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SATURDAY, July 15 (HealthDay News) -- When Julie Miller Jones talks to students about nutrition, she is amazed at how early in their lives they know the word diet. By fourth grade, most do, especially the girls, said Miller Jones, a professor of nutrition and food science at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minn.
Miller Jones and other nutrition experts wish these fourth graders -- along with all the other people they counsel -- would simply jettison the word "diet" from their vocabulary.
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"For a lot of people, the idea that a diet is something to go on and then off is wrong-headed to begin with," said Miller Jones. Instead of "diet," she suggested, substitute the word "eating plan." And determine that you will stick with it for life.
"Unless [overweight] people get their head around this idea, that this is something you do for a lifetime, not six weeks or six months, they are doomed to failure," Miller Jones said.
Even worse, constant dieting, especially with severe calorie restriction, makes it harder to lose weight the next time, Miller Jones said.
No one's disputing that excess body weight isn't a problem in the United States. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, about 64 percent of adults age 20 and older are overweight or obese, as are 15 percent of children and teens ages 6 to 19.
Even so, dieting, particularly in adolescence, can be counterproductive, experts said.
One expert, Joanne Ikeda, found that out when she surveyed adult women about their dieting habits in a study published in 2004 in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. She asked 149 obese women if they had dieted and if so, how many times and when. "We were able to use statistics and compare with women who had not gotten that large," she said.
The result: The higher a woman's body mass index, or BMI, the more likely she was to have started her first weight-loss diet before age 13, said Ikeda, the founding director of the University of California Berkeley's Center for Weight and Health.
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