What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [154]
The most complete source is “Methods for Voluntary Weight Loss and Control,” proceedings of a National Institutes of Health conference, 30 March-i April 1992, along with its staggering 1,119-item bibliography (“Methods for Voluntary Weight Loss and Control,” in Current Bibliographies in Medicine [CBM 92–1] [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992].
9. See Garner and Wooley, “Confronting the Failure of Behavioral and Dietary Treatments,” for a review and bibliography of all the long-term follow-up studies. See also M. Holmes, B. Zysow, and T. Delbanco, “An Analytic Review of Current Therapies for Obesity,” Journal of Family Practice 28 (1989): 610–16.
10. K. Brownell and T. Wadden, “Etiology and Treatment of Obesity: Understanding a Serious, Prevalent, and Refractory Disorder,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 60 (1992): 505–17, are representative of the group that remains undaunted by the poor long-term results of dieting. They call for more realistic goals—reasonable weight rather than “ideal” weight—better screening for really motivated clients, and more research on maintenance. They write articles on a “balanced” view of dieting in response to the data in this chapter. I admire their dogged persistence, but I do not share their optimism about the future of the dieting industry. There is little reason to hope that ten-pound losses will be maintained any better than twenty-five-pound losses are. There is little reason to believe that people who suffer through diet after diet are unmotivated, and there is even less reason to expect any breakthrough about maintenance.
Brownell and Wadden assert that the public good will not be served if people come to believe “(a) diets do not work; (b) dieting is more dangerous than staying heavy; and (c) excess weight is a trivial risk factor.” This statement astonishes me. Brownell and Wadden are two of the investigators whose very research makes these propositions so plausible. Rather than hoping to chill debate about whether dieting is useless or even harmful, I believe it is very much in the public interest to provoke such debate.
11. See R. Jeffrey, J. Forster, and T. Schmid, “Worksite Health Promotion: Feasibility Testing of Repeated Weight Control and Smoking Cessation Classes,” American Journal of Health 3 (1989): 11–16; and R. Jeffrey, W. Hellerstedt, and T. Schmid, “Correspondence Programs for Smoking Cessation and Weight Control: A Comparison of Two Strategies in the Minnesota Heart Health Program,” Health Psychology 9 (1990): 585–98.
12. The serious scholar should read “Methods for Voluntary Weight Loss and Control” (see note 9, above). The upshot is that no known diet keeps weight off in the long run, except for a very small minority of dieters.
13. The rat model of yo-yo dieting was developed by K. Brownell, M. Greenwood, E. Stellar, and E. Shrager, “The Effects of Repeated Cycles of Weight Loss and Regain in Rats,” Physiology and Behavior 38 (1986): 459–64. The increased metabolic efficiency is well replicated, but whether yo-yo rats rebound to a higher weight is still controversial. See R. Contreras and V. Williams, “Dietary Obesity and Weight Cycling: Effects on Blood Pressure and Heart Rate in Rats,” American Journal of Physiology 256 (1989): 1209–19. See R. Keesey, “The Body-Weight Set Point,” Postgraduate Medicine 83 (1988): 115–27, and Garner and Wooley, “Confront the Failure of Behavioral and Dietary Treatments,” for reviews.
In spite of all the press on yo-yo dieting,