Diet or Eating Disorder?

By Rebecca Cooper, MFT, CCH, CEDS

Have you ever dieted? More than once?

Most of the methods we may have tried to control our eating have not worked long term. I hope to explain why diets don’t work, show how diets lead to eating disorders and present some ideas for you to consider that do work.

Diets don’t work. Let me contradict myself now and say “all diets work.” The protein diet, the grapefruit diet, low carb diet, the (fill-in-the-blank) diet, all work. The more bizarre the regime the better it works - at least temporarily!

The problem is that we go off them. We rebel. We get fed up with the diet and we eat all the things we have been depriving ourselves of. We go off the diet. Then we gain the weight back… plus more.

Due to the food restrictions of the diet, our metabolism has slowed down. Our body thinks it is experiencing a famine; it is in starvation alert mode and is trying to store every calorie. The result is that we gain weight with a vengeance, faster than ever before.

Repeating this behavior over time forms a predictable pattern. We gain weight, go on another diet, rebel, and then start the yo-yo cycle of eating and dieting over and over again.

When we diet, we set ourselves up to overeat because we subconsciously rebel over restricting our food. Binge eating often starts as a direct result of dieting. Thirty-five percent of ‘normal dieters’ progress to eating disorders.

Currently, over sixty percent of the population of America is overweight - and nearly one-third are obese. There are more overweight people in the US than at any other time in history. Americans spend over $60 billion on dieting and weight loss products each year. Weight loss is a national obsession. At any given time, 25 million Americans are seriously dieting. Only 1 out of every 200 dieters lose their weight and keep it off for a year or more.

Currently, 2 million Americans suffer from eating disorders. At least 50,000 individuals will die as a direct result of their eating disorder. Because of the secretiveness and shame associated with eating disorders, many cases are probably not reported.

Even before we start our diet the thought of going on a diet begins to influence our overeating. Have you ever thought “I’ll go ahead and eat that cake now because tomorrow (or on Monday, or the first of the month or year) I am going on a diet”? How many times has this happened to you?