Let's Finally End the Generational Cycle of Chronic Dieting

Many of us spend years of our lives attempting to get to a so-called “healthy weight” in order to prevent illness, increase our quality of life, and find true happiness. In this pursuit of weight loss, whether it’s for health reasons or solely appearance-based, there comes out of it a bigger problem, to say the least. The dilemma has created a whole load of problems, including weight stigmatization, fear of eating certain foods, eating disorders, low self-esteem, discrimination, food guilt, body shame, and Weight GAIN. But that is not the extent of it! We pass these problems down to the ones we love the most, pretty much guaranteeing that they suffer in all the ways we have in this diet culture we live in. All of this has been backed by a substantial body of research.

As a result of these problems created by the diet industry, many people are scared of eating and don’t even know how to eat anymore. People are ashamed of their bodies and have lost all trust in what their bodies are telling them. Eating has become a chore and the pleasure of eating has been taken away. Intuitive eating is the solution to these problems and it is the way to establish peace with food, mind and body again. 

What is Diet Culture?

In 2022, close to 50% of New Year’s resolutions in the US were centered around fitness and 40% were centered around weight loss. There are countless reasons why someone chooses to change their body, i.e., body dissatisfaction, health problems, trimming down for summer, that new job promotion, their doctor told them to lose weight… But the main culprit is diet culture.

Diet culture is a collection of social expectations which dictates how we should look and eat. Diet culture glorifies thinness and says that thinness equates to heath and that thinness determines your value. It promotes weight loss as a means of achieving a higher status. This causes those who get wrapped up in diet culture to spend their life thinking they are broken because they don’t take on the impossibly thin “ideal.” This also means ultimately feeling compelled to spend large sums of time, money, and energy attempting to make their body smaller, even though research quite clearly says that almost no one can sustain weight loss for more than five years. This is why I refer to it as “toxic diet culture.”

Have you ever thought, “if only enough people liked and respected me, then my life would be perfect?” Diet culture makes us believe that we need to look the part in order to be accepted and valued on this earth. And how do we get there? By eating the “right” foods, working out daily, wearing a certain sized clothing, possessing a certain body weight, etc. What’s worse is that the children that we bring into this world (or our future children, in my case), our pride and joy, will be victims of this diet culture, and won’t even know that it’s not their fault. They will be told time and time again that they are not perfect just the way they are, and that they need to change themselves to fit this mold that diet culture has created for them. In fact, according to research, around 50% of 13-year-old American girls reported being unhappy with their body. And by the time the girls reached 17 years of age, that number grew to nearly 80%. What’s more, around 80% of teenage girlsreported fears of getting fat.

I Suffered but My Kids WILL NOT Suffer

For me, I suffered through the consequences of diet culture for more than 20 years of my life. I remember having negative thoughts about my body at around 10 years old. I started restricting my food intake at 12. Let me say, I grew up without food rules or my parents restricting me from eating the foods I wanted, so that wasn’t the problem. I observed my elders, whether it was my mom or grandma, talking poorly about their body. I believe this stuck with me and when my body started changing, I adopted that negative self-talk. Not to mention, the cut-out pictures of supermodels that I would make a collage with and tape to my bedroom door. That surely had a negative impact on my body image. Anyway, this restriction eventually led to years of dieting, and as this cycle persisted, I continued to feel worse about myself and my body. I felt like a failure and I was obsessing more and more about food and my body. I experienced a lot of negative emotions that bled out into my personal life, causing me to refrain from going out and doing things, causing me to hold off on pursuing my dreams, and causing me to live an unhappy life. In fact, nearly 70% of adult women reported avoiding participation in activities due to their body image. That was me.

I don’t have any children yet, but when I was stuck in this chronic dieting cycle, I couldn’t imagine passing this down to my future children. I didn’t want my future children to see me talking poorly about my body, as I saw my elders talk poorly about their body.

However, it doesn’t always start with poor body image talk. Everyone who inherits this generational cycle has their own story. A client of mine, Susan was put on her first diet at the age of 8! Eight! As you can imagine, because I know many dieters have a similar experience, her dieting continued for the next 40 years of her life. When she became a mother, her kids grew up and had issues of her own. But rest assured, she has stopped her cycle, and leads by example for her children and grandchildren now.

 Another client Tammy, didn’t quite inherit this cycle, rather she developed it after her first pregnancy when she gained weight, as the majority of women do when they have a baby. I find this is often the case. A woman has a baby, and then goes on her first diet to try and lose the “baby weight.” Twenty years after Tammy’s pregnancy, she came to me still trying to lose that “baby weight.” She explained to me that every time she would go on a diet, she would lose some weight, and then gain all the weight back, plus some! Tammy’s weight is now stable and she is at peace with food and her body.

Here's the thing… Diets don’t work…

Diets Don’t Work and They’re Harmful

I understand that many of us just want to be healthy and feel good, and there is nothing wrong with that. The issue is that diet culture has taken over the word “health” and because of that, health is now looked at as synonymous with weight. Therefore, many of us are made to believe that losing weight to get to a certain size is what it takes to be “healthy,” and that just isn’t the case (despite what your doctors say). As a result, this causes people to restrict their eating in order to lose weight and shrink their bodies.

If diets were treated like medications, they would never be released to the public. Take for example, a medication that helps to lower blood pressure. Let’s say this medication improved blood pressure for a few weeks, but in the long run caused even higher blood pressure levels, ultimately causing worsened blood pressure or things like heart and kidney disease. Would you blame yourself for a medication that doesn’t work, but then still continue to take it? This is pretty much the same process as dieting, whether or not your doctor recommended it. Would you start a diet even though you knew it wouldn’t work in the long-run?

Here's the thing, dieting is a major predictor for weight gain. Yep, I said it… weight gain! So, let’s talk a little about our biology as humans. It is important to realize that when we restrict our eating, whether that’s by dieting, calorie counting, intermittent fasting or whatever, the body thinks that it is starving. Here is what happens when the body notices it is starving or undereating: The body will adapt to the starvation state by slowing down the rate it burns. When we start eating again, it will hold onto that new source of energy for dear life and store it away, through various biological enzymes and hormones the body releases. This helps the body prepare for the next famine. Overtime, when we continue to diet, this triggers the body to become more efficient at using the energy that is brought in, by continuing to slow down its metabolism.

Here are a couple actual studies that indicate that dieting actually promotes weight gain:

• Mann and others, a team of UCLA researchers, reviewed 31 long-term studies on dieting. The conclusion: dieting is a predictor of weight gain. Specifically, up to two-thirds of dieters regained MORE weight than they had lost.

• A Finland study which looked at more than 2,000 sets of twins showed that independent of genetics, dieting is significantly associated with accelerated weight gain. Take one set of twins. The one who went on a diet was about 2-3 times more likely to gain more weight, compared to the twin who did not go on a diet.

Now that we’ve established that diets don’t work, I want to explain a major reason why diets are harmful. Besides the fact that chronic dieting harms our relationship with food, body and mind, it also causes weight cycling (yo-yo dieting). Weight cycling itself, is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, insulin resistance, and inflammation. However, weight cycling is rarely controlled for in a lot of the large studies that associate body weight with health issues.

You might be wondering, if diets don’t work (but rather, cause weight gain), and diets are harmful (due to the physical, emotional, and mental harm they cause), than why do diets continue to be prescribed by our physicians. A big explanation for this can be illustrated by the Semmelweis reflex, which is the rejection of new evidence or knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigm. This term is derived from the physician who figured out that lives could be saved if doctors only washed their hands. However, Dr. Semmelweis was basically laughed at and looked down on by is colleagues for this foolish idea.

It's Time to HEAL Ourselves and Set an EXAMPLE for our Children… 

During my journey, once I realized that weight loss or changing my external appearance won't fix how I feel inside, what I was actually beginning to understand was that I needed to heal my relationship with myself because changing the outward appearance didn't work. It’s similar to when someone gets plastic surgery. When outward appearance is changed, some people still act and behave in accordance to who they were before the surgery, who they believed themselves to be. This is because outward appearance, like the size of our clothes or the number on the scale, do not determine who we are. Who we are comes from within.

The problem is our diet culture. Like me, many children grow up hearing negative body image talk, or receive constant messages telling them all about the thin ideal, growing up playing with Barbie dolls and watching Disney movies like Frozen or Rapunzel. These messages that our children receive throughout their lives will continue to be shaped by the diet industry, the media, the cosmetic industry, etcetera. And all of these industries will profit off of their self-rejection and need to change their appearance in order to be loved, feel accepted, and feel worthy.

On one end of the “health and wellness” arena there lies toxic diet culture, as reviewed earlier. On the opposite end of this spectrum, we have intuitive eating. To define intuitive eating, it is a dynamic self-care framework of eating that integrates instinct, emotional, and rational thought. Intuitive Eating is a process of honoring your health and body by getting in tuned with the messages your body is communicating to you in order to meet your physical and emotional needs. It encompasses 10 defined principles that take you through a journey of healing and recovery from diet culture, to a life full of peace, joy, and compassion.

In order to stop this cycle from affecting our children like it has to us, we need to heal ourselves first so they don’t follow in our footsteps and suffer like we have. Where has it gotten us? Years of yo-yo dieting, constantly worrying about everything that we put in our mouths, avoiding social settings because the only food offered isn’t on the diet we’re on, avoiding social settings because of shame, having no energy to go on that hike, worsening health, robbing us of our happiness, and so much more agony. Is that what you want for our children? I think not.

If you’re ready to end this cycle click here.