The Ups and Downs of 'Yo-Yo' Dieting

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And at least some of the studies suggesting that repeatedly losing and gaining weight poses health risks fail to separate intentional weight loss from unintentional weight loss, one expert maintained.

"People who lose weight unintentionally may be losing weight due to a disease, such as cancer, or depression," explained Alison E. Field, associate professor of pediatrics in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston. "Those weight losses one would expect to look bad for your health, because they are the result, not the cause, of disease."

Field, who studies intentional weight loss, added, "In our ongoing work, weight cyclers do not appear to be more likely to die."

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The U.S. National Task Force on the Prevention and Treatment of Obesity found that, while conclusive data regarding the long-term health effects of weight cycling are lacking, the potential risks do not outweigh the potential benefits of weight loss in significantly obese patients.

Dansinger's own research on dieting suggests that overweight people should never give up trying to lose weight.

He and colleagues examined the effect of dieting advice on people's weight loss over time. The team performed a "meta-analysis" -- a study of studies -- comparing people who were counseled to change their dietary patterns, with members of a control group who received little more than general verbal or written advice on dieting.

Their study, published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that people who got dietary counseling lost an average of 6 percent of their body weight within a year, compared with the control group.

What Dansinger didn't fully appreciate at the time were the implications for weight cycling. While both groups regained virtually all of the weight they had lost after five years, the active weight-loss group, on average, did as well as, or better than, the control group.

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