Pushing my dieting button

[sarahmichigan]

If you see me post articles or rants about my anti-diet views, don't be sure that I'm directing them at you in particular. I know of at least three people on my friends list who are on Weight Watchers, and at least a few others who are doing various things to maintain or lose weight.

I may scroll through your posts about your diet plan, or I may comment occasionally if I feel compelled, too, but make no mistake: I do not support your diet. I won't try to sabotage your efforts, but I will state here and now that I think you are doing something that can potentially have very bad effects on your mental and physical health.

Dieting doesn't work. The odds are 9-1 against you that you'll keep the weight off and there's a good chance that you'll end up fatter. Chances are that you'll have to keep going on diets to maintain your weight or lose the weight you've re-gained, and yo-yo dieting is extremely unhealthy.

You may think you deserve to know what it's like to be in a thinner body, but it's most likely a pipe dream. There's no good evidence that you can modify your body shape to a signifcant extent (more than about 10 percent of your original body weight) and maintain that new shape. (For the record, I've been on Weight Watchers twice. The first time, I lost 41 pounds. The second time, I lost 36 pounds. I gained it all back.)

Health gurus are always going on about the conditions that are exacerbated by excessive weight, and they assume that losing weight will improve the condition. But there are NO good studies about whether long-term weight loss will improve your health because such a tiny minority of people who lose a large amount of weight are able to keep it off for more than a year or two.

There are, however, many studies that show that chronic dieting makes your heart health, blood pressure, and other measures of health WORSE.

Dieting causes compulsive eating habits. A weight-loss diet is just a doctor-approved eating disorder. I would not try to aid you in your efforts to be a bulimic or an anorexic, and I do not support your efforts to develop an eating disorder, which is what weight-loss dieting is, when you strip off all the pretenses.

Everyone I've ever known who has gone on a weight-loss regimen has become completely obsessed with food. Weighing food, measuring food, thinking day and night about what fits the plan and what doesn't. It's just like the mentality of the friends I've known who are anorexic and are constantly measuring what they eat and thinking all day about what they can and can't eat.

Do I support teaching yourself more about nutrition? Sure! Do I support the idea that Americans have a distorted sense of what a reasonable portion of food is? Sure! Do I support improving your eating habits to include more fiber, fruit, and vegetables and less processed food? Sure! But if your focus is on losing weight regardless of how the method will affect your long-term health, I can't support that.

I'm especially leery of commercial weight-loss plans, because it is not in their best interest to see you succeed, because then you will not keep paying them your hard-earned money. Their bottom line is making money, not your health. Did you know that Weight Watchers has a policy that if you're five pounds over your MINIMUM weight, they will help you lose weight? That means if they decide your optimum weight range is 108 to 128 pounds, and you come in weighing 113 pounds, they will help you lose weight until you're 108 pounds. If health was their focus, they would tell a woman who is 120 pounds and who wants to be 114 pounds to see a psychiatrist about her distorted body image instead of telling her they can help her lose those "last six pounds."

I'll continue to post anti-diet rants and articles about studies which point out the destructiveness of dieting, so if that bothers you, you may want to scroll on through. . .

Comments

[aiela.livejournal.com]

Perhaps if there are people who do not like reading such things, you could take volunteers for a filter for these types of posts.

Myself, I have found Weight Watchers to be a god send for many of my friends who have found their relationship with food spiraling out of control. By chosing to work on -portion control- via Weight Waters vs. deprivation, they've been able to eat all the things they enjoy while retraining their brains to what is an appropriate amount of food to eat.

Myself, I worry more about the people rushing headlong into WLS (and paying CASH for it, because their insurance companies won't pay for it unless they've exhausted all other methods of losing weight, and they aren't willing to do the work to try) than I do someone who decides to go on a diet.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

I don't think any weight-loss diet plan, even weight watchers, helps compulsive eating habits; they make them worse. That's my experience with it, and the experience of many other people's. They do teach portion control, but they also teach you to follow a plan instead of listening to your own body's wisdom. They also re-inforce "good food/bad food" thinking, which is extremely unhealthy. People get an all-or-nothing mentality about foods, or they think THEY are "bad/good" depending on what they eat. Also, it just doesn't work long-term. Studies show that the small number of people who actually lose a large amount of body weight and keep it off do it on their own, without a commercial weight-loss plan. Question, have your friends on WW kept the weight off for more than a year? I no of not one person who has done so. I realized that's anecdotal evidence, but it's in line with the statistics.

Just to be clear, I'm not against educating yourself about appropriate portions or examining your relationship to food, but that's not WW's main goal; it's taking your money.

I'm really afraid of weight loss surgery, too. There are so many horror stories about things going wrong, people getting very sick, gaining all the weight back. Yuck.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

"know of"

[aiela.livejournal.com]

Actually, yes. A friend of mine has kept 90+ pounds off for three or four years now. Via Weight Watchers. And she still eats plenty of food she enjoys.

My psych professor has a Ph.D. in health psychology, is extremely against 'dieting', but doesn't count Weight Watchers in with that. He thinks WW is a fabulous program. He'll also go on for hours that it's not anyone's fault they're fat, most of it is genetic, and if you are predisposed to being overweight, it's going to be a hell of a lot of work if you want to keep off the weight, and he can understand people not thinking it's worth it. So he's definitly not fat-phobic.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

She must be one of the 10 percent, then.

[aiela.livejournal.com]

I'm right there with you with fad diets and unsafe eating, but I see nothing wrong with "cutting calories" in the vein of "Learning how much food I actually need to eat, and eating that." Dropping down to 1000 or 1200 calories a day? No, I don't support that. But if that means you have to measure for a while to retrain yourself what's an appropriate amount to eat, I don't see that as dangerous, I see it as educating yourself as to what a "serving" is. Because most Americans have no idea.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

About the serving thing: yes, I explicitly mentioned that in my post.

My main beef with diets are ones that tell you to eat such and such amount of calories or servings regardless of what your body tells you. If your body tells you it's hungry, feed it. If it tells you you're full, stop. A lot of fat people are totally out of touch with their hungry and full signals, and I fully support slowing down while you eat and paying attention to your full signal, and (the one thing many people never figure out) paying attention to how foods make your body feel (do you feel sluggish when you eat something? Maybe you should cut back on it. Does it make you feel good and alive? Keep eating it!).

[aiela.livejournal.com]

Most of the things you are saying are okay are the things that the people I know are going to Weight Watchers for, specifically.

The -only- way I have ever lost weight was by keeping track of what went into my mouth, and holding myself responsible for it. I am an emotional eater, I eat when I'm bored, I eat too much when I eat. And keeping track, which to you seems obsessive and unhealthy is, for -me-, the only way I can curb that.

And obviously, if someone goes on a meal plan of some sort, and is careful what they eat and how much of it they eat, and then loses 20 or 30 or 40 pounds, and then goes back to eating the same way they did before, they're going to gain it back. What is needed is not a "diet", but a lifetime reevaluation of how and what a person eats. Something sustainable. Forever.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

I think there's a subtle difference between "noticing" what you eat and how it makes you feel vs. being compulsive about "restricting" yourself and beating yourself up if you slip up. I think traditional weight-loss programs tend to re-inforce compulsive eating patterns and food/body obsessions.

[aiela.livejournal.com]

And in my experience, most people I know fall in the former rather than the latter, and sometimes your posts seem to lump everyone into one category.

I agree that the latter is unhealthy. I disagree that there's no way to get into a weight loss program without becoming one of the latter.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

OK, I'll admit that I make generalizations about dieting and compulsive eating patterns.

Putting that all aside, even the NIH has determined that most people put back on the weight they lose, and there is a great deal of evidence that weight-cycling is very bad for your health.

[styggie.livejournal.com]

i dont think sarah should have to filter her opinions - it is her journal. If you want to censor her, do it at your end. You have entered into her space, not the other way around.

[aiela.livejournal.com]

I never said I didn't want to read it. She mentioned that it might be a problem for some people. I was making a suggestion based on that statement.

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

It's OK, Angie, I took it in the spirit you intended.