In her latest book, Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss – and the Myths and Realities of Dieting, Gina Kolata seeks nothing less than to end the diet wars, marshaling scientific evidence to demolish myths on both the right (being overweight is just a failure of willpower!) and the left (the greedy food industry made us fat!).
You wouldn’t want to challenge the 59-year-old Kolata on the jogging or cycling path: This summer she’s shooting to run a 5K road race at a brisk seven-and-a-half-minutes-per-mile pace and do a 100-mile bike ride at 20 miles an hour. “I’m the exerciser!” Kolata says.
It’s worth noting that I don’t actually agree with about 50 percent of what Gina Kolata has to say about dieting and exercise, but she’s brilliant and I have always been fascinated with unconventional mavericks who challenge my believes. The following interview with Kolata was recently published in Elle.
Your book is titled Rethinking Thin, but I don’t guess you needed to do that personally. Have you always been so lean?
I’ve never really had to worry. And if I did, the book would look like special pleading. But there’s no way you can win – if you’re not fat, people will say, “What do you know?”
To me, your book reads like a double mystery. First, can any diet produce dramatic, durable weight loss? Second, why have we gotten so much fatter overall? Let’s deal with the first. You followed a group of subjects in a two-year academic study comparing the low-carb Atkins diet with a standard low-calorie diet.
It was a way of seeing what happens to real people when they try to lose weight in the best of circumstances – really motivated people given every possible encouragement.
Academic research shows that virtually everyone will gain back most or all of what they’ve lost on a diet, so you couldn’t have been terribly surprised when the high hopes of the subjects in both diet groups were dashed. But you were really rooting for them.
Because in the beginning, I really did see them lose weight. It’s amazing how diets just sort of sweep you up. I got swept up in it.
So what goes wrong? In your book, you discuss the research that suggests we all have a genetically determined set weight, really a weight range, within which our bodies naturally want to remain.
I think that deep down, people know they can’t be whatever arbitrary weight they pick. It’s just that they’re always being told, “If you really try, if you really try….”
But if I watch Oprah or Celebrity Fit Club, I can see fat ugly ducklings turn into thin swans. It’s like a religious experience.
I always say, See how they look in a year or two. Most people can’t stay below the low end of their normal range. You wake up hungry. Or you’re hungry all day. You’re obsessed with food.
Your body acts like it’s in a state of semistarvation, even though to the outside world you might not look thin at all. People always blame themselves when they regain: “Oh, it’s my fault, I let myself slide.” And I say, It wasn’t your fault.
Is that the point of your title, Rethinking Thin?
Yes. I think it’s a shame when you feel like you’re a failure because you’re not at some arbitrary weight which for you might be impossible to reach. I think, “I would really like to be three inches taller.” But it’s not so terrible to be 5’3″. We’re not always going to look like the perfect human specimen. But we can look good. To be continued…