Why Dieting Is Bad for Your Breasts

Gaining and losing the same ten pounds has a hidden effect on your breasts that may take years to show, says Nicole Blades.

Your breasts are pretty low-maintenance, and you can keep them healthy and sexy just by leaving them alone. Still, there's one move that will mess them up: repeat dieting, which causes your boobs to sag prematurely. Here, how and why plus the right way to keep your set gorgeous and firm.

How Sag Strikes

Some sag is inevitable. Gravity, breast growth spurts in your teens and early 20s, pregnancy, and breast-feeding all cause your boobs to change shape. Any change in the shape of your breasts stretches your skin's collagen and elastin, two components that make skin firm. This leaves your twins less perky over time, says Jill Weinstein, a dermatologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Illinois.

But you'll stretch out the collagen and elastin even more by constantly dieting. Read more

Can Dieting Be Hazardous to Your Health?

We know that maintaining a healthy weight is good for us, but drastic calorie restriction to attain that weight can create a host of serious problems, according to a new study.

Going on a diet could increase your risk of developing potentially deadly conditions such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer, a study has revealed.

It found that those who controlled their calorie intake produced higher levels of the harmful stress hormone cortisol.

And it claimed that exposure to the hormone actually made some dieters put on weight, which could explain why so many Britons fail to shed fat despite slashing their food intake. Read more

How to Avoid Packing on Holiday Pounds

Men's Health magazine's Matt Bean tells how to enjoy holiday eating while avoiding packing on the pounds.

It's easy to gain weight during the holidays, at all those parties and big dinners.

But, says Men's Health magazine Senior Editor Matt Bean, you can enjoy yourself without expanding your waistline by eating right. You just have to know what to eat, and what not to.

Men's Health is out with a book called "Eat This, Not That," a guide to the good and bad foods in your life, geared toward helping you make smart food choices all year. And Bean says the holiday season is a case in point. Read more

Dieting: We've Lost Our Way

The cult of thinness and fear of its apparent opposite, obesity, has gone too far, says Susie Orbach in an extract from her new book Bodies.

The West has grown terrified of obesity. To read the figures put out by the International Obesity Task Force, one might believe we were in the midst of an obesity epidemic that will swamp our health service and ruin the lives of the next generation.

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Playing about with appetite, or eating only on weekends, or just one meal a day, or some such scheme, can indeed lead to thinness, but because it cannot be sustained, it can equally well lead to fatness. Emotional and biological rebellions against a life of food restriction, deprivation and compulsive exercising can produce either anorectic-style responses or what appears to be its opposite - out-of-control eating. Read more