A story is doing the rounds at the moment about a Study by University of California, Davis, into the long term benefits (or rather, lack of) provided by dieting.

• CBS
• Hindustan Times

Two groups were studied, one of which was on a diet, and the other that wasn't. The first group was counting calories and reading lables, keeping food diaries and trying to moderatly limit their calory intake.

The second group :

• were explicitly instructed not to restrict their diets
• were given counselling to help them understand their body cues and how food made them feel
• attended support groups to discuss body image in society and become happier with being large
• recieved nutritional information to help them chose healthier food

There are two things that struck me about this study

1. The people in the study that were not dieting, although they didn't lose weight, did see a drop in cholesterol.
2. The people who lost weight did not lose cholesterol
3. By the end of the study the dieters had recovered all the weight they had lost, lost all the benefits of lowered blood pressure, and their level of physical activity returned to normal
   
4. The non-dieters managed to maintain higher activity levels to the end of the study

This is not the first time that studies have suggested this sort of thing, and it does add more weight (ba-dum-tsch) to the idea that dieting is not the best way to live a healthy lifestyle.

It also chimes in with something that my housemate (who is a fitness instructor) told me, that the average dieter returns to their original weight within three years of losing weight.

I think this is more evidence that the slow and steady approach, more a lifestyle change than a diet, is the way to really lose weight and be healthy.

While I would probably be regarded as being "on a diet" it is such a minor restriction that I don't really think of it in those terms.