Monday.

New diet day. I-will-do-better day. I’m starting a new program. The one that will be THE ONE this time. But… there’s a morning tea on at work, and Sally made her delicious double chocolate brownies, so… Diet starts tomorrow! Better get a second – alright, third – brownie while I’m allowed to eat them.

Tuesday.

While not traditionally the day to start a new diet, it’s really not that far off Monday, so I can still do this! The week is not lost! But… my partner already ate the whole pack of low-cal bars I bought for my afternoon snack this week. And Tom’s brought in his kid’s chocolate fundraiser – I do like those snack-size chocolates…

Wednesday.

Still feeling guilty about the brownies and chocolate, but there’s no morning tea on today – I checked the schedule – and I’ve got a homemade lunch, a new pack of diet bars for the afternoon and thankfully Tom’s sold out of his kid’s chocolates. Nothing is getting in my way! Oh, after work drinks? Tonight? The whole team is going along to welcome our new manager, you say? And it’s last minute because she’s starting earlier than we thought, right, right… Well, I guess one drink would be fine. And just a few chips. Actually, it’s getting quite late, and I’m meant to eat by 6pm on this new diet, so that all eating stops by 7pm, so I guess I can share some arancini balls. Ooo, they do wings here too!

Thursday.

Screw it. Diet starts Monday.

Sound familiar? You might not have a Sally or Tom at work, but maybe you’ve tried to start a new diet and found that things keep popping up, as if they’re trying to sabotage you. For example, the diary above shows us that if you want to shift those kilos, you will need:

      • To make sacrifices – having the brownies “while I’m allowed to eat them”
      • Willpower – “I can still do this!” – this person was still determined mid-week!
      • Specially-formulated ‘diet’ foods that don’t quite fill you up – “my partner already ate the whole pack of low-cal bars”

These kinds of mindsets originate because restricting your diet and trying to stick to an eating pattern that’s difficult is not something you inherently want to do.

And because of that you end up constantly delaying the start of your diet, or you swing between two extremes: On the diet. Off the diet. On the diet. Off the diet. And so on and so forth. And going round diet mountain is not a fun ride to be on.

You may also relate to the feeling of failure that comes when the kilos creep back on after a “successful” diet. This may be followed with an even stronger resolve to try it again – or maybe another plan – more strictly to get the results you’re after. Plus, you’ll make sure that this time your life doesn’t involve any out-of-the-ordinary eating, so you can stick to the plan and finally get to that elusive goal weight.

The thing is, there will always be something in life that doesn’t fit with your ‘diet’. A morning tea, fundraisers, work events, Christmas, Easter, birthdays, anniversaries, reunions, holidays… These things come around every year, many of them on schedule!

When we see these food occasions as insurmountable hurdles sabotaging our goal, that is what they become. The unfortunate thing is, seeing food occasions in this way doesn’t align with our personal values. These are the values that associate these moments as fun, enjoyable, delicious, and social – focussed on celebrations or time with family and friends. Instead of just enjoying them, we focus on the fact that we must restrict ourselves and use self-control. Diets have no room for enjoying food. And then when we don’t restrict ourselves (because ultimately, we don’t really want to) we feel guilt and shame. We feel frustrated and disappointed. We feel hopeless.

What if we are looking at this all wrong? What if there was another perspective?

We could buck the trend set by the 470-billion-dollar global weight loss industry1 and say no to restriction, no to conforming to an “ideal” shape, weight, or lifestyle. Instead, we could say yes to looking after ourselves. Yes, to seeing food as an inanimate object that holds no moral value. Yes, to getting the facts about our health and what we need for our own body – physically and mentally.

We can say yes to breaking free of the vicious dieting cycle we find ourselves in, through no fault of our own, and YES to shifting our focus from our weight to our health.

Hang on a second, are you saying don’t worry about your weight?

Essentially, yes. And for good reason!

The dieting cycle – the thing that has us stuck in a constant pattern of dieting/restriction, that leads to deprivation, negative emotions, eating for comfort, more negative emotions and/or thoughts about ourselves and ultimately right back to dieting again – has been described in many different ways by different health professionals (e.g., Dr Rick Kausman’s ‘vicious cycle of a dieter’, Dr Michelle May’s ‘eat-repent-repeat’ cycle). Despite the various terms used to describe this phenomenon, the one thing all versions of the dieting cycle definition have in common is this: at their core is the desire to change our body.

Usually, this means wanting to be thinner, more toned, or in some way different to how we are now.

The pursuit of weight loss can drive our thoughts in a direction that takes the focus away from our health. It saps us of the energy to make those positive, life-long changes we are hoping to achieve, while all the while beating down our self-esteem.

Furthermore, there are MANY factors that influence a person’s weight, most of which – fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your take on things – are out of our conscience control. The major factor in determining body weight and weight distribution is genetics,2,3 and as we all know, there’s not much to be done about that! For example, your genetics can influence the way your body lays down its fat cells, the internal communication pathways involved in storing and using energy and the hormones involved in metabolism.3 Sound complicated? That’s because it is!

On top of genetics, we also know that the human body is pro-survival, and so will adapt to keep itself alive. This means that when we do lose weight, which to the body can be a sign of danger, it is primed to change our metabolism and tweak its regular functioning to make sure we don’t waste away.4,5 The way I see it, it is fortunate that my body takes the reigns in figuring out where my weight should sit; weight is complicated, and if it’s my body’s job to figure it out, rather than my conscious mind’s, well, that’s one less thing for me to worry about!

But won’t losing weight make me healthier?

Not necessarily. While often conflated, weight and health are not the same thing. To understand this fully, it is useful to take a step back and look at why, as a society, this myth continues to be so prevalent.

This notion of weight directly influencing health is based on the rocky premise that our body mass index (BMI) is a good indicator of our health status. The thing is though, BMI labels are very poor indicators of disease risk. For example, a large-scale study (we’re talking more than 40,000 people) looked at factors important to long-term health, such as blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar levels, triglycerides and insulin resistance, and compared these measures to people’s BMI. They found that almost half of people in the “overweight” BMI category and around 29% of individuals in the “obese” BMI category were healthy when using the aforementioned important health indicators; and that 30% of those in the “healthy weight” BMI category were in fact unhealthy based on these factors.6

So why are we seeing studies that show losing weight leads to better health outcomes?

Well, it’s likely that a couple of things are going on here. Firstly, it is easier to measure weight change than the actual factors at play, making weight a proxy for unmeasured health influences.7 For example, the fitness we gain from exercising is in and of itself protective for our health, and lowers our risk of dying before our time;8 but it is much easier to collect weight data than fitness data, so the accolades fall on a decrease in weight rather than an increase in fitness. Secondly, healthy habits like eating more fruit and vegetables (which often leaves less room for sometimes foods, which can influence health) and moderating alcohol intake, which in the short term can also lead to weight loss, have also been shown to decrease our risk of dying before our time, regardless of our weight.9

But when studies use these health-promoting behaviours for weight loss, the weight loss gets unfairly credited rather than the positive changes themselves that have increased health.

On top of all that, studies show an association between body size and disease, but do not actually prove causation. A great example of this is a recent study that strongly suggests insulin resistance (the thing that often comes before a person develops type 2 diabetes) leads to weight gain, and not the other way around, meaning that “simply” decreasing weight is unlikely to budge insulin levels!10 Plus we need to keep in mind that many things can be strongly associated with each other without having a cause-effect relationship, like the consumption of mozzarella in the USA and the civil engineering doctorates awarded there11 (yep, seriously – check out the reference), but for some reason our society is fixated on ignoring this fact when it comes to studies on weight (personally, I blame diet culture). All this leads me to pointing out that weight shifts in either direction seem to be a side effect, rather than a root cause; and treating a side effect is never the way to treat an actual issue.

Treat the actual issue, you say?

Yes – look at the underlying issue that could be helped with diet and lifestyle changes. This could be one of the reasons you initially wanted to lose weight, such as: to broadly improve your health; to deal with a particular condition like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, arthritis or diabetes; or to feel more comfortable in your body and better about yourself. ALL these things can be helped without a focus on , and in some cases changes to diet are THE thing that will help them. And going back to the premise of this article – breaking the dieting cycle – by having a goal that is non-weight related, you deprive the diet cycle of its core driver. Without weight loss to strive for, restriction suddenly doesn’t fit. Which means deprivation isn’t a part of the picture either. With these two links in the cycle gone, keeping the dieting cycle turning becomes very difficult.

I’m all for stopping it turning! Practically, what does that actually look like?

Essentially, finding different reasons for making changes and acknowledging the difficulties. Articulate what you are trying to achieve – lower blood pressure, a healthier cholesterol profile, less pain, stable blood sugar levels – so that you can re-establish your goals. Re-define what “works” means for you. For a lot of people, making changes to their diet or exercising more only “works” if it translates to kilos lost. But if your goal is to improve your blood pressure, for example, a great marker of what “works” is whether your blood pressure has gone down! If your goal is to feel better in your body, to have more energy or to be fitter, remove the unreliable proxy measure of weight from the equation and focus on those things themselves. Can you get through the day without an afternoon energy slump? Is going up the stairs a less puffy activity? And when those thoughts pop in your head – the ones that advocate for restriction, deprivation, weight loss – notice them with curious awareness. Let yourself know that you heard that thought and that you’re not going to let it be a part of the narrative in your head.

Shifting gears from weight to health to break free of the dieting cycle takes work.

It also takes patience and, if you’ve read everything between the title and this sentence you know you’ve got it in you! My advice? Start small. Start by articulating your reasons for change. Write them down so that they can be referred to later. Redefine what “works” means to you by writing down how you would feel if things were going well. And start to notice the thoughts that might be driving the dieting cycle. Try not to think of them as good or bad, but notice that they are taking up brain space, and acknowledge that they are part of what makes long-lasting change hard.

These aren’t the only steps to breaking the dieting cycle, but they are the first ones – accepting that a desire for weight loss is at the vicious cycle’s core and working on establishing an alternative goal.

Stay tuned for part two of this article…

Need to talk to a dietitian in the meantime? Book in with Stefanie today to shift your weight goal and start breaking free from your dieting cycle.

References

  1. Wood, Laura. Global Weight Management Market (2022 to 2027) – Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecasts. Business Wire. [Online] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220718005454/en/Global-Weight-Management-Market-2022-to-2027—Industry-Trends-Share-Size-Growth-Opportunity-and-Forecasts—ResearchAndMarkets.com
  2. Shungin D, Winkler TW, Croteau-Chonka DC, et al. New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution. Nature. 2015;518(7538):187-196.
  3. Locke AE, Kahali B, Berndt SI, et al. Genetic studies of body mass index yield new insights for obesity biology. Nature. 2015;518(7538):197-206
  4. Sumithran P, Proietto J. The defence of body weight: a physiological basis for weight regain after weight loss. Clin Sci. 2012;124(4):231-241
  5. MacLean PS, Bergouignan A, Cornier MA, Jackman MR. Biology’s response to dieting: the impetus for weight regain. Am J Physiol-Regul Integr Comp Physiol. 2011;301(3):R581-R600.
  6. Tomiyama AJ, Hunger JM, Nguyen-Cuu J, Wells C. Misclassification of cardiometabolic health when using body mass index categories in NHANES 2005–2012. Int J Obes. 2016;40(5):883-886
  7. Campos P, Saguy A, Ernsberger P, Oliver E, Gaesser G. The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic? Int J Epidemiol. 2006;35(1):55-60
  8. Barry VW, Baruth M, Beets MW, Durstine JL, Liu J, Blair SN. Fitness vs. fatness on all-cause mortality: a meta-anaylsis. Prog Cardiovasc Dis. 2014;56(4):382-390.
  9. Matheson EM, King DE, Everett CJ. Healthy lifestyle habits and mortality in overweight and obese individuals. J Am Board Fam Med. 2012;25(1):9-15
  10. Wiebe N, Ye F, Crumley ET, Bello A, Stenvinkel P, Tonelli M. Temporal Associations Among Body Mass Index, Fasting Insulin, and Systemic Inflammation: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. JAMA Netw Open.2021;4(3):e211263.
  11. Vigen, T. Tyler Vigen. Spurious Correlations. [Online] http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations