Dieting Causes Weight Loss? A False Belief

As I write this, more than eighty million peoples are counting carbohydrates, cutting
calories, avoiding sugar, eating Craig meals, or living on cabbage soup
or canned weight-loss shakes. Glossy women’s magazines, TV fitness gurus,
weight-loss centers, and diet book authors tell us that all of this self-denial and
sacrifice is worthwhile—that diets work and that if we only spend a little
more money, invest a little more time, exhibit a little more willpower, the
perfect body is within our reach.
Their message is clear: if you’re not a size 6, it’s your fault. You’re weak.
You didn’t try hard enough. You’re a quitter.
It’s in the diet industry’s best interest, of course, to tell you this. Promoters
of diet products earn millions of dollars each year, simply by preying on
desperate dieters who believe their lives will change forever if they can lose
weight. But as a medical doctor who has studied dieting extensively (and,
perhaps more significantly, experienced dieting firsthand), I know that the
saddest thing about all of our starvation and self-deprivation is this:
It’s all for nothing.
In fact, for most people dieting is worse than useless. Somewhere between
95 and 98 percent of dieters fail to keep any weight off permanently, but sadder
still, many wind up gaining weight with each diet. (Perhaps that’s why
major diet programs aren’t interested in having their results analyzed scientifically.
2) We spend $30 billion a year on diet products, programs, pills, and
foods, and almost none of us loses weight permanently as a result.
Of course, that’s not what the people who run the diet programs and write
the diet books will tell you. Laura Fraser, author of Losing It: False Hopes and
Fat Profits in the Diet Industry, says, “The diet industry is a sort of perfect
business because it is the only business in the world where it fails 95 percent
of the time and blames the consumer. I mean, if you bought lightbulbs and
they went out 95 percent of the time, they wouldn’t say, ‘Well, you are not
screwing your lightbulbs in right.’ ”3
I’m reminded of the word delusion, which in psychiatry is defined as “a
fixed false belief.” I see a nation of people running themselves ragged, spending
more money on weight-loss products than some countries spend on their
national budgets, because of our delusion that dieting is the key to weight
loss—if only we can stop failing at it.
But in reality we haven’t failed at dieting—dieting has failed us. That’s why
almost every miraculous success story you read in ads for Jenny Craig or
Nutri/System says, in fine print at the bottom, “results not typical.” (A more
honest disclaimer for those I-lost-eighty-pounds-in-six-months stories would
be “results almost unheard of.”) A tiny number of lucky people, of course,
do succeed in losing weight on a diet and keeping it off—but for every one
of them there are fifty people who try every bit as hard, with no success.
Saying that dieting is a successful technique is much like saying that surgery
for pancreatic cancer is a rousing success because it cures two or three of
every hundred patients—or like saying that playing the lottery is a wise financial
strategy because two or three of every hundred people actually win more
money than they lose.
With millions of people suffering from the effects of failed diets, we should
find strength in our numbers—the strength to say that our lives are too valuable
to waste in an endless, unsuccessful battle with food. Unfortunately, the
diet industry, abetted by a culture that teaches us to value dangerously distorted
body images, has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams
in convincing us that we are failures if we look, feel, or eat like normal people.
We are brainwashed to believe that a woman with a slightly rounded
belly is grotesque, that a man without washboard abs is “soft” and weak, that
a teenage girl in size-10 jeans is fat. And we are brainwashed to believe that
there is only one path to personal fulfillment and an ideal body: constant
dieting, constant sacrifice, constant denial. It’s a lie—one that causes us enormous
suffering, guilt, and shame and offers us no reward and no escape.
If you are still playing the diet game, the most important step you must
take to achieve lasting weight loss is to stop believing this lie. You can’t win
at dieting, no matter how hard you try.
Before I explain why, it’s important to understand just what a diet is. By
dieting, I mean any eating pattern that entails replacing internally driven,
hunger-driven eating with externally controlled eating. Obviously, if you’re
counting calories or drinking Slim-Fast every day instead of eating lunch,
that’s a diet. But it’s also a diet if you tell yourself you can’t eat a dessert or
snack when you’re hungry—or if you restrict yourself to artificial sweeteners,
forbid yourself to put your favorite dressing on your salad, or deny yourself
certain foods because they’re “bad.” And it’s a diet if a doctor says “Eat
whatever you want, but just eat half as much as usual” or “Eat whatever you
want, as long as it’s healthy food.” In short, if you’re not eating what you
like, when you’re hungry for it, you’re dieting.
Why does virtually every diet fail? Three reasons. One is that when you
diet, your body outsmarts you. The second is that when you diet, you cause
a disconnection between your sense of hunger and eating, and that guarantees
that you will fail at dieting—unless you diet to the point of risking your
life. And the third is that while almost everyone can have an attractive,
healthy body, most bodies simply can’t be reshaped to look like Brad Pitt’s or
Cindy Crawford’s.