I signed up for Askville at amazon.com, but I rarely participate, especially on their health topics (you can use up a couple of years' worth of Sanity Watchers points reading the advice given there).
Anyway, I got an email today about asking a question/voting on questions for 4 authors of diet books (askville members post questions, then we get to vote on the questions, the questions with the most votes will be presented to the authors). The authors and their books are Matt Goulding, Eat This, Not That: Thousands of Simple Food Swaps That Can Save You 10, 20, 30 Pounds-or More!, T. Colin Campbell, PhD, The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health, Jim Karas, The Cardio-Free Diet, and last but not least Kim Barnouin & Rory Freedman, Skinny Bitch (oh yeah, these two bitches know just tons about how to lose weight and keep it off forever, don't they?).
So I thought, what the fuck, I'll ask a question and see how many people vote for that question to be asked of these so-called experts on weight loss. I am really interested in seeing how they would answer it (bet it doesn't get enough votes to get asked, though). The reason I don't think it will get enough votes? Well, here's my question and the details I gave to go with it: "Can you guarantee permanent weight loss if a person follows your advice/diet?"
I ask this because from everything I've read, 95 - 98% of people who go on a diet regain everything they lost within 5 years. I haven't seen a safe, effective way to lose more than 10 - 30 pounds permanently yet. If 10 - 30 pounds was all I needed to lose, I wouldn't worry about it. For people who need to lose more than 50 pounds, there is no safe way for them to lose it and keep it off permanently, and yo-yo dieting is worse for a person's health than being at a stable, though higher, weight. That's why diets have to state "results not typical" when showing someone who has lost massive amounts of weight (and we never hear if they've been able to safely maintain that loss for more than 5 years). I would think that if people eat a variety of foods and get a moderate amount of exercise, they would be healthier than if they repeatedly lose/gain weight through dieting.
From what I've seen of the questions being asked so far, most of them are of the "what do I eat", "why don't my diets work", "how do I prevent belly fat even though I'm at my ideal weight", "what is the optimum amount of exercise per day/week" variety.
I want to keep my sanity, so I'm not even reading the comments other askville participants have left on those questions, I would probably end up screaming at my computer about the stupidity of it all (yeah, I'm learning that there are things I shouldn't read, even if I am a voracious reader).
I have to say that I haven't read any of the books by those authors (they don't have vampires/werewolves/dragons/faeries/etc and romance with humans in them....lol), and probably won't read them since I'm not interested in dieting (I am interested in health and fitness, but weight loss isn't a necessary part of that). I'm rather skeptical of any book that says follow this diet plan and you'll be healthy and skinny for life. I've read enough of them, and followed the advice in some of them, and it hasn't worked in the past, and probably never will work, so why keep reading the same old recycled shit?
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