Jul 25, 2011 18:41 GMT  ·  By

It’s a known fact that fad diets are neither healthy nor really successful in the long run. A new extended study shows that even their healthy counterparts are rather futile, in that those who go overweight will eventually bounce back to their heavier selves a few years down the road.

In other words, if you’re unlucky enough to pack one pound too many, you will find it very hard – if not downright impossible – to lose the weight later on, in the long run.

Even if you go on a diet and you shed the extra pounds, you will still gain it back after a while, which means the yo-yo-ing effect can never really be annulled, Female First reports, citing the findings of the study.

Conducted as part of the Medical Research Council’s National Survey of Health and Development, on 25,000 people divided in two groups (5,000 born in 1946 and 20,000 born in 1958), the study also included a thorough assessment of their lifestyle.

Members of both groups starting gaining weight in the 1980s and have been increasing in size ever since. Oppositely, only a handful who went on a diet are thin to this day, because most reverted back to their pre-diet size.

“Both groups began increasing in weight in the 1980s and since then people have been increasing in mass all through life,” Rebecca Hardy of the MRC says.

“For men it goes up steadily through life. For women it starts slowly and accelerates in the mid-thirties. Once people become overweight they continue relentlessly upwards. They hardly ever go back down,” Hardy adds.

So, to avoid the vicious circle of yo-yo dieting, we should be careful to not become overweight in the first place. That, of course, can be done by eating healthy and getting plenty of exercise, and it will spare us of the trouble of going on endless diets later on in life.

“A few lose weight but very few get back to normal. The best policy is to prevent people from becoming overweight,” Hardy also says.