Yo-Yo Dieting: Like a Drug (Really)

Posted on Nov 11th 2009 2:00PM by Kristen Seymour

Photo: javiercit0, Flickr

Have you ever gone on a diet and felt like you were going through withdrawal from lack of chocolate and sweets? A new study by Boston University has found that you're not too far off base, reports ScienceNOW.

In fact, there are a few parallels between yo-yo dieters and drug addicts, says co-author of the study and Boston University neuroscientist Pietro Cottone. It's not just the good feeling you get when you eat, say, chocolate cake, that makes you go back for more. The study found that dieters also seek out those foods to avoid the negative feelings they experience when they don't have those foods, similar to an addict trying to avoid withdrawal, he explains.

Researchers in the study gave rats cycles of normal and then chocolate-flavored rat chow, and saw some surprising results. Rats in the control group (all regular food) ate about the same amount every day, while rats who occasionally got chocolate food began to eat far more when they got the chocolate-flavored food, but less when presented with regular food. Additionally, according to ScienceNOW, the chocolate-fed rats exhibited signs of anxiety when the chocolate-flavored food was taken away. (Um, how many of us can relate to that?)

The anxiety is thought to be caused by a hormone involved in the body's stress response; this same hormone also plays a role in drug and alcohol withdrawal. To further drive the point home, researchers gave the rats a drug to block this hormone, and consequently noted that the rats ate less chocolate-flavored chow and more of their regular food.

So, okay. You now know not to tease rats with chocolate-flavored food. But there's a major lesson for the bipedal among us, too. Markus Heilig, a psychiatrist well-versed in CRF's role in alcohol addiction at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, Maryland, tells Science NOW that the study shows "the vicious circle" of yo-yo dieting.

Basically, the study indicates that, regardless of your willpower, intermittent dieting might actually affect the biology of your brain, making you crave junk food more and more every time you try to diet.

Hungry for more? We've the scoop on the ups and downs of yo-yo dieting.

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Tags: addiction, chocolate, comfort food, dieting, drug addict, DrugAddict, emotional eating, EmotionalEating, food addict, FoodAddict, weight loss, WeightLoss, yo-yo dieting, Yo-yoDieting

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

sharon 11-11-2009 @ 2:49PM

chocolate has always been my dieting pitfall! I found a chocolate meal replacement shake that tastes like a chocolate milk shake and totally keeps the cravings away - a must have! Dr. Klauer's Everyday Nutrition shakes

tarosaij 11-11-2009 @ 3:02PM

ok...so....what do we do about it? Is there something that can be done to avoid the anxiety and cravings associated with avoiding junk food?

u262f 11-11-2009 @ 4:35PM

LOL! Are you a human or a mouse? ;)

Since we're humans, we have intelligence. We can think. We can tell time and delay gratification. We can buy and stock our own food instead of being limited to what the lab gives us. We can reprogram ourselves, our tastes, our habits. I'm sure the solution varies from person to person, though, so you'll probably have to figure out what works with your body.

For example, I weaned myself off of soda and juices to water gradually. Going from soda to juice was easy for me: Odwalla was very tasty. Then, I started watering down my Odwalla. At first, I started with a 50/50 mix, but then I found that I needed less and less juice for the drink to still taste good. Eventually, it just wasn't worth the effort or expense to add that little bit of juice to my water. (I'm lazy, and I've been very effective in using my laziness to help me lose weight and become healthier.)

I also started thinking about the taste of my food instead of scarfing things down in front of the TV or while working. I avoid eating at times when I'm not able to enjoy the taste of my food. Once I started thinking about how my food actually tastes, I realized that junk food is actually inferior. For example, I can get cheap potato chips, but they just don't have the depth of flavor of Kettle Bakes. However, the Kettle Bakes I like are expensive and hard to find. I promise to buy myself Kettle Bakes once in a while, and that prevents me from craving the cheaper potato chips. I earn my own money, and I deserve better than those cheap chips.

Once I discovered taste, I started cooking my own food (which led me to eat a lot of raw vegetables because I'm too lazy to cook them), and I realized that all restaurants overcook foods drastically, which renders everything tasteless, and then they inundate everything in greasy, salty, and/or sugary sauces to make up for it. It started programming into me the idea that the taste of salt, sugar, and grease were the taste of the inferior. In particular, the tastes of table salt and refined sugar are very simplistic and don' t have depth or complexity. I replaced salt with herbs and spices, and I replaced sugar with fruits.

Once I've upgraded my normal food, my tastes got very picky, and junk food (chips, cakes, cookies, fast food) started tasting very boring. If I'm eating junk food, it means that I've failed to plan ahead so badly that I don't have something tastier with me (like unsalted nuts or a piece of fruit). Basically, I created many layers of counter-anxieties that overrode my addiction to junk food. I'm very cheap and lazy, but I've developed expensive tastes, which turned out to be great combination of vices for losing weight improving health.

Aggie 11-11-2009 @ 3:40PM

Dieting always causes weight gain. I have told skinny friends who want to gain weight that the best way to do so is to embark on a course of restrictive eating, also known as dieting.

If I had my early years to do over again, I would never have tried to lose weight by dieting. Instead, I would have concentrated on trying to be and stay active. My body is now quite efficient at holding onto its fat stores and resisting activity.

u262f 11-11-2009 @ 5:11PM

I completely agree that restrictive eating doesn't work. However, many studies are now saying that lack of physical activity isn't the problem, and it doesn't have all that much to do with weight. (However, physical activity is still very important to health. Health and weight are not the same thing, and I would bet that they're significantly less related than we're led to believe.)

I'm a fan of IMPROVED eating, and it has worked wonders for me. A lot of studies are coming out saying that calories are NOT all created equal. In retrospect, this should've always been obvious: how could people ever have thought that eating 2000 calories of refined sugar per day is going to have the same effect on a human body as 2000 calories in balanced meals?

Also, we're slowly learning that the human body is insanely complex. Breaking things down into fat vs protein vs carb was far too simplistic, and there are "good" and "bad" varieties of everything (such as omega-3 fats vs. trans fats and refined carbs vs. whole grains). Furthermore, everything needs to exist in balance in a human body. When we start distilling and extracting and packaging "super-nutrients" from foods in an attempt to pack in the nutrients, we find that ingesting so much of it causes other problems, and then we put it on the "evil" list again.

We need to keep in mind that more of a good thing isn't always better. Sure, a piece of chocolate is divine. Apparently, a few dozen pieces of chocolate makes people addicted. A few thousand pieces of chocolate will probably make even the most avid chocolate lover very sick. So, the trick might be to find that balance between "divine" and "addicted". To make things more complex, I'm sure it varies from human to human, so science probably can't figure out what this "sweet spot" (haha) is for any particular person. It's something that each individual needs to discover for themselves. Some people might be addicted with just one bite, while others may never get addicted. Furthermore, I'm sure that balance changes over the course of an individual's life, so it's something that needs to be constantly monitored and re-checked.

So, while I'm completely against restrictive diets, I strongly urge people to take a good, hard look at what they eat and to make sure that they eat enough foods with a high nutrition density. Unfortunately, the food industry and even the FDA has either been utterly clueless or outright lying to us about what "nutritious" is, so it's actually a hard thing to do, and reading labels or popping vitamins is not enough.