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Last updated on November 14th, 2024 at 08:51 pm
“I’m so excited to be on the newest (insert trend) diet,” said no one ever. Bottom line, dieting sucks. Even if dieting “works” for a little while, it still sucks.
Dieting is the process of trying to force your body to take up less space in the world through food restriction.
The most common behaviors of dieting include:
- Counting Calories
- Exercising to burn calories
- Off-limits foods
- Volume eating calories dense foods
Dieting sucks because you typically end the journey regaining more weight than you lost, disrupting your relationship with food, and messing up your metabolism.
This article explores common diets, why dieting probably isn’t working for you, and how to let go of chronic dieting.
Dieting Examples
There are millions of diets on the market. Every day diet culture comes out with a shiny new wellness hack that really just puts a new face on the same old bullshit.
Some common diets include:
- Whole 30
- Paleo
- Plant Based Diets
- Keto
- Adkins
- The wellness diet
- Ideal Protein
- Intermittent fasting
The list goes on and on. However, the one thing that all diets have in common is that they are typically unsustainable long term because of their restrictive nature.
Why Am I So Bad At Dieting
Contrary to popular belief, your body’s job is not to exist in the smallest possible version of itself. The moment you start to restrict your food intake while dieting, your body starts to fight back.
YOU are not bad at dieting. It’s the diet that is failing you.
When you start to diet your body automatically:
- Shifts hormone production
- Alter Digestion
- Shift digestive enzymes
This is all in an effort to protect you. When you start to diet, you are literally fighting against millions of years of evolution. Evolution tells us that plentiful food leads to nourished and thriving bodies.
So when your body believes that food is scarce, it’s going to start putting mechanisms into place to protect you! That’s its job.
Thus while it might feel like you are bad at dieting, you should instead look at it like you are very good at surviving.
Top Reasons Dieting Sucks
Dieting Causes Weight Gain
When you restrict your food, your metabolism slows down. It’s often very difficult to recover your normal metabolic rate once you have stopped dieting.
The single greatest predator of long term weight gain is dieting.
Dieting causes weight gain because:
- It amps up your hunger hormones and suppresses fullness hormones
- It spikes your cortisol (from the stress of not eating)
- Once you resume your normal diet, your metabolism has now slowed leading to weight gain
Dieting Slows Digestion
Delayed digestion is another tool that the body uses to try to conserve energy. If you diet long term or practice extreme calorie restriction you may even experience gastroparesis.
Slowed digestion in dieting sucks because:
- You will have trouble pooping
- You’ll get bloating and nausea
- Stomach pain might be a common thing
In fact, repeated dieting can be one of the number one contributors to developing IBS (irritable bowel syndrome).
Diets Creates Food Obsession
If you feel like you can’t stop thinking about food, it’s probably because you have a long standing relationship with dieting. Food is more than just fuel. You weren’t meant to survive on as little of it as possible.
Dieting can cause you to:
- Hyperfocus on good and bad foods
- Have fear foods
- Have extreme food guilt after eating
Even after you stop dieting, it can be hard to learn to enjoy food again.
Dieting Isolates You
When you are on a strict diet it’s often hard to:
- Fully engage in social events
- Be around people who aren’t focused on dieting
- Engage in family meals
Diets Take A Lot of Time
Being on a diet sucks because you are constantly having to organize your next meal or snack. This leaves a lot less time for other things you might enjoy like your career, hobbies or family.
Dieting can quickly make eating feel like a chore.
Ways you’re giving up your free time to your diet include:
- Counting calories
- Mandating a step or exercise goal
- Preparing special foods
Dieting Messes Up Your Hunger Cues
Dieting often requires you to ignore your hunger cues. This makes it difficult to know when you are truly hungry or full.
Some ways that your hunger cues might be altered in dieting include:
- Having extreme hunger even after a meal
- Experiencing a surge of head hunger even if you’re physically full
- Limited or no hunger cues at all
Dieting Can Lead to Disordered Eating
There is a strong connection between dieting and eating disorders. In fact, a history of frequent dieting is the number one contributor to later developing an eating disorder.
Dieting teaches you to:
- Hate your body unless it’s as small as possible
- Constantly feel fat even after you’ve lost weight
- Body check (weighing, mirror checking) frequently to make sure we are still okay
The longer and more intensely dieting rules are followed, the greater the risk of developing disordered eating or an eating disorder.
Quit Dieting For Good
In order to stop dieting you will need to develop trust with your body to know what it needs to eat and what size it needs to be.
Some simple tips to stop dieting include:
- Getting rid of thinspirational accounts you follow on social media
- Finding ways to respect your body that don’t include food restriction
- Celebrate non scale victories
- Grieve your smaller body and let attempts to pursue it go
- Challenge the food police
- Practice intuitive eating
- Stop commenting on people’s bodies
Challenge internalized fatphobia
- Switch Witch: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly - October 18, 2024
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- Help, I Feel Like I Don’t Deserve To Eat - September 7, 2024