Atkins on the Ropes

The news today carries reports that the Atkins Nutritional Inc. has filed for bankruptcy. Not too surprising, but another indication that most diets are fads that arise, peak, and fade. If you’ve lived long enough, you’ve seen the F-Plan diet, the Grapefruit diet, the South Beach diet, the Cabbage-Soup diet, low-fat diets, the glycemic impact diet, Sugar Busters, The Zone diet, Dr Dean Ornish diet, and finally, Atkins come and go. Poor overweight people yo-yo from one to the next, with out actually doing much for their health.

Maybe it’s time to pay more attention to the Health At Every Size (HAES) people. We’ve mentioned this before, but it deserves repeating. HES enthusiasts – and there are many, and they’re not all obese – believe that a healthy attitude to eating will be more successful, in the long run, than life as an off/on dieter. One of them is Jonathan Robinson.

A new study has shown that a HAES program beat out a diet program with respect to sustained healthy eating improvement and weight-loss maintenance over a 2-year period – see the clinical summary.

Update on Thu, August 18, 2005 at 07:05AM by Robert Griffith

More on HAES (Health At Every Size)

A new study has reported a comparison between a six-month diet program with a behavior modification program along HAES lines.   The beneficial results after one year were about the same for both groups, but 2 years later the HAES group had maintained their improvements in blood pressure and cholesterol levels, while the diet group had relapsed.   We have summarized this study on our website, HealthandAge.com.