節食並不足以讓你健康,重要的是生活方式
Recently, I wrote about how changing your lifestyle and eating a Mediterranean diet could cut your risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes - even though you didn't lose any weight.
近來，我寫了改變生活方式和吃地中海飲食會降低人們患心臟病、中風和糖尿病的風險--即使你的體重沒有減輕。It struck me that, with all the encouragement to shed the pounds and lower your BMI, weight control has become the be all and end all of our health goals. And in doing so we've ignored something much more important: your lifestyle - what you eat, how active you are, whether you smoke and how much you drink.
令我震驚的是，在減肥和降低身體質量指數的所有鼓勵中，體重控制已成爲我們健康目標的要旨。這樣做的同時，我們卻忽視了更加重要的東西：你的生活方式--吃什麼、是否運動、是否抽菸、飲酒量是多少。If you get all those things right, research says your weight hardly matters. Looks like we've been focusing on the wrong thing. I'm not saying weight loss in obese people isn't beneficial, but we mustn't lose sight of other important factors - because weight loss alone doesn't always mean better health.
研究表明：如果你做對了所有事情，那你的體重就不那麼重要了。好像一直以來，我們關注的點都錯了。我並不是說，胖子不能從減肥中獲益，但我們不能忽視其它重要的因素--因爲只是減肥並不意味着更健康。
Even in the most rigorous research, it's hard to know if the healthy outcomes are due to weight loss or lifestyle changes. So we often concentrate on weight loss because it's easy to measure. Furthermore, in the long term, it's weight-loss maintenance that's the problem. Once weight has been gained the body actually fights against weight loss. This means that adjusting lifestyle takes on even greater importance.
即使在最爲嚴謹的研究中，也很難得知健康的結果究竟是由於體重減輕還是生活方式變化所引起的。所以我們關注於體重減輕，因爲體重更容易測量。此外，從長遠角度看來，保持體重減輕纔是關鍵。一旦體重反彈，身體實際上會對抗體重減輕。這就意味着調整生活方式有着更重要的意義。
It's worth remembering that body weight is only a small part of being healthy. As we know, not all body weight is equal: round the waist it's bad, on the thighs and hips much less so. And there are risk factors much worse than being fat. Smoking!
值得記住的是：體重只是健康的一小部分。我們知道，不是所有的體重都是一樣的：腰上的肉多是件壞事，但大腿和臀部肉多卻沒那麼要緊。而且還存在比肥胖更嚴重的風險因素：抽菸！Carrying too much weight can increase your health risk by 20%, but smoking increases it by 100%. You can lose tens of kilos of weight, but if you continue smoking you've hardly touched the risk of a heart attack.
體重太重可能會使人們患心臟病的風險增加20%，但吸菸卻增加100%。你可以減掉幾十公斤的體重，但如果你繼續抽菸，那你心臟病發作的風險就會很大。In addition, many measures of health and wellbeing can be markedly improved without weight loss. Heart fitness, lung fitness, blood sugar control can all be improved with physical activity, even if your weight doesn't change.
此外，您的健康和福祉可以在不減輕體重的情況下得到顯著提高。心臟健康、肺健康、血糖控制都可以通過身體活動得到提高，即使在體重不變的情況下。And let's not forget that most weight-loss programmes started in the US where the media place value on a lean physique. This then led to anxiety about body shape and silhouette.
別忘了，大多數的瘦身方案都始於美國，而美國的媒體可十分重視消瘦體型。這反而會導致對身型和輪廓的焦慮。
