Ep.26 Teenage Dieting Myths and Healthy Alternatives
Oct 18, 2023
Dr Jenny Gourgari
What if the very diets teenagers follow to lose weight are the culprits behind weight gain and unhealthy eating habits? We're shaking things up with an in-depth exploration of a groundbreaking study that turns conventional dieting wisdom on its head.
But it's not just about exposing the dark side of teenage dieting. So forget the dieting myths you've heard - we're starting a new conversation about achieving a healthier lifestyle.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
What if the very diets teenagers follow to lose weight are the culprits behind weight gain and unhealthy eating habits? We're shaking things up with an in-depth exploration of a groundbreaking study that turns conventional dieting wisdom on its head.
But it's not just about exposing the dark side of teenage dieting. So forget the dieting myths you've heard - we're starting a new conversation about achieving a healthier lifestyle.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
Hello, welcome to another episode of the Lifestyle and Weightless 14's podcast. This is Dr Jenny Corgaria and today's topic. I'm going to talking about dieting in teenagers. You may have heard already that dieting is not a very effective way to get you into a healthy weight, both for adults, but I'm mainly interested in teenagers, and what we have seen in different studies is that, even though diets may be effective on the short term, that means that if you do a diet for a month, that may be effective and you may lose weight, it's not sustainable over time and it may actually get you to have the opposite results if you follow a very particularly, very strict diet. So this was a very, very interesting study. It was published in 2003 in the Journal of Pediatrics and what the researchers did is they got teenagers and they follow them over two to three years and they ask them whether they diet or not and how frequently do they use dieting as a method to control their weight, and they also collected data on their exercise and what they eat and whether they also have other unhealthy behaviors. And then they follow their weight and their height and calculated the body mass index to see what happened in different groups according to their diet behaviors. So they initially started asking those questions in a group of teenagers in 1996 and then some of them they followed for one or two or three years. This was a study done between 1996 and 1999. So a total of 16,882 teenagers participated in the study. This is a huge sample of teenagers, which makes this a great study because, as I have mentioned before, the higher the people you have in a study, the more likely it is that the results you're getting are going to be closer to the truth.
Speaker 1:
So when they got these teenagers they were. They asked them questions like, for example, during the past year, how often did you get? Did you diet to lose weight? How often did you diet to keep you from gaining weight and how frequently have you died in the last year? Never less than a month, one to three times a month, once a week, two to six times a per week or every day. So the kids that were following a diet maybe one or three times a month or once a week. They were put together in a group that was named as infrequent dieters, the kids that reported dieting two to six times per week or almost every day. Those were the kids that were labeled as frequent dieters. And then there were the group of teenagers that never they had never died, they were not following a diet, so they also followed this group of kids.
Speaker 1:
So, because activity is one reason why some people may gain or lose weight, they collected data on their physical activity. So they ask them questions like how often did you play volleyball or soccer or basketball? So they kind of get a sense of how much activity they were doing and they calculated a score based on their physical activity. They also gave them food questionnaires where they asked them what they were eating and there was a questionnaire of different food items and they asked them how frequently they had this food, like maybe once a month or once per day or four times per day. So in a sense they were trying to do like a gross estimate of their dietary intake and see what they were eating and how frequently they were eating it. And they also asked them about binge intake. So if the kids had episodes at least once a month where they had days where they would eat a very, very large amount of food in a short period of time and then they would really feel out of control during that episode of overeating, then they would characterize this as a binge eating behavior, and they also collected data on the kids that had binge eating behavior. So they followed these kids at the beginning and then they followed them over time and then they look at their body mass index, which is their weight for their height, and that way they could see which kids over time did better and which kids did not do so good. If you don't know what the BMI is, I invite you to go check out episode number one, where I describe what is a BMI and how you can figure out what's a healthy BMI for your teenager, for any teenager really. So go to lifestyle14scom for what's last one. It's go back to episode one to learn more about the healthy BMI.
Speaker 1:
So what they found in this study was that 25% of the girls and 13.6% of the boys were infrequent dieters and 4.5% of the girls and 2.2% of the boys were frequent dieters. So what that tells you is that almost 30% of the girls and adolescent girls were in some form of diet, and roughly somewhat less than 20% of boys also were following some kind of diet, whether frequent or infrequent. The percentage of dieting was more in girls than in boys, but is still significant. Percent of boys reported some kind of dieting. Now, when it comes to binge eating, overall binge eating was way less common than dieting, both in boys and in girls, but it was more common in girls than it was in boys. It was less than 5%, probably closer to 2% or something like that, in in girls.
Speaker 1:
When they followed the kids over time, what they found is that the group of children that were following some kind of diet gain more weight over time than the group of the kids that did not follow any diet and, in particular, the people that were following more dieting. The frequent dieters were the people that ended up gaining more weight compared to the group that were infrequent dieters and also compared to the group that never had diet. So Approximately, the infrequent dieters also were five times more likely to get involved in binge eating behavior compared to the group that never diet. And when we look at the frequent dieters, that likelihood went up to 12 times more likely, and that is in girls and similar results in boys. The frequent dieters that were boys were seven times more likely to involved in binge eating behavior. That tells you that the percentage of kids that have this unhealthy binge eating behavior is more common among the kids that tend to diet and follow a strict diet more frequently. And finally, the frequency of dieting was very important when they analyzed the data in regards to which boys and which girls gain weight or they had a higher BMI over time. And the researchers found that the kids, that the more frequently the kids diet, the more increase the head and their weight over time, compared to the kids that did not diet and the or that they even had less frequently dieting behavior.
Speaker 1:
So the questions that come to mind with these amazing results is why does this happen? And one explanation that comes to mind, and also the authors, the researchers propose, is that when somebody dies, dies, follows a strict diet for a certain period of time. They cannot really continue to live like that for too long. So inevitably when you have a cycle of various restrictive dieting, then that is usually followed by periods of overeating or periods of binge eating, where it counteracts with everything all the effort you put in the diet so you may lose some weight with the period you are following a diet, but then you end up overeating because you are sick and tired of this restrictive type of diets and then you overeat. They also found that the girls and boys that were following the more restrictive diets, the frequent diets, they tend to eat more carbohydrates than the kids who didn't die and they think that maybe perhaps that also played a role, like the quality of the food, that when you may follow a certain diet but you eat, you choose to eat the limited amount of food that you have you tend to make not so healthy options that they are high in carbohydrates. That's potentially one possible another explanation. And finally, they found that the people that were dieting more frequently were more likely to also have episodes of binge eating, where again, they would lose control, they would eat a lot of food in those episodes of binge eating and that would also tend to lead to weight gain.
Speaker 1:
So what is the take home message from this great study? It is, first of all, dieting is very common among both girls and boys during teenage years. Second, binge eating behavior is more common in teenagers that follow a diet versus teenagers that don't follow a certain diet and, in particular, binge eating is actually worse the more intense the dieting behavior is among teenagers. Third, the more frequent the dieting, the more weight gain over time. So it doesn't work. In simple words, dieting, restrictive diet doesn't work. All it does is just following a period of restrictive and overeating, which is not healthy, and it can create all kinds of unpleasant feelings.
Speaker 1:
So my advice to you all is if you are following a restrictive diet, you don't have to do that. If your goal is to be in a healthier weight, the healthier lifestyle is the best way. It is a sustainable way that you can follow a healthy lifestyle where you slowly build healthy habits over time that you don't have to ever give up because it is a lifestyle. It is a habit. It's the way you live your life, so you learn how to live your life and that's how you get into a healthy weight. And if you want to learn more about my program, where I teach you all about how to create a healthy lifestyle and being a healthy weight, I invite you to go to lifestyle14scom. Forward slash, join and join the waiting list for the next coaching group of the lifestyle14s program. I hope this was helpful and I'll talk to you soon. Take care.