honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Wednesday, February 27, 2002

Fad-diet results tend to fizzle

By Nanci Hellmich
USA Today

A new advertising campaign for Special K cereal claims that people can lose six pounds in two weeks by eating it twice a day.
Fad diets work.

Ask anyone who faithfully followed the famous grapefruit diet, or the cabbage soup diet or the lettuce diet of some years back. Most lost weight — at least for a few minutes.

Now come the Subway and the Special K diets, both based on brand-name foods and both purporting to take off a lot of flab in a little time. Do they work?

Probably, experts say.

But will the success last? Maybe, but probably not.

The Subway plan isn't one the company whipped up but is a program followed by Jared Fogle, who went from 425 pounds to 180 pounds in a year by eating two subs a day. The company's ads feature incredible before-and-after photos of Fogle, now a firefighter, who lost weight eating the subs, but Subway says that the diet may not be for everyone.

Advertisements for Special K boast that people can lose up to six pounds in two weeks by eating the cereal with milk and fruit twice a day — once for breakfast and as a replacement for lunch or dinner.

What next? The Big Mac diet? The Lucky Charms diet? The Oreo cookie diet?

"There is going to be more of a market for crazy fad diets as more people are desperate to lose weight, but they live in an environment that makes it nearly impossible," says diet researcher Kelly Brownell, a psychology professor at Yale University.

It's no wonder that gimmicky, quick-fix diets have come and gone and come back again.

Americans are lugging around too much fat. About 61 percent of Americans, or 127 million people, weigh too much. Some are fed up with conventional weight-loss methods. They've gone down the eat-less-exercise-more road many times before and always hit a dead end.

That's when many dieters turn to desperate measures.

Fad diets have one thing in common: They narrow or limit food choices, says Keith Ayoob, a spokesman for the American Dietetic Association.

Brownell says the diets usually offer dramatic before and after photos of people who have lost a massive amount of weight, and they promise that the program is easy to follow.

If you stick to these diets, of course you'll lose weight, Brownell says. By definition, you are cutting calories. In some ways, every diet works if somebody follows it, but it doesn't mean it's effective or safe over the long term, he says.

And dieters who don't change some of their bad eating habits probably won't keep the weight off, experts say.

Brownell doesn't think the Subway or Special K diets are particularly dangerous in the short term, but whether people will keep off their lost weight over the long term is questionable.

Fogle's Subway plan controls portions and limits food choices. To lose weight, Fogle had coffee for breakfast; a 6-inch turkey sub with lots of vegetables and a bit of spicy mustard, baked chips and a diet soft drink for lunch; and a foot-long veggie sub with no mayo or cheese for dinner.

He says by eating this way for a year and walking, he was able to lose 245 pounds. Fogle, who is 6 feet 2, decided that 180 pounds was too low for him and increased his weight to 190. His story has inspired others to lose, and a few of them also appear in Subway's TV advertisements.

Fogle thinks the Subway diet worked for him because he likes sandwiches and the taste of this fast-food fare, and the plan was convenient. He lost his weight while a college student at Indiana University in Bloomington.

He did feel hungry on his diet, but he says, "you have to be hungry to lose weight."

Now, Fogle, 24, who has a contract with Subway to do appearances and commercials, says he's eating lots of other foods at decent-sized meals, but he's avoiding high-fat, buttery foods. And he still is consuming Subway sandwiches several times a week.

To nutritionists who have charged that his Subway diet is too low in fruits and vegetables and some key nutrients like calcium, Fogle counters that it wasn't healthy for him to weigh 425 pounds and have a 60-inch waist. "There is no perfect diet for everyone. But this was the perfect diet for me. I tell people you do what works for you," says Fogle, who is working on writing his own diet-motivational book.

Like the Subway plan, the Special K Kick-Start Diet limits fat and calories. Kellogg's pushes it as a two-week diet. The folks featured in the advertisements are actors and not people who actually lost weight on the program.

The diet is based on a study conducted by Richard Mattes, professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. He had dieters eat cereal (several types were used) for two meals a day; the third meal was one of their choosing. For snacks, dieters were encouraged to eat fruits and vegetables. Study participants lost two to 10 pounds in two weeks; the average loss was about four pounds.

The theory is that people will lose a considerable amount of weight in the two weeks because their calories are restricted, and then they'll be more motivated to lose more weight. The diet is especially helpful to people who eat portions that are unrealistically large, Mattes says.

In many ways, the latest diets aren't as unusual as some in the past. Take the cabbage soup diet, where dieters lived mostly on a soup made with a head of cabbage, carrots, onions, celery and other ingredients. Or the low-carb, high-fat Atkins diet, which is wildly popular and allows dieters to feast on bacon and beef but squeezes out bread, pasta and potatoes.

Ayoob of the American Dietetic Association says he had a college nutrition professor who said she was going develop the strawberry shortcake diet to help people lose weight. Her theory was that after a while, they would get so sick of eating strawberry shortcake that they'd prefer to eat nothing at all — thus cutting calories.

It's all the food choices out there that get some people into trouble, Ayoob says. But eliminating foods from your diet, especially ones you really love, can backfire, because you may start craving them and then binge."I wouldn't want to be on a diet that didn't allow me to have a piece of chocolate every once in a while," he says.

Ayoob says managing weight and good health involves "striking a balance between the foods we need to include and a few foods that we can't live without."