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Top Ten Reasons to Stop Dieting

Michelle May

Top-10-Reasons-to-Stop-Dieting

For 25 years, I’ve been saying “diets don’t work.” Gradually, the chorus has grown louder. Even WeightWatchers’ CEO admits, “We got it wrong” (ironically, explaining why WW is jumping into the weight loss drug market! I have to wonder whether they got it wrong again…) Read on for my Top 10 Reasons to Stop Dieting. (These are also 10 great reasons to stop recommending diets for your patients and clients!)

1. Diets don’t produce sustainable results.

Top-10-Reasons-to-Stop-DietingA review of diet studies estimated that at best, only 20% of participants maintain weight loss at one year, and the percentage of those maintaining weight loss decreases further by the two-year follow up. The authors suggest that these statistics would be even worse if outcomes for participants who dropped out of the programs and those who had diagnosed comorbidities such as mood disorders or binge eating disorder had been included.[1]

For reasons you’ll learn below, it turns out that most weight loss interventions have similarly poor long-term results, including weight loss medications.[2]

2. You may gain more than you lost.

There is significant evidence that the restrictive, weight-focused approach is ineffective at producing sustainable changes in weight or health.

In a review of 31 long term studies on dieting, Medicare’s Search for Effective Obesity Treatments: Diets Are Not the Answer, the authors conclude, “there is little support for the notion that diets lead to lasting weight loss or health benefits.” They found the majority of individuals are unable to maintain weight loss over the long term and one-third to two-thirds of dieters regain more weight than they lost.[3]

3. Diets decrease your metabolism and increase hunger.

Your body evolved to adapt and survive when food was scarce. Your body doesn’t know you are doing this on purpose!

There are coordinated metabolic, behavioral, neuroendocrine, and autonomic responses designed to maintain body fat stores at an ideal established by your central nervous system. This is called “adaptive thermogenesis” and results in weight regain in those attempting to sustain reduced body weights.[4]

This metabolic adaptation to weight loss is associated with increased hunger sensations.[5] (See! It wasn’t your imagination or lack of willpower!)

4. Metabolic adaptations persists over time.

A study of The Biggest Loser contestants provides important evidence about one of the many reasons that diets fail.

Participants’ resting metabolic rate decreased by an average of 610 kcal/day at the end of the competition. Six years later, their resting metabolic rate was an average of 704kcal/day below baseline – even though 13 of 14 participants in the study had regained the majority of the weight they had lost. That’s 500 calories lower than would be expected at their weight![6]

Further, one year after initial weight reduction, levels of the circulating mediators of appetite that encourage weight regain after diet-induced weight loss do not revert to the levels recorded before weight loss.[7]

In other words, it takes less food to maintain your previous body size AND your appetite is increased. No wonder it feels so hard!

5. Diets require an unsustainable amount of time and energy.

Restrictive eating behaviors require a significant, and for most people, unsustainable amount of time, energy, and willpower—already in short supply for most people.

Some people manage to stick with the rules but develop a Restrictive Eating Cycle in the process. (Take the Eating Cycle Assessment here.) They have to become experts at ignoring hunger and/or depriving themselves of foods they love in order to stay in control. This is a significant price to pay since it takes a lot of energy to eat only so called “good” foods and avoid the “bad” ones.

In the Restrictive Eating Cycle, eating leads to conflict and guilt, rather than pleasure and satisfaction that are essential for sustainable changes to one’s eating. Not to mention that pleasure and satisfaction are legitimate and healthy outcomes from eating!

6. Diets produce counterproductive psychological consequences.

Studies have shown that food restriction actually results in counterproductive psychological consequences such as preoccupation with food and eating (recently dubbed “food noise“), distractability, increased emotional responsiveness, dysphoria, increased eating in the absence of hunger, and bingeing.[8]

Further, there is evidence that even children and adolescents are developing disordered eating behaviors at an alarming rate.[9]

7. Diets are an outside-in approach.

Diets are based on the latest external authority’s rules about when, what, and how much to eat. For example, many diets prescribe an allowed amount of food per day, forcing the dieter to ignore hunger in order to comply. Diets may prescribe eating at predetermined meal times, sometimes causing the dieter to eat even when they are not hungry.

This teaches dieters to disregard their own internal authority and further disconnects them from their own body’s innate cues of hunger and satiety, moving them further from their ability to know what their body needs. (Read more: Diet culture: An outdated paradigm whose time is up!)

Lasting changes occur when there are shifts in the way you think, feel, and respond. In other words, Inside-Out.

8. Diets increase cravings, guilt, and eating.

Most diets are based on limiting various foods in one way or another. When certain foods are forbidden, their intrinsic value increases—as if they were on a pedestal, just out of reach. When these desirable foods are restricted, feelings of deprivation increase, potentially leading to stronger cravings (“food noise.”)

When one finally gives in to these powerful cravings, they feel guilty and out of control. They may give up the diet and even binge on the foods they’ve been missing. This constant struggle leads to an endless eat-repent-repeat cycle and a painful love-hate relationship with food.

Of course, most dieters blame themselves when the diet fails, when in reality, the diet failed them.

9. Diets miss the point.

Diets don’t address the underlying reasons people struggle with their eating.

Although substituting celery sticks for potato chips may temporarily decrease calories, if the potato chips were eaten out of boredom, celery sticks won’t fill the bill either. Consequently, when the diet is over, the underlying triggers for eating haven’t changed so the previous eating habits resume.[9]

Even people who have undergone bariatric surgery (weight loss surgery or WLS) often continue to struggle with their eating after the honeymoon period when they don’t address their triggers for eating.

10. The focus on weight and weight loss perpetuates weight stigma.

Dieting in response to societal pressure to attain an idealized body shape or size and the prizing of the thin ideal perpetuates weight stigma—negative beliefs and attitudes toward people who do not meet an “acceptable” weight, size, or shape.

Weight stigma is associated with diminished health and well-being in myriad ways, including increased caloric consumption, diminished exercise, binge eating behaviors, low self-esteem, depression, and decreased self-rated health.[10, 11]

What to do instead?

Research has shown that size acceptance and using a non-diet approach produces sustainable improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol levels, physical activity, self-esteem, and depression compared to dieting. There is a growing trans-disciplinary movement away from restrictive, weight-focused programs toward a non-diet, weight-neutral, mindfulness-based approach to optimal well-being.[12]

Am I Hungry? Mindful Eating Programs are a gentle inside-out approach that guide individuals to increase awareness of their drivers for eating, tune into their body wisdom, and practice mindfulness skills.

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References

[1] Tylka, T., et al. (2014.) The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss. Journal of Obesity, 2014.

[2] Wilding, J. P., Batterham, R. L., Davies, M., Van Gaal, L. F., Kandler, K., Konakli, K., Lingvay, I., McGowan, B. M., Oral, T. K., Rosenstock, J., Wadden, T. A., Wharton, S., Yokote, K., & Kushner, R. F. (2022). Weight regain and cardiometabolic effects after withdrawal of semaglutide: The step 1 trial extension. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, 24(8), 1553–1564. https://doi.org/10.1111/dom.14725

[3] Mann, T., Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: Diets are not the answer. Am. Psychologist, 62, 220-233.

[4] Rosenbaum M, Leibel RL. Adaptive thermogenesis in humans. Int J Obes (Lond) 2010;34:S47–S55.

[5] Tremblay A, Royer MM, Chaput JP, Doucet E. Adaptive thermogenesis can make a difference in the ability of obese individuals to lose body weight. Int J Obes (Lond) 2013;37:759–764.

[6] Fothergill, E., Guo, J., Howard, L., Kerns, J. C., Knuth, N. D., Brychta, R., Chen, K. Y., Skarulis, M. C., Walter, M., Walter, P. J. and Hall, K. D. (2016), Persistent metabolic adaptation 6 years after “The Biggest Loser” competition. Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.)24(8), 1612-9.

[7] Sumithran P, et al.  (2011). Long-Term Persistence of Hormonal Adaptations to Weight Loss. New England Journal of Medicine, 365(17), 1597-1604.

[8] Polivy, J. (1996.) Psychological consequences of food restriction. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 96(6), 589-92.

[9] López-Gil, J. F., García-Hermoso, A., Smith, L., Firth, J., Trott, M., Mesas, A. E., Jiménez-López, E., Gutiérrez-Espinoza, H., Tárraga-López, P. J., & Victoria-Montesinos, D. (2023). Global proportion of disordered eating in children and adolescents. JAMA Pediatrics, 177(4), 363. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2022.5848

[9] May M: Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: A Mindful Eating Program to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle. Am I Hungry? Publishing; 2013, updated 2020.

[10] Tylka, T., et al. (2014.) The Weight-Inclusive versus Weight-Normative Approach to Health: Evaluating the Evidence for Prioritizing Well-Being over Weight Loss. Journal of Obesity, 2014.

[11] Mauldin, K., May, M., Clifford, D. (2022). The consequences of a weight‐centric approach to healthcare: A case for a paradigm shift in how clinicians address body weight. Nutrition in Clinical Practice. https://doi.org/10.1002/ncp.10885

[12] Bacon, L., & Aphramor, L. (2011). Weight science: evaluating the evidence for a paradigm shift. Nutrition journal, 10(1), 1.

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