Background: How seriously do overweight women try to lose weight? Have they previously tried to lose weight? Do women with a higher body mass index (BMI) dieted more or less than overweight women with lower BMIs?
Study: An article in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association tries to answer these questions. Adult women with an elevated BMI ranging between 30 and 70 were asked to complete questionnaires about their lifetime dieting experiences and to provide other information including heights and weights. Those women with the higher BMIs tended to start dieting before age 14 and dieted more frequently than women with lower BMIs. Not surprisingly, negative memories of dieting far outnumbered any positive or neutral ones.
Comments: The authors recommend that, "When a patient has a history of dieting failure, dietetics professionals should consider focusing on improvements in metabolic fitness through lifestyle changes for chronic disease risk reduction rather than encouraging continued attempts to lose weight." Given the association between obesity and chronic diseases such as diabetes, the difference between what is meant by metabolic fitness versus dieting is not clear.
But some additional insight is provided in another article in the same issue of the journal. Looking into the association between healthful and unhealthful weight-control behaviors and dietary intake among adolescents, it found that "girls using unhealthful weight-control behaviors had significantly lower intakes of fruit, vegetables, grains, calcium, iron, vitamins A, C, and B-6, folate and zinc." It concluded that adolescent girls who engage in unhealthful weight-control behaviors are at increased risk for dietary inadequacies as adults. It may be that this group of girls who engage in unhealthful weight-control behaviors end up as overweight, unhealthy women discouraged with by their past dieting failures.
Barbara K. Hecht, Ph.D.
Frederick Hecht, M.D.
Medical Editors, MedicineNet.com