Dump the diet: Why focusing on health and exercise is best
Tired of being overweight? Struggling to lose those last few pesky kilos? Whatever you do, do not go on a diet. Diets don’t work, particularly for women hitting middle age, says Niki Bezzant, journalist and writer on nutrition and health.
After reading the literature around them, she believes they’re too restrictive. The vast majority of people fall off the wagon and eat their way back to their pre-diet shape.
Sure, Michael Mosley’s 5:2 diet, or intermittent fasting, will likely see fast weight loss, but “you can’t stay on [these diets] for the rest of your life,” says Bezzant. “They’re too difficult. Most people can’t eat in a very restrictive way for a long, long time.”
But when they regain weight, the majority of dieters also blame themselves. “They don’t blame the diet,” she says. “And then they go on another diet.
“What a great business model the diet industry has: they fail you, but you blame yourself. It’s really such a losing game. That’s why I say don’t go on a diet.”
Her latest book, The Everything Guide: Hormones, health and happiness in menopause, midlife and beyond, focuses on reframing the discussion on ageing to be about health rather than looks, and laying the groundwork for females in their 40s, 50s and 60s to live well as they age so they can be “kick-ass” older women. Everything from food, mood, stress, sex, cosmetic enhancements, fashion, style and generally having a good time (without drinking) is covered. Her approach is calm, reasonable, sensible in the face of a level of hysteria around food, partly whipped up by social media.
A regular contributor to the Listener, Bezzant is a journalist who has carved out a niche writing on midlife women’s health. It began when she was editor of the Healthy Food Guide and expanded to writing about menopause as she hit that stage herself. “I started to wonder how come I, who has been writing about health for 20-plus years, didn’t know anything about my own hormones and my own body, what was happening to me, or anything about menopause, really.”
Her previous book, This Changes Everything: the honest guide to menopause and perimenopause, came out in 2022 and she now regularly speaks to staff in large and small organisations – quite a few of them with male-dominated workforces.
“This is fantastic because it really helps to open up the conversation around menopause and destigmatises it. It’s also often large groups of women as well – lots of companies have large bubbles of people in this age and stage.”
She sees herself as a translator of research into accessible language to help people navigate confusing messages on health. A lot of those confusing messages are about weight loss. “I’ve seen quite a few diet fads come and go and come around again,” she writes. “But I have been a bit surprised by the speed at which diet-grifters have moved into the midlife women/menopause arena, and are now pushing unproven, strict and sometimes downright silly diet plans to women when they are feeling a bit vulnerable and sometimes confused.”