Dieting — The Vicious Circle

So what are the consequences of all this failed dieting? How do dieters respond to diet-breaking?

Dieting becomes a vicious circle, a merry-go-round which is difficult to get off. And each time around the effects are more powerful, more destructive and the weight loss less.

Effects of long-term dieting

If dieters are not really losing weight, what are they actually doing? It seems that all dieters have one thing in common: they are thinking about dieting. They are thinking about eating less and thinking about losing weight, but not necessarily achieving either of these aims. Sometimes dieters lose weight and sometimes they don't, but they are constantly trying to. Dieters share a common state of mind.

In the short term, dieting can provide a structure, a means of encouragement and support and a way to change your life. In the long term, failed dieting results in depression, a preoccupation with weight and food and episodes of overeating.

A recently documented effect of dieting is a process called weight cycling. This applies to those women who sometimes manage to lose weight but find that they put it back on again.

Have you ever dieted, lost weight and put back on more weight?

Have you ever dieted, lost weight, put it back on and next time around found it more difficult to lose?

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are involved in a weight cycling project to test the effects of 'yo-yo' dieting. Because so many dieters have reported that losing weight becomes progressively more difficult after putting weight back on, they first studied this effect in rats.

Researchers overfed a group of twenty-one rats to make them put on weight. They then changed their diet to make them lose this weight. They repeated this several times so that the rats went through a series of weight loss and weight regain. The first time around the rats took twenty-one days of dieting to reach their normal weight and forty-five days to regain the lost weight. The second time around the rats took forty-six days to lose the same amount of weight, eating the same amount of food, and only

fourteen days to regain the weight. Prolonged dieting meant that weight became easier to regain and more difficult to lose.

A similar study was carried out at Harvard Medical School and it was found that the pattern was similar for dieting women. It seems that repeated weight loss causes the body to use up stored fat more efficiently, and to live off less food. Repeated dieting and weight regain put the body into 'starvation mode', the metabolic rate decreases, and even when the weight has been regained the body still expects further deprivation.

Further research suggests that 'yo-yo dieting' has even more disturbing consequences. Yo-yo dieters seem to lose their pounds as muscle and regain them as fat. Thus prolonged attempts at dieting increase the body's overall fat content. A study of 1170 men in Pennsylvania found that over a period of twenty-five years those who showed the greatest weight fluctuations had the highest risk of heart disease.

In the short term dieting may make you feel good. In the long term it can result in far more problems than it solves. If you don't lose any weight you will feel a failure, dieting will become a habit and a way of life, and you will experience all the psychological changes which seem to accompany attempts at losing weight. If you do manage to lose weight, unless you can keep it off for ever, further weight loss will be more difficult and the physical and psychological problems greater than the simple problem of seeing yourself as fatter than you would like to be.

Dieting causes overeating. Overeating causes weight gain. Weight gain causes dieting. In fact, dieting no longer seems to refer to eating less. What most people are doing when they 'diet' is a combination of eating less and eating more. They swing from times of restricting food to times of compensating for this restriction. Dieting means attempting to eat less, but not necessarily doing so. What all dieters have in common is a state of mind. They are thinking about eating less — that is all. Very few dieters actually manage to do this; most of them simply think about it. And this is why the dieting industry is so powerful. Dieters never finish dieting. Dieters never get to the stage when they can finish with the dieting industry. Because dieting means further dieting and therefore further use of the ever growing industry which supports it.

What is life like without dieting?

Imagine not dieting. Picture how you would look and feel. Do you look fat and ugly, and feel unhappy?

Giving up dieting is like giving up an addiction; it is difficult to visualise life without it. Suggesting that people should stop dieting often causes quite strong reactions. In the course of my work I have had numerous people criticise my belief that dieting is self-destructive. I thought I would include several of these comments and illustrate how many of these criticisms are based on the myths surrounding dieting and are not founded in fact.

'It is all right for you to say don't diet, but I would feel happier if I were thinner.' This woman associates dieting with getting thinner, and being thinner with being happier. Firstly, dieting does not make most people thinner most of the time and, secondly, being thinner does not make most people happier.

'You are all right, you're not fat, but I need to keep on dieting.' Firstly, this women assumes that only fat people diet. Women of all shapes and sizes diet, up to 90 per cent of women see themselves as being larger than they want to be; dieting is motivated by perceived size not actual size. Secondly, she believes that if she continues to diet she will lose weight. Dieting involves thinking about losing weight but not necessarily achieving it. It is only necessary to realise how few dieters are successful to understand that dieting is not about weight loss.

'If I didn't diet I'd be enormous.' This women assumes that dieting is preventing a massive weight gain. Some people do manage to limit their food intake continuously and for extended periods of time so that they can keep their weight below their natural set points. If such people returned to eating the volume of food they ate before they started to diet, they probably would gain weight owing to a lowered metabolic rate. However, most dieters are not eating less overall, but fluctuate between episodes of undereating and episodes of overeating. What they are doing is thinking about eating less. In which case, if they stopped dieting they would not gain weight, but would stop being preoccupied with food and feeling miserable.

Giving up dieting is a positive step. Dieting does not make you thinner, happier, in control or successful, so why do it?

What are the benefits of not dieting?

Acceptance

Stopping dieting means you can accept yourself for who you are now, instead of looking to the future for a better person to emerge. It means you can be proud of yourself, and no longer make endless comparisons with better, thinner and more beautiful role models. As Anne Dickson says in her book The Mirror Within, that comparison is:

such an automatic process that we sometimes forget to ask ourselves too big/flat/short, for whom? Having learned the need for attractive parts, we compare these fragments to external media models, usually without any specific person in mind, and we rate ourselves in fragments and against some internal ideal.

Stop dieting and you can stop making these critical comparisons. The present you becomes important and the discrepancy between that and the future ideal can be forgotten.

Freedom

Stopping dieting means freedom from thinking about, dreaming about and denying food. It means you can go out for dinner when you want and join in wholeheartedly at social occasions. Stopping dieting means eating what the rest of the family eats and no longer cooking two separate meals. It means freedom to fill your time with other things. Time need no longer be taken up with planning diets and reading diet books but can be spent doing all the other things there are to do.

Confidence

Stopping dieting means that you will no longer be faced with disappointment, feelings of failure and depression. You will no longer need to set yourself unattainable goals resulting in guilt and feelings of weakness. Your confidence and self-esteem will grow as you no longer constantly undermine yourself with self-criticism.

Eating behaviour

Your eating behaviour will change. Dieting causes changes in all the factors which contribute to eating. Attempting to eat less creates:

• depression which results in eating to feel better; preoccupation with food resulting in thinking about food and so eating more;
• preoccupation with weight causing eating to compensate for no weight loss;
• feeling out of control and therefore undereating followed by overeating;
• deprivation and increase in the urge to eat;
• certain foods becoming treats, becoming more desirable and so being eaten more.

Dieting aims to result in eating less, but paradoxically can cause overeating. Giving up dieting takes away this problem. Initially you may eat as a response to the new-found non-dieting freedom but gradually food will no longer play a central role in your life. Stop dieting and you will think about food less. You will eat when you are hungry, not when your craving for food becomes too strong to ignore. You will no longer wish for platefuls of cakes and high calorie foods because knowing that you can eat them whenever you want stops them from being so attractive. Cream-cakes every day may seem wonderful on a diet but as a reality will become boring. Stop dieting and eating will become less important to you.

Stop dieting and you can get on with life and appreciate all the other things that there are on offer.