Overeaters Anonymous

It's not for everyone, but works for some. This comment was left at The Atkins Avenger at a post about OA:

"I have been going to OA for a number of years in Australia. I feel loved and supported in my group, but just as importantly challenged. My disease of overeating is about dishonesty - for years I thought I got fat even though I didn't eat very much. I truly believed that. It was OA that helped me to chip away at that self-deceit and see how much food I was putting in my mouth.

I hope you can find what I have found - a new way to live. I now eat three times a day, a miracle for someone who spent 35 years grazing all day. And I have found something else between those 3 meals - life.

Keep going back. It has worked for me."

Obesity and asthma and COPD

"In a cross-sectional study of normal-weight, overweight and obese adults, waist circumference was consistently negatively associated with pulmonary function across the BMI categories.

"Waist circumference is a better predictor of pulmonary dysfunction than BMI in adults," study chief Dr. Yue Chen of the University of Ottawa told Reuters Health.

Obesity is associated with a wide range of health problems including respiratory dysfunction. "Intra-abdominal pressure causing a mechanical effect on the diaphragm is likely the reason for obesity associated with pulmonary dysfunction," Dr. Chen explained."

Am J Clin Nutr 2007; 85:35-39 as reported at Medscape.com via Reuters.

Low fat--low results

And not much taste, either.

"The Women's Health Initiative (WHI), of which the Dietary Modification Trial is one component, is one of the most outstanding achievements in clinical research history. The National Institutes of Health established the WHI in 1991 to address the most common causes of death, disability, and impaired quality of life in postmenopausal women. This multimillion-dollar, 15-year project, involving 161 808 women aged 50 through 79 years, was designed to address many of the inequities in women's health research and provide practical information to women and their physicians about hormone therapy, calcium/vitamin D supplements, dietary patterns, and prevention of heart disease, cancer, and osteoporosis.

The Dietary Modification Trial component evaluated the effect of a low-fat (target 20% fat), high–fruit/vegetable and grain diet on the prevention of breast and colorectal cancer and heart disease. Between 1993 and 1998, 48 835 postmenopausal women with a mean baseline age of 62.3 years, mean body mass index of 29.1, and a dietary fat intake of at least 32% of total calories (approximately the 50th percentile for fat intake) were randomly assigned to either the self-selected dietary control group or the low-fat dietary intervention, which aimed to change dietary patterns but did not encourage weight loss or caloric reduction (even though the vast majority of participants were obese or overweight).

The trial did provide a unique opportunity to examine long-term effects of an ad libitum low-fat dietary pattern on body weight and the relationships between weight changes and specific changes in dietary components. The authors reported a 2.2-kg weight loss in the intervention group at year 1 (1.9 kg between groups) and a modest 0.4-kg difference between the groups at the 7.5-year mark (P = .01). They concluded that a low-fat eating pattern does not result in weight gain in postmenopausal women."

Editorial in JAMA 2006;295:94-95 You can register free for this site and read the articles if they are 6 mo. old.


Eat less; move more; eat all the colors. It works, but doesn't sell books.