Obesity Case

With the fast food and big portions that we have available in America, obesity is a becoming an ever bigger problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control about 60 million adults are obese ("Facts"). Being obese obviously correlates to additional health problems. These problems include diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and several others ("Facts"). Since there are so many obese people there is a huge market for diet fads.

The money that people spend on these diets is about a $60 billion per year (Reisner). We all have heard of several diets called Atkins, South Beach, and others. The industry lures people to think that if they buy their scam, they will lose weight rapidly. Although some diets do tend to work, most of them fail in helping people reach long term and sustainable goals. Diet fads do not work because they restrict what you eat, disregard overall health, and many times the weight is gained back.

Several diets tell you what you can and cannot eat. For instance, the Abs Diet by Men's Health, tells you when to eat, what to eat, and how much of certain foods you can eat (Zinczenko). This causes the person on the diet to long for what they really want. By cutting out a certain kind of food it sets the person up for failure. If the dieter likes cookies and the diet says you can never eat cookies, he/she will long to eat cookies. Soon enough cookies will be available to that person, and most of the time the dieter will give into temptation and eat them. Restricting the food you eat when dieting is important, but there is a healthy way to go about it.

Just changing your diet and losing weight, does not make you a healthy person. Diets often can get you to lose weight by cutting back on calories. Even though you are losing this weight your body's metabolism is getting slower. Traci Mann, a PhD at the University California Los Angeles did a study on how effective diets were. She said "When you keep to a calorie-reduced diet, your body makes metabolic adjustments that make it harder to lose weight" (DeNoon). Mann also concluded that your body gets used to what you put into it, therefore if you reduce the calories in your diet, will have to keep reducing calories to lose weight (DeNoon). Exercise is often not a part of any diets. Without exercise our body's metabolism slows down (DeNoon). Mann found from the study, that the most weight was lost and kept off by eating healthy and exercising consistently.

When on a diet most people do not eat the foods they most enjoy. The person on the diet is forced to eat foods they despise. This causes an imbalance in the diet. There is a term called Yo-yo dieting, which is losing weight and then gaining it back again. According to Health Guidance, Yo-yo dieting causes