Geoffrey Cannon - Dieting Makes You Fat

Geoffrey Cannon is co-author of two number one bestselling books: Dieting Makes You Fat (with Hetty Einzig) and The Food Scandal (with Caroline Walker). He is secretary-general of the World Health Policy Forum; co-convenor of The New Nutrition Science project; and chief editor of the new comprehensive expert report on Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer. As a campaigning and investigative journalist he wrote prolifically for many national newspapers and womens magazines.

The New Nutrition Science (chief editor) (with Claus Leitzmann)

The Fate of Nations. Food and Nutrition Policy in the New World Superbug. Natures Revenge: Why Antibiotics Breed Disease

Food and Health: The Experts Agree

The Good Fight. The Life and Work of Caroline Walker

The Politics of Food

Fat to Fit

The Food Scandal (with Caroline Walker)

Dieting Makes You Fat (first version) (with Hetty Einzig)

Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective (chief editor)

Guia Alimentar para a Populao Brasileira (initial drafts of official national dietary guidelines, for federal government of Brazil)

Alimentos do Brasil (Foods of Brazil) (for government of Brazil)

Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective (project director, chief editor)

STAR*RANK (road and track running standards, records and rankings)

Getting in Shape (fitness project for the Sunday Times)

The New Nutrition Science project (co-convenor)

World Health Policy Forum (co-founder, secretary-general)

Public Health Nutrition (associate editor, columnist)

Brazilian government (member, delegation to World Health Organization Executive Board meeting)

World Health Organization (representative, Earth Summit on Sustainable Development)

UK government (member, delegation to International Conference on Nutrition)

UK government (member, National Nutrition Task Force)

National Food Alliance (now Sustain) (co-founder, previous chair)

Soil Association (previous board member)

Guild of Food Writers (previous secretary)

Caroline Walker Trust (co-founder, previous secretary)

London Road Runners Club (co-founder)

Serpentine Running Club (founder)

For Raquel and Gabriel

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

William Shakespeare

The problem nowadays always turns on how we shall decide to live.

Edward Hoagland

What dieting makes you fat means. What you will find here. What you will not find. This is not a dieting book. It includes the seven golden rules for lifelong wellbeing, which also work if you want to reduce body fat.

This book addresses you as a citizen as well as a consumer. Eating and living consciously protects you against disease. It also creates positive health and wellbeing in the living and physical world of which we all are a part.

Enjoyment of food and drink is part of the joy of living. It is hard to have a good relationship with food or with life if it seems that what you are eating and drinking is making you more and more overweight. All the more so, if all your efforts to reduce weight lead to hunger and craving and to an increase in weight back to or beyond where you were before, and a sense that even when you eat and drink less you still become heavier or flabbier.

Extra body fat often leads to obesity, which may be debilitating, and is associated with increased risk of various serious and even deadly diseases. But whats just as bad is the sense that your body is out of your control, even alien, the sense of failure that this creates, and the fear often justified that at least some people in your life see you as somebody who is feeble, lazy or greedy, who cant or wont get a grip. Being and staying the weight and shape you want to be isnt just about protecting yourself against disease, its about your whole health and wellbeing.

These days, bookshops are stuffed with dieting books. Half or more of the advice on health and wellbeing on websites now is about how to be and stay slim. Business in slimming drugs is booming. At the same time, rates of overweight and obesity among children and young people as well as adults are rapidly increasing, all over the world. We live at a time when food and drink is cheapened and fatness is feared. Whats happening? One reason is that advice on what to eat and drink for good health is mostly incomplete, misleading, or wrong, as is advice on what to eat and drink in order to get rid of body fat. A purpose of this book is to show you the right way, starting with why dieting is the wrong way.

The term diet is ambiguous. Now it usually means all of what we eat and drink, although this is not what going on a diet means. Diet once was a great concept. Dietetics was originally the philosophy of the wisely conducted life in all its aspects physical and also mental, emotional and spiritual within which the appreciation and celebration of food and drink, including everyday meals, and the feasting and fasting meant to mark special occasions, is one part. Diet in this broad sense is part of Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan and Arabic teaching, and of worldwide oral tradition, as it was in Europe and the Americas until the rise of science in its modern sense. (For more on diet and dieting see the notes to this introduction, at the back of the book.)

Here is what I mean by dieting makes you fat. The terms dieting, as in dieting books, and diet, as in going on a diet, are used in what is now the usual sense. This does not mean occasional prudence or restraint in what you eat or drink, or avoiding specific foods and drinks you think are bad for you. It also does not mean the one time in your life when you transform the quality of what you eat and drink, become more physically active, reduce body fat, get in shape, and maintain this change always which is what I recommend in . It means the occasional or regular temporary following of regimes that restrict energy intake from food and drink, with the intention of reducing a substantial amount of body weight, after which you resume your normal pattern of eating and drinking.

These qualifications, which are important, exclude only a small proportion of people who go on diets. Some dieting regimes claim not to involve restriction of energy measured as calories or kilojoules but as you will see, practically all of them actually do, whether they say so or not.

Now for makes you fat. Of course it is not only dieting that makes you fat. Typically, people go on a diet for the first time because they want to get rid of unwanted body fat and weight that has accumulated for some other reason. But the first part of this book shows that the process of dieting itself increases body fat and body weight and why. The more severe the regime, and the more often dieting is repeated, the greater is this unintended and unwanted effect.

People who follow the advice given in dieting regimes do not become heavier and fatter at the moment the regimes are completed. Of course not! If dieters really do consume less energy than is used by their bodies, then they will for sure reduce their weight and also their body fat although less, and often a lot less, than most champions of popular dieting regimes claim or assume. Measured at that point, dieting works. What I mean is the whole effect of dieting, including what happens immediately after the regime is completed, and then a couple of weeks later, then in the next year or two, and long-term.