Why crash dieting DOES work: Surprise evidence suggests it’s the best way to slim

Here’s a sobering thought: beach weather is nearly here, and the diet you’ve been meaning to embark on since January remains in the planning phases.

You really don’t want to expose those extra pounds to the world, but you do want to put on your swimsuit and feel OK about it. A crash diet seems to be your only option, but aren’t crash diets unhealthy – not to mention ineffective – after the first week? Not if you approach them correctly.

Despite what many nutritionists have preached for years, low-calorie diets can be healthy if you do them right, and can work wonders on pounds and inches in just a few weeks.

Clinical experience shows that somebody with a serious commitment to weight loss can lose up to 20 pounds – and two to three dress sizes – in two months. That’s a lot of weight, and an enormous change in appearance for most of us.

Best of all, if a crash diet is done right (and you make permanent changes to how you eat) it can yield results that will stand the test of time just as well as those slow and careful, long-term diets that emphasise depressingly incremental drops in weight.

Conventional wisdom says that rapid weight loss leads to rapid weight regain, but a new generation of science is showing that slow isn’t necessarily better.

In fact, fast weight loss – if achieved with a healthy, caloriecutting food-based diet – can bring long-term success equivalent to the more gradual weight-loss programmes, which is reason for procrastinators everywhere to rejoice. In fact, for some people, healthy crash dieting may work even better than a diet that lasts all year.

A recent study from my laboratory at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, found that the slow and careful approach seems to be sustainable only by those dieters who are not sidetracked by rich food, party snacks and other common food challenges in daily life.

So where does exercise fit into all of this? The drumbeat of get moving to lose weight has become so loud that almost everyone blames his or her weight problem on not spending enough time working out.

The food we are putting in our mouths seems to take a back seat.

But a look at the evidence doesn’t support the hype.

‘Exercise doesn’t necessarily make you thin’
National surveys show that people who do manual jobs – construction, farming and domestic work – are often heavier than people who sit in front of a computer screen all day.

Indeed, physically strenuous jobs carry a 30 per cent increased risk of obesity in the U.S. when compared with office jobs.

Of course, comparisons like this don’t factor in social class, or whether you eat chocolate or take a run after work, but that’s the whole point – compared with factors like what we snack on, hard manual labour just doesn’t make as much of a difference.

Even if your day is spent shovelling gravel, you’re still going to develop a pot belly if you lunch on pizza and fizzy drinks every day.

This is not to say exercise is bad – exercise is, of course, important for maintaining health, strength and vitality. But when it comes to weight loss, it doesn’t seem to be the panacea that it is often made out to be. And the evidence isn’t just anecdotal.

My laboratory summarised 36 years of published studies on exercise and weight, conducted between 1969 and 2005, and found that adding even an hour of exercise per day results in an average fat loss of just six pounds over the course of several months – hardly the benefit one would expect from all that work.

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