problem. In addition, the poor quality of the average daily diet contributes to the tendency toward weight gain: with highly refined, highly processed foods, it is difficult to consume sufficient amounts of the body's required nutrients--""The body of a sedentary person who eats an average amount of processed foods and sugar will continue to signal hunger until enough nourishing food has been eaten. The only way for such a person to get enough nourishment from food is to consume too much energy from food."" The most effective way to avoid these two problems, explain the authors, is to revise the diet away from processed foods, and toward exercise as a means of improving health while ensuring that the body uses fuel in the proper way. Others have been over this ground before (see Bennett's The Dieter's Dilemma, e.g.), but Cannon and Einzig state the case clearly and have new evidence to support it. A real boost for those ready to abandon the traditional fad-diet merry-go-round.