January 27, 2010 • 19 mins
Molly and Cristen discuss the phenomenon of dieting -- from early "fad" diets to a possible link between dieting and aging -- in this episode of Stuff Mom Never Told You.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told
you from house top works dot Com. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen Christens
a little bit a little bit ill today, so if
(00:22):
her voice gets a little bit scratchy, you'll know why. Yes,
and Kristen and I'm they're sick. But I've got something
that personal question for you. All right, do you enjoy banting?
It's not a dirty question? Next year? No, I know,
I know what you're talking about, and I gotta say no,
I like food too much. Yes, banting does have to
(00:42):
do with food. Despite being sick, you've read the articles
we're going to discuss today. Good job. Let's talk about
William Banting uh Man. Maybe a few people have heard
of today, but he is. He was the household name
busy in the mid nineteenth century. Banting had a great story.
He was a coffin maker, a very very portly fellow,
quite large. He could not tie his shoes, and to
(01:05):
issues he can couldn't even reach him over his portly
billy and Banting decided that he wanted to drop some pounds.
They tried everything, yeah, but finally he found one guy
who was like, why don't you cut out your saccharine matter? Yeah,
which they basically met carves, bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer,
and potatoes. So Banting went on a very primitive form
(01:28):
of the Atkins diet, I guess, and he dropped a
hundred and fifty six pounds. The part of his day amazing,
and we are not the only people who thought it
was amazing. He was pretty impressed with himself too, since
he tried everything else. And he wrote a book about
a little pamphlet um called The Letter on Corpulence, addressed
to the public. They just don't title dieting books the
(01:49):
way they used to, but um. Because it was such
a you know, bestseller, people wanted to drop their portly
bellies to um. Banting became the household word for dieting,
according to an article we found on Salon dot com.
And there were all sorts of fad diets in Banting's day.
There was the Graham diet, invented by Sylvesta Graham, who
(02:13):
invented then Graham Cracker, and this one was my favorite.
Horace Fletchers Fletcherism who was known as the Great Masticator
because he had a theory that all food and even
milk should be chewed at least thirty two times. I
really wished the article had explained how you chew milk?
(02:33):
Do you have any idea how you do that? Maybe
you swish more than chew, all right, I mean I
don't think that can be good for your teeth. I
don't know, but that's beside the point. Everyone else in
the day loved it, people like Upton Sinclair, Henry James,
John d Rockefella. They all went to these Fletcher clubs
where you just sit around a chew food. Yeah, very
very slowly, just chew. And we think this sounds hilarious.
(02:55):
But you've got to wonder, um, people, a hundred years
from now, we'll be looking back at us and saying, wow,
all they did was eating meat and eggs. How did
they think that that was gonna work. Cabbage diets, grapefruit diets,
South beach diets, liquid diets. There are all sorts of
fat diets going on. And we want to talk about diets.
You know, we've talked in the past about colon cleansing,
(03:17):
We've talked about UM, B, M I and weight control,
so naturally the next thing to come to is whether
what you put in your belly or lack thereof, if
that makes any difference. What does dieting deciding work? And
then another question I have about this Christian, Yes, is
there a link between dieting and aging? Well? Well, I
think the reason why you asked this question is because
(03:38):
of an article that you wrote for elso forks dot
com on calorie restriction and anti aging, because there have
been this series of studies that have shown that reducing
your calorie intake by around thirty can possibly lead to
longer lifespan. Yeah, and we're not talking all restriction in
(04:00):
terms of you're gonna cut out the chocolate cake or
the cupcakes or the cookies. I mean you were going
to go down to calories a day and um, but
still maintaining all your necessary nutrients. And this is again
just not like a railer calorie restricted diets. It's draconian.
It's like we're gonna eat carrots and salmon and that's it.
Should I go over a sample of a calorie restricted diet?
(04:25):
Jenny Menu Cournesis of the New York times in two
thousand three. For breakfast, you might have a mega muffin,
which is uh thirty ingredients including raw wheat, germ, rice brand,
Brewer's East, carrots, strawberries, and silium husk ingredient metam. Yes,
so that's going to really get things going in the morning,
(04:47):
this mega muffin. Then for lunch, you might have a
protein bar or a roast beef sandwich. Hold the bread,
But doesn't that just sound like roast beef? Yes? Okay,
maybe they should just call it a just roast beef.
I think if you're on this diet you might start
to have hallucination because you're so calorie deprived that you
might just called a roast beef sandwich. And then for dinner,
(05:09):
we're gonna cat things off with some broccoli, zucchini, and
canned pink salmon for a total of three hundred calories,
followed by a decadent dessert of fruit salad tough with
way protein. Now, why would you? I mean, I'm all
for eating healthy, but that it just doesn't do it
for me. It seems like life's too sure to do,
(05:30):
you know, just eat three hundred calories and canned salmon
every day. And mega muffins. Well, and especially because when
I was researching this article, you read the articles about
this phenomenon, and I mean, these people have to invest
in scales and notebooks and they weigh their food, and
it's it's like a full time job. If I'm hungry,
I'm more likely just to you know, open a bag
(05:52):
of pretzels than to actually want to cook something. So
if I'm really hungry, I'm not gonna want to sit
in weigh my salmon on a scale. But you know what, Molly, um,
you might be cutting your life shorter than necessary by
opening that bag of pretzels. That's true, and for so
many reasons. But the main thing is, all these studies
that we're talking about, they've been studying calor restriction in
(06:13):
mainly flies and mice because they've got pretty short livespans.
It's easily too, it's easy to track them. Starting in
nive when a nutritionist at Cornell found that if you
eat fewer calories, you'll have at increase in lifespan. Wow,
so that would make a human live to the age
of a D sixty. Now, I mean, that's a pretty
(06:34):
decent trade off eat a lifetime of mega muffins and
then be hundred sixty right. Yeah, that's that's six ext
years of mega muffins. That's what you've got. Away but
um away, Sorry, Chris, and I just abused myself sometimes
that wasn't purposeful. Um But anyway, there are no studies
of how calory restriction works in humans because unlike mice
(06:55):
and fruit flies, we already have fairly long lifespans. Yeah, uh,
but we do have some observational material from Okinawa, Japan.
Um it's kind of a little depressing this, uh, this research,
but basically, after World War one and two, when food
(07:17):
was in short supply, there were fewer people in um On,
Okinawa who were dying from age la diseases such as
cornery artery disease, type DOW, diabetes, and cancer. So basically
they were won in a forced calorie restriction diet. And
in general, um Japan also has a very long lived population,
(07:37):
much longer than folks here in the US. So you know,
that's that's maybe one one human study. Well, they sort
of think that maybe if you force yourself into survival
mode the way these people might have been in survival
mode after a war where there was no food, then
somehow evolutionary wise, your body kick starts itself and says,
we've got to live through the starvation. So that's sort
(08:00):
of the point of color restriction is almost fooling your
body into thinking, hey, there's no food, but to ensure
that we've got you know, offspring, we should we should
continue to live. But I think we got to point
out to though, that these calor restriction studies are not
the same across the board, for for these animals. Going
back to the animals, because it doesn't work for everybody.
(08:21):
For instance, it extends the life in fruit flies, but
not house flies. It's gonna benefit fat mice, but not
already lean mice. And also it's gonna make lab rats
live longer, but not those found in the wild. Yeah,
I mean, there's a lot of unknowns, and there's you know,
while living longer to some extent would be a nice
(08:42):
side effect, there are some other side effects of this
um that include loss of libido, cessation of menstrual periods,
loss of memory and muscle mass, and dizziness. So that's fun. Yeah,
And maybe I mean, like going back to this stuff
in Japan, maybe they're it's not just that they're on
a calorie restricted diet, but the quality of the food
they're eating is a lot better. It's a healthier balance,
(09:04):
and maybe they're you know, living healthier lifestyles in general,
getting a bit more exercise and all of that. And
I think that's the model for all healthy lifestyles. Christian
you know, you eat less, you move more, and that's
how you kind of make a lifestyle change sustainable. These
people who are adopting this color instruction dieter are sort
of taking it to the extreme and not necessarily a
(09:24):
healthy extreme. Sure, cutting I think we could say that
cutting thirty of your daily calorie intake is is an
extreme form of dieting. And speaking of extreme dieting, one
side effect that we might not think about is how
that kind of rapid weight loss might affect your physical appearance,
(09:45):
and not for the good. We might, you know, go
down to dress size. But according to a fairly recent
study from Plastic and Reconstructive Journal, my favorite journal, yes,
um women and these were women I think over forty
who lost as little as ten pounds um looked four
years older because of the weight loss, right, while the
(10:08):
ones who didn't lose the weight had these plump cheeks
and soft features that made them look younger than their
actual age. And this comes from a study of body
mass index among two pairs of identical female twins over
over the course of two years. And well, I didn't
look at the same thing, and men, I think that, Um,
it does make an interesting point about how if you
(10:30):
if you lose that important kind of fat around your face,
it can can make you look older, a little haggard.
So you might live forever, but you'll look kind of
an old lady while you do it. So what's the solution, Kristen.
I mean, these are extreme diets. We're basically saying fad
diets are really out there and probably don't work, right.
(10:51):
I mean, no one's going around masticating things thirty two
times today. Well, I mean you aren't. I mean you're
not even lunch with me. Something figured out that thing
two hours. Uh. Well, Molly, the thing is we might
just be fighting an uphill battle with all this dieting stuff.
Te Well, according to the Eating Disorders Foundation of Victoria,
(11:16):
Molly of people who go on weight loss diets as
a diet, probably yeah, some kind of fat diet, a
diet intended to make them lose weight. Um, they're gonna
gain back everything they've lost in more within two years. Wow. Yeah.
So basically, if you're going on a diet purely to
(11:37):
lose weight, the second year abandoned that diet, it all
comes back, sure, which is why we're gonna basically are
we going to take a stance to stay down with diets? Well,
I think that this is a good point to to
maybe propose that we change our concept of what a
diet should be when we look at a going on
a diet. You know, if I'm gonna go eat grape
(11:58):
fruit for two weeks, obviously I'm not going to sustain that,
but I'm going to drop, you know, a few pounds,
but it's going to rebound once I finally gets stick
of great fruit and start eating normally again. But maybe
instead of going on these fad diets, I should look
at my diet okay, as a whole and see, like
you're eating habit by eating habits, exactly what I'm eating when,
(12:20):
and what kind of healthy, sustainable adjustments I could be making. Yeah,
like you know that. I mean, people generally know as
a rule that they should not eat fried chicken. Let's say,
even though it's delicious, so delicious, um, and so going
on a great fruit diet to counteract the years you
spent eating fried chicken. Good idea, right, So if you
(12:41):
make the overall change, what you're telling me is if
I limit my intake of fried chicken while still upping
my quantities of healthy foods, Yeah, such as carrots, maybe
trade in the fried chicken, Molly for the chaw grill
charred grills. It's delicious, sorry, really like all forms of chicken.
(13:01):
And I think one interesting concept, Molly we should also
bring up is this idea of the set point theory
that maintains that our weight is genetically determined that for
some people, no matter how hard they try to gain
or to lose weight, it's just not gonna happen because
it's just not in their genes. And even more specifically,
(13:26):
whenever we try to gain or lose weight within four
to six pounds or two to three ms of our
kind of set weight, our body is going to go
into survival mode and it's gonna slow our metabolism to
save energy, and then our cravings for high calorie foods
(13:50):
are going to skyrocket, thus causing the diet rebound and
as proof of that, Kristen, let's let's take a brief
trip to Scandinavia. UM. There was one study I'm not
sure the year, but it was UM profile in a
book called Rethinking Thin by Gina Colata, where she goes
over sort of all these weight loss studies over the
(14:11):
years too to more or less point out how ridiculous
they are. UM. But there's this group of five hunds
and forty adopted children in Denmark UM who were found
to be, with very few exceptions, as fat or thin
as their biological parents, no matter what they were fed
or how much they exercised. Similarly, there was another study
of Swedish twins. Like I said, we're going to cover
the whole, almost the whole realm of Scandinavia UM. Sevent
(14:34):
of body weight and these Swedish twins was genetic, so
that it's more likely that you're inheriting your weight from
your parents, and you're inheriting much else, including um likelihood
of getting mental illness cancer. But that sounds sort of
depressing to think about, Kristen. I mean, for all of
us who are out there trying to make changes in
our diet to exercise more, is all hope lost. I mean,
(14:56):
I don't think so. I think that, like you said,
making those daily chang ages in our diets, we're eating
foods that make us feel good in the long run,
as opposed to foods with icing that probably only makes
us feel good in the short run. That's sort of
more a long term benefit than weight losses. When don't
you say yeah, and and think about integrating certain lifestyle
(15:18):
changes you know that are often tossed out, you know
as common tips such as you know, taking the stairs
or parking farther away, or you know, trying to walk more.
Just approaching it from I guess, a holistic perspective rather
than just saying, you know what, like I gotta lose
ten pounds and I'm just gonna eat grape fruit and
(15:39):
special K and that's it and go to the extreme.
So weight loss is possible, but not with a fat
diet long term, long term, Yeah, exactly. Just if you
want sustainable results, you have to work at It takes
it takes time, Okay, it takes dedication. So no fat
diets Anti frowns on them. Yeah, I mean, come on,
(16:00):
life is too short for fad diets people. That's what
my Mom always told me, so, if you guys have
any thoughts on dieting and aging, let us see what
they are at mom stuff at house stuff works dot com.
And speaking of our email addressed addressed Kristen, I've got
some people who haven't written into it in the past.
(16:24):
Let's hear an email from Lindsay, who wrote us about
the baseball podcast. She wrote, I have to say I'm
a little disappointed with your portrayal of softball as a
girl who spent her entire youth on a softball diamond.
I was a little confused when you mentioned men playing
the sport because it has a soft ball, so they
wouldn't get us hurt with increasing cost of medical insurance
in the ninet thirties. I don't know if either of
(16:46):
you have ever played softball, but believe me, when you
get hit with a twelve bench softball sixty miles per
hour from thirty ft away, there's nothing soft about it.
When I was still playing, a fellow player ripped off
a girl's ear lobe just because their girl was not
fast enough to catch the ball that was hit right
back at her. I don't think that she thought the
ball was soft as well, just because the bases are closer,
the field is smaller. Road pitch underhand does not mean
(17:07):
that there's any less challenging. There's no difference in reaction
time when hitting a ninety miles per hour baseball from
ninety ft and hitting a sixte mile per hour softball
from thirty ft as well as I have to completely
disagree when you compare female softball softball players with cheerleaders
and the fact that they feel the need to keep
their femininity while playing their sport. As a small girl,
I was discriminated in the sport for not being as
(17:29):
big and burly as other girls. The game has become
much more butch and closer to baseball, with stronger players
that hit home runs. The sport which used to be
more interesting than baseball because there's far more action, but
now managers which seems to be like baseball teams, encouraging
home runs instead of the short game of bunting drag hitting,
which in general meant a lot more action. I do
agree that baseball and softball are different sports, but I'm
sure glad that as females get the better of the two.
(17:51):
Softball all right, And I've got an email here from Christina,
and she wants us to get rid of marriage. You
propose that podcast, I did propose it, Uh, she posed,
she said, I totally agree. I think Kristen said it.
We should just get rid of marriage completely. People could
(18:11):
still live together and have kids, they just wouldn't be married.
There's still the religious marriages if you believe in that,
but it wouldn't be legal. There'd be no joint bank accounts,
Texas would be filed separately, and there'd be no expensive
and traumatic divorces. I think marriage is just an unnecessary
and expensive complication. My mom quite often reminds me that
I'm only sixteen and it will probably change my mind
(18:33):
when I meet the man of my dreams. I tell
her that I'm not a romantic and don't dream about
a mysterious man that will show up in my life
at some unspecified time in the future. Then she says
she should record the things I will say now and
played in the bi wedding. I tell her again, I'm
not getting married, but she's still fully convinced I will
fall in love and get married. Maybe I'm screwed up
in the head or my mom forgot to teach me something,
(18:54):
but I just think independently. Whatever it is, I don't
want to be anyone's wife. Well, thank you Christina all
writing in yeah, and as always if you would like
to write in again, our email addresses mom stuff at
how stuff works dot com and during the week, if
you'd like to head over to our blog, it's called
how to stuff And if you would like to read
(19:17):
Molly's article on dieting and aging, you should also head
over to how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff
works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out
our blogs on the house. Stuff works dot com home
(19:37):
page brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told
you from house top works dot Com. Hey, and welcome
to the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen Christens
a little bit a little bit ill today, so if
(00:22):
her voice gets a little bit scratchy, you'll know why. Yes,
and Kristen and I'm they're sick. But I've got something
that personal question for you. All right, do you enjoy banting?
It's not a dirty question? Next year? No, I know,
I know what you're talking about, and I gotta say no,
I like food too much. Yes, banting does have to
(00:42):
do with food. Despite being sick, you've read the articles
we're going to discuss today. Good job. Let's talk about
William Banting uh Man. Maybe a few people have heard
of today, but he is. He was the household name
busy in the mid nineteenth century. Banting had a great story.
He was a coffin maker, a very very portly fellow,
quite large. He could not tie his shoes, and to
(01:05):
issues he can couldn't even reach him over his portly
billy and Banting decided that he wanted to drop some pounds.
They tried everything, yeah, but finally he found one guy
who was like, why don't you cut out your saccharine matter? Yeah,
which they basically met carves, bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer,
and potatoes. So Banting went on a very primitive form
(01:28):
of the Atkins diet, I guess, and he dropped a
hundred and fifty six pounds. The part of his day amazing,
and we are not the only people who thought it
was amazing. He was pretty impressed with himself too, since
he tried everything else. And he wrote a book about
a little pamphlet um called The Letter on Corpulence, addressed
to the public. They just don't title dieting books the
(01:49):
way they used to, but um. Because it was such
a you know, bestseller, people wanted to drop their portly
bellies to um. Banting became the household word for dieting,
according to an article we found on Salon dot com.
And there were all sorts of fad diets in Banting's day.
There was the Graham diet, invented by Sylvesta Graham, who
(02:13):
invented then Graham Cracker, and this one was my favorite.
Horace Fletchers Fletcherism who was known as the Great Masticator
because he had a theory that all food and even
milk should be chewed at least thirty two times. I
really wished the article had explained how you chew milk?
(02:33):
Do you have any idea how you do that? Maybe
you swish more than chew, all right, I mean I
don't think that can be good for your teeth. I
don't know, but that's beside the point. Everyone else in
the day loved it, people like Upton Sinclair, Henry James,
John d Rockefella. They all went to these Fletcher clubs
where you just sit around a chew food. Yeah, very
very slowly, just chew. And we think this sounds hilarious.
(02:55):
But you've got to wonder, um, people, a hundred years
from now, we'll be looking back at us and saying, wow,
all they did was eating meat and eggs. How did
they think that that was gonna work. Cabbage diets, grapefruit diets,
South beach diets, liquid diets. There are all sorts of
fat diets going on. And we want to talk about diets.
You know, we've talked in the past about colon cleansing,
(03:17):
We've talked about UM, B, M I and weight control,
so naturally the next thing to come to is whether
what you put in your belly or lack thereof, if
that makes any difference. What does dieting deciding work? And
then another question I have about this Christian, Yes, is
there a link between dieting and aging? Well? Well, I
think the reason why you asked this question is because
(03:38):
of an article that you wrote for elso forks dot
com on calorie restriction and anti aging, because there have
been this series of studies that have shown that reducing
your calorie intake by around thirty can possibly lead to
longer lifespan. Yeah, and we're not talking all restriction in
(04:00):
terms of you're gonna cut out the chocolate cake or
the cupcakes or the cookies. I mean you were going
to go down to calories a day and um, but
still maintaining all your necessary nutrients. And this is again
just not like a railer calorie restricted diets. It's draconian.
It's like we're gonna eat carrots and salmon and that's it.
Should I go over a sample of a calorie restricted diet?
(04:25):
Jenny Menu Cournesis of the New York times in two
thousand three. For breakfast, you might have a mega muffin,
which is uh thirty ingredients including raw wheat, germ, rice brand,
Brewer's East, carrots, strawberries, and silium husk ingredient metam. Yes,
so that's going to really get things going in the morning,
(04:47):
this mega muffin. Then for lunch, you might have a
protein bar or a roast beef sandwich. Hold the bread,
But doesn't that just sound like roast beef? Yes? Okay,
maybe they should just call it a just roast beef.
I think if you're on this diet you might start
to have hallucination because you're so calorie deprived that you
might just called a roast beef sandwich. And then for dinner,
(05:09):
we're gonna cat things off with some broccoli, zucchini, and
canned pink salmon for a total of three hundred calories,
followed by a decadent dessert of fruit salad tough with
way protein. Now, why would you? I mean, I'm all
for eating healthy, but that it just doesn't do it
for me. It seems like life's too sure to do,
(05:30):
you know, just eat three hundred calories and canned salmon
every day. And mega muffins. Well, and especially because when
I was researching this article, you read the articles about
this phenomenon, and I mean, these people have to invest
in scales and notebooks and they weigh their food, and
it's it's like a full time job. If I'm hungry,
I'm more likely just to you know, open a bag
(05:52):
of pretzels than to actually want to cook something. So
if I'm really hungry, I'm not gonna want to sit
in weigh my salmon on a scale. But you know what, Molly, um,
you might be cutting your life shorter than necessary by
opening that bag of pretzels. That's true, and for so
many reasons. But the main thing is, all these studies
that we're talking about, they've been studying calor restriction in
(06:13):
mainly flies and mice because they've got pretty short livespans.
It's easily too, it's easy to track them. Starting in
nive when a nutritionist at Cornell found that if you
eat fewer calories, you'll have at increase in lifespan. Wow,
so that would make a human live to the age
of a D sixty. Now, I mean, that's a pretty
(06:34):
decent trade off eat a lifetime of mega muffins and
then be hundred sixty right. Yeah, that's that's six ext
years of mega muffins. That's what you've got. Away but
um away, Sorry, Chris, and I just abused myself sometimes
that wasn't purposeful. Um But anyway, there are no studies
of how calory restriction works in humans because unlike mice
(06:55):
and fruit flies, we already have fairly long lifespans. Yeah, uh,
but we do have some observational material from Okinawa, Japan.
Um it's kind of a little depressing this, uh, this research,
but basically, after World War one and two, when food
(07:17):
was in short supply, there were fewer people in um On,
Okinawa who were dying from age la diseases such as
cornery artery disease, type DOW, diabetes, and cancer. So basically
they were won in a forced calorie restriction diet. And
in general, um Japan also has a very long lived population,
(07:37):
much longer than folks here in the US. So you know,
that's that's maybe one one human study. Well, they sort
of think that maybe if you force yourself into survival
mode the way these people might have been in survival
mode after a war where there was no food, then
somehow evolutionary wise, your body kick starts itself and says,
we've got to live through the starvation. So that's sort
(08:00):
of the point of color restriction is almost fooling your
body into thinking, hey, there's no food, but to ensure
that we've got you know, offspring, we should we should
continue to live. But I think we got to point
out to though, that these calor restriction studies are not
the same across the board, for for these animals. Going
back to the animals, because it doesn't work for everybody.
(08:21):
For instance, it extends the life in fruit flies, but
not house flies. It's gonna benefit fat mice, but not
already lean mice. And also it's gonna make lab rats
live longer, but not those found in the wild. Yeah,
I mean, there's a lot of unknowns, and there's you know,
while living longer to some extent would be a nice
(08:42):
side effect, there are some other side effects of this
um that include loss of libido, cessation of menstrual periods,
loss of memory and muscle mass, and dizziness. So that's fun. Yeah,
And maybe I mean, like going back to this stuff
in Japan, maybe they're it's not just that they're on
a calorie restricted diet, but the quality of the food
they're eating is a lot better. It's a healthier balance,
(09:04):
and maybe they're you know, living healthier lifestyles in general,
getting a bit more exercise and all of that. And
I think that's the model for all healthy lifestyles. Christian
you know, you eat less, you move more, and that's
how you kind of make a lifestyle change sustainable. These
people who are adopting this color instruction dieter are sort
of taking it to the extreme and not necessarily a
(09:24):
healthy extreme. Sure, cutting I think we could say that
cutting thirty of your daily calorie intake is is an
extreme form of dieting. And speaking of extreme dieting, one
side effect that we might not think about is how
that kind of rapid weight loss might affect your physical appearance,
(09:45):
and not for the good. We might, you know, go
down to dress size. But according to a fairly recent
study from Plastic and Reconstructive Journal, my favorite journal, yes,
um women and these were women I think over forty
who lost as little as ten pounds um looked four
years older because of the weight loss, right, while the
(10:08):
ones who didn't lose the weight had these plump cheeks
and soft features that made them look younger than their
actual age. And this comes from a study of body
mass index among two pairs of identical female twins over
over the course of two years. And well, I didn't
look at the same thing, and men, I think that, Um,
it does make an interesting point about how if you
(10:30):
if you lose that important kind of fat around your face,
it can can make you look older, a little haggard.
So you might live forever, but you'll look kind of
an old lady while you do it. So what's the solution, Kristen.
I mean, these are extreme diets. We're basically saying fad
diets are really out there and probably don't work, right.
(10:51):
I mean, no one's going around masticating things thirty two
times today. Well, I mean you aren't. I mean you're
not even lunch with me. Something figured out that thing
two hours. Uh. Well, Molly, the thing is we might
just be fighting an uphill battle with all this dieting stuff.
Te Well, according to the Eating Disorders Foundation of Victoria,
(11:16):
Molly of people who go on weight loss diets as
a diet, probably yeah, some kind of fat diet, a
diet intended to make them lose weight. Um, they're gonna
gain back everything they've lost in more within two years. Wow. Yeah.
So basically, if you're going on a diet purely to
(11:37):
lose weight, the second year abandoned that diet, it all
comes back, sure, which is why we're gonna basically are
we going to take a stance to stay down with diets? Well,
I think that this is a good point to to
maybe propose that we change our concept of what a
diet should be when we look at a going on
a diet. You know, if I'm gonna go eat grape
(11:58):
fruit for two weeks, obviously I'm not going to sustain that,
but I'm going to drop, you know, a few pounds,
but it's going to rebound once I finally gets stick
of great fruit and start eating normally again. But maybe
instead of going on these fad diets, I should look
at my diet okay, as a whole and see, like
you're eating habit by eating habits, exactly what I'm eating when,
(12:20):
and what kind of healthy, sustainable adjustments I could be making. Yeah,
like you know that. I mean, people generally know as
a rule that they should not eat fried chicken. Let's say,
even though it's delicious, so delicious, um, and so going
on a great fruit diet to counteract the years you
spent eating fried chicken. Good idea, right, So if you
(12:41):
make the overall change, what you're telling me is if
I limit my intake of fried chicken while still upping
my quantities of healthy foods, Yeah, such as carrots, maybe
trade in the fried chicken, Molly for the chaw grill
charred grills. It's delicious, sorry, really like all forms of chicken.
(13:01):
And I think one interesting concept, Molly we should also
bring up is this idea of the set point theory
that maintains that our weight is genetically determined that for
some people, no matter how hard they try to gain
or to lose weight, it's just not gonna happen because
it's just not in their genes. And even more specifically,
(13:26):
whenever we try to gain or lose weight within four
to six pounds or two to three ms of our
kind of set weight, our body is going to go
into survival mode and it's gonna slow our metabolism to
save energy, and then our cravings for high calorie foods
(13:50):
are going to skyrocket, thus causing the diet rebound and
as proof of that, Kristen, let's let's take a brief
trip to Scandinavia. UM. There was one study I'm not
sure the year, but it was UM profile in a
book called Rethinking Thin by Gina Colata, where she goes
over sort of all these weight loss studies over the
(14:11):
years too to more or less point out how ridiculous
they are. UM. But there's this group of five hunds
and forty adopted children in Denmark UM who were found
to be, with very few exceptions, as fat or thin
as their biological parents, no matter what they were fed
or how much they exercised. Similarly, there was another study
of Swedish twins. Like I said, we're going to cover
the whole, almost the whole realm of Scandinavia UM. Sevent
(14:34):
of body weight and these Swedish twins was genetic, so
that it's more likely that you're inheriting your weight from
your parents, and you're inheriting much else, including um likelihood
of getting mental illness cancer. But that sounds sort of
depressing to think about, Kristen. I mean, for all of
us who are out there trying to make changes in
our diet to exercise more, is all hope lost. I mean,
(14:56):
I don't think so. I think that, like you said,
making those daily chang ages in our diets, we're eating
foods that make us feel good in the long run,
as opposed to foods with icing that probably only makes
us feel good in the short run. That's sort of
more a long term benefit than weight losses. When don't
you say yeah, and and think about integrating certain lifestyle
(15:18):
changes you know that are often tossed out, you know
as common tips such as you know, taking the stairs
or parking farther away, or you know, trying to walk more.
Just approaching it from I guess, a holistic perspective rather
than just saying, you know what, like I gotta lose
ten pounds and I'm just gonna eat grape fruit and
(15:39):
special K and that's it and go to the extreme.
So weight loss is possible, but not with a fat
diet long term, long term, Yeah, exactly. Just if you
want sustainable results, you have to work at It takes
it takes time, Okay, it takes dedication. So no fat
diets Anti frowns on them. Yeah, I mean, come on,
(16:00):
life is too short for fad diets people. That's what
my Mom always told me, so, if you guys have
any thoughts on dieting and aging, let us see what
they are at mom stuff at house stuff works dot com.
And speaking of our email addressed addressed Kristen, I've got
some people who haven't written into it in the past.
(16:24):
Let's hear an email from Lindsay, who wrote us about
the baseball podcast. She wrote, I have to say I'm
a little disappointed with your portrayal of softball as a
girl who spent her entire youth on a softball diamond.
I was a little confused when you mentioned men playing
the sport because it has a soft ball, so they
wouldn't get us hurt with increasing cost of medical insurance
in the ninet thirties. I don't know if either of
(16:46):
you have ever played softball, but believe me, when you
get hit with a twelve bench softball sixty miles per
hour from thirty ft away, there's nothing soft about it.
When I was still playing, a fellow player ripped off
a girl's ear lobe just because their girl was not
fast enough to catch the ball that was hit right
back at her. I don't think that she thought the
ball was soft as well, just because the bases are closer,
the field is smaller. Road pitch underhand does not mean
(17:07):
that there's any less challenging. There's no difference in reaction
time when hitting a ninety miles per hour baseball from
ninety ft and hitting a sixte mile per hour softball
from thirty ft as well as I have to completely
disagree when you compare female softball softball players with cheerleaders
and the fact that they feel the need to keep
their femininity while playing their sport. As a small girl,
I was discriminated in the sport for not being as
(17:29):
big and burly as other girls. The game has become
much more butch and closer to baseball, with stronger players
that hit home runs. The sport which used to be
more interesting than baseball because there's far more action, but
now managers which seems to be like baseball teams, encouraging
home runs instead of the short game of bunting drag hitting,
which in general meant a lot more action. I do
agree that baseball and softball are different sports, but I'm
sure glad that as females get the better of the two.
(17:51):
Softball all right, And I've got an email here from Christina,
and she wants us to get rid of marriage. You
propose that podcast, I did propose it, Uh, she posed,
she said, I totally agree. I think Kristen said it.
We should just get rid of marriage completely. People could
(18:11):
still live together and have kids, they just wouldn't be married.
There's still the religious marriages if you believe in that,
but it wouldn't be legal. There'd be no joint bank accounts,
Texas would be filed separately, and there'd be no expensive
and traumatic divorces. I think marriage is just an unnecessary
and expensive complication. My mom quite often reminds me that
I'm only sixteen and it will probably change my mind
(18:33):
when I meet the man of my dreams. I tell
her that I'm not a romantic and don't dream about
a mysterious man that will show up in my life
at some unspecified time in the future. Then she says
she should record the things I will say now and
played in the bi wedding. I tell her again, I'm
not getting married, but she's still fully convinced I will
fall in love and get married. Maybe I'm screwed up
in the head or my mom forgot to teach me something,
(18:54):
but I just think independently. Whatever it is, I don't
want to be anyone's wife. Well, thank you Christina all
writing in yeah, and as always if you would like
to write in again, our email addresses mom stuff at
how stuff works dot com and during the week, if
you'd like to head over to our blog, it's called
how to stuff And if you would like to read
(19:17):
Molly's article on dieting and aging, you should also head
over to how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff
works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out
our blogs on the house. Stuff works dot com home
(19:37):
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