Doing Everything Right and Still Not Losing Weight? Here’s Why:

Truth be told: there is no “one size fits all diet” for weight loss

Like with everything else in life, there is no ‘one size fits all’ diet (Photo: iStock)

Ever wondered why the diet your bestie swears by does not work for you? You completely overhaul your lifestyle, do everything right and still the bulge refuses to budge? So what gives?

Turns out, researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science have found the answer. It lies deep within a person’s own individual body chemistry, and the way we burn food as fuel. Meaning: you and your best friend can eat the exact same food and get totally different results.

‘One Size Fits All’ Diet Is a Total Myth

People metabolize food very differently depending on their body’s makeup - and the makeup of their gut microbes (Photo: iStock)

A new study published in this month’s edition of medical journal Cell, done by Israeli scientists on 800 people - both of ideal weight and pre-diabetic individuals, between the ages of 18 and 70 years, looked at a variety of bio-markers for a week.

Researchers carefully monitored what the volunteers ate for a week and how their blood sugar levels responded, every five minutes. They also noted the amount of exercise, sleep and other factors which influence weight loss in all the 800 people.

After analyzing nearly 47,000 diets and overall lifestyle factors, researches noticed that different people had vastly different responses, sometimes opposite responses, to the same food. Sometimes a food that would result in low blood sugar for one person, would cause high blood sugar for another.

While certain things are universally true - like sugar is toxic and trans fats are killer - other factors vary. For example, my body’s response to carbs might be different than yours and for one woman in the study who struggled with weight issues all her life, there was a startling revelation. Tomatoes, which are low-glycemic food, were causing a spike in her blood sugar levels. Bizarre, but clearly proves that umbrella recommendations for how to eat don’t do the trick.

Move Away Diet Fads, Personalised Diets Are the Future

Diets have a 98% failure rate but some strategies might really do the trick (Photo: iStock)

<b>There are profound differences in individuals. For all these years we thought that people get obese because they don’t follow a diet but, based on our study, it could be that people are in fact compliant but the dietary advice we are giving them is inappropriate. </b>

<b> Eran Segal, Lead Scientist, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel </b>

Just to be sure that the initial findings weren’t by fluke, researchers re-designed the experiment, this time by analyzing the results for two weeks. They made one tailored “good diet” and one non-personalised “bad diet”. The results echoed the initial conclusion: the good diets worked and the personalised bad diets, not so much. They concluded that the microbes important for digestion shift in a positive way, while the personalised diets themselves varied, the microbe situation improved in the same way in which individual while on the “good” diets.

The researchers will now create algorithms which determine how a person’s blood sugar responds to the food they eat. Down the line, they say, their algorithm could be used to create personalized diets for people.

Having personally tried all types of diets since I was 15, from the GM diet to the bananas and milk, the cottage cheese and the beastly tasting vegan diet, I had an epiphany of this research decades ago. I know for sure that high protein and low carbs work for the universe but not for me.

So if your weighing scales tell you that a particular diet is not showing results, it makes sense to switch to another. Not all diets are created equal and it makes total sense to play around till you find what slays the fat forever.

Related Read: Diet Secrets: You Are When You Eat