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By Root 905 0

claim is unsound because weight (at any given height) has a normal distribution, normal both in a statistical sense and in the biological sense. Why is there a distribution of weights at all? Why don’t all 64-inch-tall thirty-five-year-old women weigh 130 pounds? Some women fall on the heavy side of 130 pounds because they are heavy-boned, or buxom, or have slow metabolisms. Others fall there because they overeat and never exercise. In the biological sense, the couch potatoes can legitimately be called overweight, but the buxom, heavy-boned, slow people deemed overweight by the “ideal” table are at their natural and healthiest weight. If you are a 155-pound woman and 64 inches in height, you are “overweight” by around 15 pounds. This means nothing more than that the average 130-pound, 64-inch-tall woman lives somewhat longer than the average 155-pound woman of your height. It does not follow that if you slim down to 125 pounds, you will stand any better chance of living longer.

Here is an analogy. Imagine that fifty-year-old men who are gray-haired die sooner than fifty-year-old men who are not. If you are a gray-haired fifty-year-old, should you dye your hair? No, and for two reasons: First, whatever causes grayness may also cause dying sooner, and coloring your hair will add no time to your life because it doesn’t undo the underlying cause of dying sooner. Second, health damage caused by repeatedly coloring your hair with chemicals might itself shorten your life.

In spite of the insouciance with which dieting advice is dispensed, no one has properly investigated the question of whether slimming down to “ideal” weight produces longer life. The proper study would compare the longevity of people who are at their “ideal” weight without dieting to people who achieve their “ideal” weight by dieting. Without this study, the common medical advice that you should diet down to your “ideal” weight is simply unfounded.3

This is not a quibble, for there is evidence that dieting damages your health and that this damage may shorten your life.

Myths of Overweight

The advice to diet down to your “ideal” weight in order to live longer is one myth of overweight. Here are some others:

Overweight people overeat. Wrong. Nineteen out of twenty studies show that obese people consume no more calories each day than non-obese people. In one remarkable experiment, a group of very obese people dieted down to only 60 percent overweight and stayed there. They needed one hundred fewer calories a day to stay 60 percent overweight than normal people needed to stay at normal weight. Telling a fat person that if she would change her eating habits and eat “normally” she would lose weight is a lie. To lose weight and stay there, she will need to eat excruciatingly less than a normal person, probably for the rest of her life.4

Overweight people have an overweight personality. Wrong. Extensive research on personality and fatness has proved little. Obese people do not differ in any major personality style from nonobese people. They are not, for example, more susceptible to external food cues (the fragrance of garlic bread, for example) than nonobese people.5

Physical inactivity is a major cause of obesity. Probably not. Fat people are indeed less active than thin people, but the inactivity is probably caused more by the fatness than the other way around.

Overweight shows a lack of willpower. This is the granddaddy of all the myths. When I am defeated by that piece of carrot cake, I feel like a failure: I should be able to control myself, and there is something morally wrong with me if I give in. Fatness is seen as shameful because we hold people responsible for their weight. Being overweight equates with being a weak-willed slob. We believe this primarily because we have seen plenty of people decide to lose weight and do so in a matter of weeks.

But almost everyone returns to the old weight after shedding pounds. Your body has a natural weight that it defends vigorously against dieting. The more diets tried, the harder the body works to defeat the