Life After Diets

The Addition Diet

Why adding, not eliminating, food is key to a healthy diet

Christina Passarella
4 min readFeb 20, 2020

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45 Million.

That’s the number of people in the United States who go on a diet each year.

$33 Billion.

That’s the amount of money Americans spend each year on weight loss products and services.

70%.

That’s the proportion of adults in the United States that are overweight or obese by current medical standards.

1 in 6.

That’s the number of Americans who have ever been overweight or obese, lost weight and maintained their weight loss.

How can so many people spend so much time and money on this single goal with so little to show for it?

Most of the 45 million Americans who go on a diet this year will fail and try another diet, and then another. They will spend their hard-earned money and limited time and resources on one lifestyle change after another and will have very little to show for it. In fact, they may be worse off in the long term. Studies have shown that weight cycling, more commonly referred to as yo-yo dieting, is responsible for much of the association we see between obesity and heart disease and other chronic illnesses.

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Christina Passarella

Follow along on my quest to make diet culture another millennial casualty. Find me on Insta @life_after_diets