The Returns On Wellbeing Institute welcomes diverse views on workplace wellbeing. Jon Robison, Founding Partner at Salveo Partners, shares his views on the role of food in personal wellbeing.
Years ago, I was a provider of the Optifast Program, which then as now touts itself as “a medically supervised weight loss program that closely monitors and assesses progress towards better health and emotional well-being.”
In 1988, Oprah made the program famous when she lost 67 pounds over several months, and then celebrated on her TV show by pulling a red wagon full of 67 pounds of animal fat to symbolically celebrate her victory.
But while this episode (and the Optifast program) quickly appealed to those looking for fast weight loss, the fact is Oprah quickly regained all 67 pounds and more when she returned to normal eating.
As a trained nutritionist, I then believed that crash diets and losing weight was synonymous with good health. But like Oprah, I saw clients succeed at losing weight by drastically cutting calories, only to gain it back. And once people regained that weight, most were shamed and humiliated.
The Truth About Weight Loss & Health
In the 1990s, I started searching for alternatives to radical weight loss programs. I collaborated with the Association for the Health Enrichment of Large People (AHELP), the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH), and later with the Health At Every Size movement.
What I found were new ways of thinking about food, dieting and health, leading away from regimented, unnatural programs that focused on weight loss and dieting, and moving toward more intuitive approaches that focused on trusting our own bodies.
This departure set my career course to where it is today: changing how individuals, companies, and wellness professionals approach food and its relationship to overall personal health and wellbeing.
Today, I reject weight loss programs because they don’t work and can lead to even worse health outcomes.
First, research shows that roughly 80% of people who lose significant weight by dieting will regain the majority of it back within 2 years. The yo-yo effect of losing and regaining weight wrecks the human metabolic system. And second, when people lose and regain weight, they feel like, and often are held out to be, publicly humiliated failures.
The pursuit of long-term intentional weight loss fails most of the time. It also creates health problems including weight stigma, weight cycling, and eating disorders. The negative impact on such people’s physical and mental wellbeing cannot be overstated.
Society is hard on heavy people. In addition to fat-shaming (which is widespread), many workplaces take an equally harsh attitude toward weight, effectively punishing “overweight” employees with financial penalties (often disguised as unrealized “incentives”), and higher insurance premiums.
Food and Human Health
I am a contrarian. Unlike many public experts, I do not believe food and weight are the most important factors in determining good physical health.
Individual behaviors including nutrition, exercise, smoking, stress management, and sleep account for only 25 to 30 percent of our health outcomes, with genetics playing a part that we can’t control.
But the overwhelming areas that determine our overall health are social determinants of health, the economic and social conditions that influence the health of people and communities. These, and genetics account for the remaining 70-75% of our health outcomes (see chart below)
The CDC asserts that social determinants of health (which are influenced by individual socio-economic conditions including personal income levels, social capital, and access to resources), are factors that play an outsized role in determining human health, including:
- healthcare access and quality
- education access and quality
- social and community contexts
- economic stability
- neighborhood environments
- housing and built environments
This is borne out by growing evidence that shows the zip codes where people live more accurately predict their life expectancy than their personal health behaviors, which includes their eating habits.
Intuitive Eating: An Alternative to Weight Loss Programs
Many employers believe they can make employees healthier, which will make them better workers and lower their healthcare costs. Employers accordingly spend billions on wellness programs with “weight loss” as the top objective.
This is a mistake. There’s little evidence that these programs work for changing behavior, achieving better health or losing weight because they mistakenly assume that employers can force people (and their metabolic systems) to behave in certain ways.
In fact, I don’t believe companies should dictate what people eat. I oppose incentives or coercive measures to get people to eat this or that. And while I believe food plays a role in overall health, disproportionately focusing on weight loss and diets has failed. And it’s done great harm.
The right approach is encouraging people to eat intuitively, not via outside rules and regulations. When people follow their own natural impulses, they are more likely to eat healthier foods in healthier quantities, and are more likely to achieve better overall health, whether they lose weight or not.
Intuitive eating is a “weight-neutral” approach that encourages listening and responding to our bodily hunger and satiation signals to guide how and what we eat and meet the own unique bodily needs.
It’s difficult to move to an intuitive eating style. But it can be learned, and it works. Evidence shows that intuitive eating leads to better health. Dr. Michelle May, and my own company Salveo Partners, teach people how to avoid diets and eat intuitively for better health.
So if employers should stop trying to get employees to lose weight, what should they do?
First, employers should stop trying to intervene in many areas and leave medical aspects to doctors and qualified professionals. And they should avoid invasive programs meant to curb genetically-based chronic conditions.
For example, employers should stop using diabetes as an excuse for weight loss programs. Diet programs can’t affect Type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease, or Type 2 diabetes, which you can’t give to yourself because it’s largely genetic and is not caused by eating too much sugar.
Employers should instead offer programs that teach people to eat intuitively, which makes people more likely to avoid weight cycling, become better attuned to their bodies and minds, and actually eat a better variety of foods and become healthier and happier.
Intuitive eating programs are becoming more common. By following this approach, employers can offer a wide range of choices at the workplace. Don’t try to bar people from having birthday parties with cupcakes. Treat them like adults and let them make their own intuitive eating decisions.
What’s the end result? A healthier, less obsessed, less anxious workplace. People who eat intuitively have been shown to improve their metabolic parameters, which leads to better physical and mental/emotional health.
Jon Robison is the co-author of three books, including The Spirit and Science of Holistic Health, How to Build a Thriving Culture at Work and most recently, Rehumanizing the Workplace. He has a master’s degree in human nutrition and in exercise physiology, and a PhD in health education and human performance from Michigan State University, where he taught for 25 years in the Nutrition and Physiology Departments. Visit www.salveopartners.com
The statements and opinions expressed in this blog are those of Mr. Robison and do not necessarily reflect the views, policies, or positions of the Returns On Wellbeing Institute or any other organization or individual. Publication of this blog does not imply an endorsement of the statements or opinions herein.