Weighty concerns

Dec. 31, 2009 (The Boston Globe delivered by Newstex) --

Do champagne calories count the same as brownie calories? Are weight-loss plateaus real, and if so, why do they strike very nice dieters? Does yo-yo dieting truly wreck your metabolism, or is that a cruel myth?

So many pounds to lose, so few answers. With New Year's Day mere hours away and the nation's annual diet resolution poised to kick in, I called nutrition experts, and, pretending that I was posing others' questions, put my queries to them.

First the bad news. Actually, it's all bad news. Let's just get started.

Not only do champagne calories do as much damage as the ones derived from ice cream, but from a weight-loss perspective they may be even worse. That's the word from Susan B. Roberts, a professor of nutrition and a professor of psychiatry at the USDA Nutrition Center at Tufts University, and coauthor of ``The Instinct Diet'' (which will be called ``The `I' Diet'' when it comes out in paperback).

``It's what psychiatrists call the disinhibiting effect,'' she said. ``You have a few glasses and you think, what the heck.''

Things don't improve even once the devil-may-care attitude wears off. The more rich and yummy food you eat one day, the more you want to eat the next day. This syndrome even has its own name: the second-meal effect.

While the reasons for this horror are not known, she said, actual metabolic effects are suspected rather than psychological ones, with studies showing that tasty meals are digested faster than plain ones.

Roberts was making me nervous. The deck seemed stacked against dieters more than I'd thought. Perhaps exercise is the answer. But before joining a gym, I wanted some hard stats. Can you work off what you eat?

``Theoretically you can exercise away the calories,'' said Kelly D. Brownell, cofounder and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, ``but if you have a typical fast food meal, you'd have to run about half a marathon to burn off those calories.''

I did the time math, and let's just say it's a bad buy.

You know what's also a bum deal? The dreaded weight-loss plateau. What's up with those? There are two explanations, Roberts said. ``One is that the calories are sliding up. The person is hungry and eating more than they realize. Things add up. They're putting a little more milk in their coffee, eating a chicken nugget left over from the kids' dinner.'' (What? Who knew that ``clean-up'' calories count?)

Sometimes the plateau isn't the dieter's fault but the diet's. ``There are a lot of diets that pretend to be good diets,'' Roberts said. ``But many women won't lose weight on the 1,400 or 1,600 calories a day the diet calls for. But for the first week they think they're losing weight because the diets are low in sodium and they're losing all this water. Once the water loss stops, the weight loss stops.''

If there's one thing worse than a plateau, of course, it's gaining weight (and then losing and gaining and losing and gaining). As dieters/fashionistas know, yo-yo weight loss wreaks havoc on the wardrobe. If you shop solely when you're in a thin phase, you've got nothing to wear when you're heavy, and the pain of weight gain is doubled.

But yo-yo dieting may be bad for more than your style. A persistent rumor in dieting circles holds that rollercoaster dieting may actually change your metabolism. Under this theory, the body learns to protect its energy stores and use less energy when calories are restricted, making it harder to lose weight.

With New Year's Eve looming, perhaps the most pertinent question regards nighttime eating. Is it really worse than daytime eating? Experts used to think there was nothing to this theory, Brownell said, but the current best guess is that food eaten later is indeed metabolized less effectively.

I pressed him for a cut-off time. ``Is it 6 p.m.?'' I asked, panicky. ``5 p.m.? Do I need to start going to the early bird special?'' Brownell insisted he didn't know the number. It's probably for the best, anyway. The calories consumed as Americans crammed food into their mouths ahead of the deadline would probably outweigh any good that came from not eating at night.

Meanwhile, with the nation readying itself to try and lose weight - or at least to talk about trying to lose weight - the answer to the most important question of all remains a mystery: If you lose weight when you're stressed or miserable, and gain it when you're happy, meaning you're thin when you're sad and plump when you're cheerful, when are you better off? When you're joyful? Or when you're cheerless?

Newstex ID: BGL-1035-40872259