Diet programs can increase your disease risk, if you don't keep the weight off. Image: Flickr/ brymo / CC-BY-SA

It’s one of the most often-touted reasons to lose weight – it reduces your risk of disease. Diet programs claim that reduced disease risk is a big reason to spend thousands, if not millions, on weight loss. Reducing disease risk, though, depends on more than just losing weight.

Diet programs and disease risk

It’s a well-known fact that losing weight helps you be healthier. Losing weight reduces risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure and even cancer. Diet programs are often touted as a way to lose weight and reduce this risk. However, the problem is that most people who taken on diet programs end up putting the weight back on. In the Journal of Obesity, almost all people who followed a diet program lost at least some weight — and then put it back on within a few years.

The effects of yo-yo dieting

The tendency that most people have to re-gain weight after losing it on diet programs is known as yo-yo dieting. Individuals who have been on multiple diet programs tend to re-gain more weight than they initially lost, meaning that they are at a higher risk of the diseases that they were trying to prevent. In other words, diet programs could actually increase disease risk. With more than 73 percent of Americans classified as overweight or obese, that means the nation as a whole could be facing even higher risk of health problems.

Diet programs that decrease disease risk

The only weight loss diet program that has any success in keeping weight off is not a “diet program.” Instead, full-stop lifestyle changes — from diet to exercise to work environment — show the most success. Encouraging lifestyle changes takes a systematic approach, but it can be difficult, at best, to make happen. Some diet programs can actually increase disease risk by cutting out helpful nutrients or encouraging unhealthy eating — so lifestyle changes are the only healthy way to go.

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Used correctly, SparkPeople can light a fire under your weight-loss goals. Image: Flickr/Myklrovertine

SparkPeople is one of the many online communities focused on weight loss and healthy living. SparkPeople also runs SparkRecipes.com, SparkTeens.com and BabyFit.com, but does the diet advice actually work? The short answer is yes — but, like all weight loss, people who want to get the job done have to work hard.

What SparkPeople offers

Sparkpeople is half social network and half diet advice. The free, ad-supported website calculates your BMI and offers recommendations on exercise and nutrition. Nutritional planning tools and a daily log help you keep track of what you’re eating while the exercise log tracks how many calories you burn. When you make progress on your weight-loss goal, you get SparkPoints that you can redeem for various small prizes. Unlike the $18 a month for WeightWatchers or $500 for various “diet food” systems, SparkPeople encourages you to make changes with its free system first. On top of that, the SparkPeople system will only allow “healthy” goals to be set or tracked in their system.

SparkPeople community helps out

The most helpful aspect of SparkPeople is not the calorie-counting engine behind it, but the other dieters. The message boards, forums and blogs built into SparkPeople help you connect and communicate with other people trying to accomplish the same goals. This community element is incredibly important when it comes to losing and keeping weight off. Like all social networks, the SparkPeople community relies on you to get out there and be social — so people can choose not to.

Does SparkPeople actually work?

The biggest question most people have, though, is whether SparkPeople will actually help them lose weight. It is true that SparkPeople is a great tool to track the elements of weight loss. If you are expecting a Biggest Loser-style change in your appearance, though, SparkPeople probably won’t help. Healthy weight loss is all about changing habits, not following a specific “diet” that will leave you in a yo-yo dieting situation. If you aren’t a fan of the SparkPeople system, there are a few other effective online tools that do the same sort of thing. Try Calorie Count, the About.com system that is very similar to SparkPeople. If you’re not a fan of an online system, you could even just try writing down everything you eat, cutting out liquid calories or just walking an extra 30 minutes a day. You don’t have to buy into the $60 billion a year diet industry to lose weight — you just have to change small things you do every day.