节食并不足以让你健康,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.
近来，我写了改变生活方式和吃地中海饮食会降低人们患心脏病、中风和糖尿病的风险--即使你的体重没有减轻。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.
令我震惊的是，在减肥和降低身体质量指数的所有鼓励中，体重控制已成为我们健康目标的要旨。这样做的同时，我们却忽视了更加重要的东西：你的生活方式--吃什么、是否运动、是否抽烟、饮酒量是多少。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：如果你做对了所有事情，那你的体重就不那么重要了。好像一直以来，我们关注的点都错了。我并不是说，胖子不能从减肥中获益，但我们不能忽视其它重要的因素--因为只是减肥并不意味着更健康。
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.
即使在最为严谨的研究中，也很难得知健康的结果究竟是由于体重减轻还是生活方式变化所引起的。所以我们关注于体重减轻，因为体重更容易测量。此外，从长远角度看来，保持体重减轻才是关键。一旦体重反弹，身体实际上会对抗体重减轻。这就意味着调整生活方式有着更重要的意义。
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!
值得记住的是：体重只是健康的一小部分。我们知道，不是所有的体重都是一样的：腰上的肉多是件坏事，但大腿和臀部肉多却没那么要紧。而且还存在比肥胖更严重的风险因素：抽烟！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.
体重太重可能会使人们患心脏病的风险增加20%，但吸烟却增加100%。你可以减掉几十公斤的体重，但如果你继续抽烟，那你心脏病发作的风险就会很大。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减轻体重的情况下得到显著提高。心脏健康、肺健康、血糖控制都可以通过身体活动得到提高，即使在体重不变的情况下。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.
别忘了，大多数的瘦身方案都始于美国，而美国的媒体可十分重视消瘦体型。这反而会导致对身型和轮廓的焦虑。
