Fashion diets can tell you otherwise, but eat a high-fat diet, high carbohydrate will not make you gain weight.
Actually, women actually lost a little weight when they consistently ate few fats and many fruits, vegetables and grains. The discovery is yet another gem mined from the huge study of women's health initiative.Barbara Howard, PhD, of MESTSTAR Research Institute in Washington, and colleagues signed almost 50,000 postmenopausal women aged between 50 and 79 for the dietary modification assay. Most women were overweight or obese and were eating diets that have 39% of fat calories.
Women's forty percent have intensive training and support while eating a low-fat diet with five or more portions of fruits and vegetables and six or more portions of grains. This training included 18 group counseling sessions in the first year and four sessions per year for the rest of the study. The other 60% of women were delivered a copy of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.None of women - in any group - was said to eat less or exercise more. In fact, they were not specifically counted to lose weight.
Even so, in the first year, women trained to eat a healthy diet lost about 5 pounds. After seven and a half years, they still weighed about a smaller pound than women in the group who did not receive special training.
"Restricting fat intake does not lead to weight gain," he concludes Howard and colleagues. "Long-term recommendations to reach a lower diet in total and saturated fat with higher consumption of fruit, vegetables and whole grains, and without focus on weight loss, do not cause weight gain."The discoveries appear in the January 4 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Fast Fat Loss Diet Plans - Low-Fat, High-Carb Diet Is No Gainer
The study can refute the claims of some popular diet gurus that a low fat diet makes people fat. In fact, women who ate the smallest fat lost more weight.
And there was also evidence that carbohydrates are not all bad. Women who ate more vegetables tended to lose more weight than those who ate the minimum.
But the results of the study are "a little underlying", write dietary researchers Michael L. Dansinger, MD and Ernst J. Schaefer, MD, from the Tufts University in Boston, in an editorial that accompanies howard's team report .
Dansinger and Schaefer note that most women in the study was obese or overweight.
"Weight loss was not a goal of treatment [in the study], but maybe it should have been" suggest.
Editorials note that although the study has achieved women to cut their fat intake from 39% to 30% of total calories, it still fell far short of their goal of cutting fat intake to 20% of total Calories.
."Is it time to admit the defeat? Is the US society convicted to be one in which few individuals maintain normal body weight and one-third of adults are obese?" they asked. "Many believe that humanity has no self-control to counterbalance the forces that create a predictable wave of obesity in technologically advancing societies."
As a response, Dansinger and Schaefer point to your own recent study in which they compared several different diet plans. None worked much better than another. But they all worked - for people relatively few that preyed the program.
Eat less and exercise more - what doctors call "lifestyle change" - really helps people lose weight. That editorials say, it means that all hope is not lost.
"The most capable people who can find a way to overcome monumental logistical and psychological barriers that prevent the complete application of lifestyle change can revert obesity in months," write Dansinger and Schaefer. "The medical profession and society in general sub-dosed this potent cure for a long shot."
