Sandra Aamodt > Quotes

“The intense focus on weight loss suggests that obesity must be uniquely deadly, but that’s far from true. Low fitness, smoking, high blood pressure,41 low income,42 and loneliness43 are all better predictors of early death than obesity, when considered individually.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“A person who was stranded on a desert island would live a lot longer on hot dogs than on spinach.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“The diet industry has adopted a strategy of taking credit for weight loss and then blaming the predictable regain on individual lack of willpower when it actually results from the brain’s energy-balance system working correctly to reverse weight loss.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Such widespread misery would be a concern all by itself, of course, but this type of blame is especially poignant because body dissatisfaction is a strong predictor of weight gain across the lifespan.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Anyone who believes that an obese person could become thin simply by following the lifestyle of a thin person is ignoring the power of the energy-balance system or “weight thermostat” centered in the hypothalamus.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Successful long-term losers are hard to find, but people who repeatedly gain and lose weight are abundant.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Shaming people to encourage them to lose weight is counterproductive. Few people are motivated to take good care of anything that they hate, and that includes their bodies.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Later research has shown that you can improve your children’s language skills by responding rapidly to their vocalizations, mimicking the turn-taking of conversation even before your baby is capable of forming words. Responding with a comment or a touch to your baby’s best attempts to communicate seems to encourage continued efforts to improve these skills. So talk to your baby and put up a good show of understanding what she’s saying. It’s fun for both of you, and it will help her language skills to develop more quickly.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Welcome to Your Child's Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College

“Medical professionals have strong weight-related prejudices, with 69 percent of people in the overweight or obese categories reporting discrimination from doctors.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“acupuncture definitely has some effect on the brain. Functional imaging of brain activity shows that acupuncture has specific”
― Sandra Aamodt, Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How To Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Behavior

“In long-term studies, higher starting weights predict a reduced likelihood of exercising later, while starting exercise habits have no effect on later weights.21 Children who are teased about their weight also have negative attitudes about sports, are less active, and”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“When research shows that a particular diet “works,” we need to check how long the study lasted to know whether the loss is likely to be temporary. Most diet studies last only six months, and few of them follow participants for longer than a year, due to limited funding and perhaps anxiety about documenting the long-term failure rates.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Like the tobacco industry, the food industry has a problem. So does the diet industry. Both of them would rather have their customers believe that we’re the ones with the problem—we’re too weak willed to control our appetites and refuse to take responsibility for our weight. So far, the companies have done a good job at selling that message. It’s a clever way to distract us from their problem, which is that they need to persuade individuals to buy their products, but they can’t afford to admit where the profits lie in the industry. How many people would sign up for a diet program or buy a weight-loss book if they knew that the business model depends on repeat customers who come back after they’ve regained the weight they lost the previous time? Who would feel good about buying their family a nice snack of Hyperprocessed Heart-Attack Crisps if the package were labeled accurately? Yet diet plans don’t make money by making people permanently thin, and food companies don’t make money by selling crunchy fresh apples. Both”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Because low-calorie dieting leads to the production of stress hormones, being on a diet can directly impair the willpower that is needed to succeed in resisting temptation”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Existing studies overestimate long-term weight-loss success.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Considerable evidence shows that dieting—willfully eating less to lose weight—rarely works in the long run, while its unintended side effects do a lot of harm.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Deliberate attempts to become thinner strongly predict weight gain over the long term, even when researchers take initial weight, diet, and exercise habits into account.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Take a moment to think about that. Doctors routinely recommend a treatment for obesity (dieting) that is likely to result in their patients’ gaining more weight. After one of my talks, a doctor told me that it felt unethical not to recommend dieting to her obese patients, but when I asked her about the ethics of prescribing a treatment with such a high failure rate, she fell silent.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“women who are sixty-four pounds above average weight are paid 9 percent less than women in the normal range, equivalent to three years of work experience. Wage discrimination against the obese occurs across a variety of countries, ethnic groups, and professions. In laboratory studies, candidates with identical qualifications are less likely to be hired or promoted and are offered lower salaries if they are described as obese.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“But most “calories in/calories out” arguments about weight loss ignore vast individual differences in how bodies handle energy”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“After one of my talks, a doctor told me that it felt unethical not to recommend dieting to her obese patients, but when I asked her about the ethics of prescribing a treatment with such a high failure rate, she fell silent.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“there is some amount of weight loss that would improve health, there is no known diet that can achieve it for most people—not even a diet with intensive long-term support in a highly motivated population.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“In our environment—which provides intense motivation for overeating while the culture insists that everyone should remain extremely thin—many people have developed a difficult relationship with food.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Taken together, this research indicates that stress contributes directly to many of the health problems that are often attributed to obesity, including diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and heart disease.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“If dieting has failed you, that’s not because you’re a failure but because your brain is working correctly.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“chronic stress can greatly impair learning ability.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys But Never Forget How To Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Behavior

“Public health efforts that increased physical activity and decreased social isolation would save vastly more lives than battling the brain’s weight-regulation system.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“The biased beliefs among medical professionals in many countries—that obese patients are uncooperative, hostile, and dishonest—lead doctors to prescribe weight loss for conditions that have no relationship to body fat. As a consequence, obese people are reluctant to go to the doctor.13 When they do, they get lower-quality care, receiving fewer preventative screenings and less treatment overall. Because early diagnosis and prompt treatment influence health, receiving poor medical care may be part of the reason that obese people are more likely to get sick than their lower-weight peers.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“Children as young as three repeat popular stereotypes suggesting that the obese are lazy, stupid, unsuccessful, and lacking in self-control.”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss

“In the 2010 guidelines, the recommendations to eat more “fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fat-free and low-fat dairy products, and seafood” are straightforward. In contrast, the recommendations of what to eat less often are written in the language of nutritionists, which most people don’t speak, telling us to cut back on “saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, added sugars, and refined grains.” Why not phrase it as “red meat, processed foods, sweetened drinks, and white flour”? The food lobby understands that clear advice is more likely to be acted upon, so they push for recommendations in technical language. The”
― Sandra Aamodt, Why Diets Make Us Fat: The Unintended Consequences of Our Obsession With Weight Loss