Ignoring Your Body’s Messages Won’t Work

Diets don’t work for another reason: it’s dangerous to stop listening to your
body. Yet that’s exactly what you do every time you starve yourself.
Imagine what would happen if you ignored your body when it told you,
“I need to go to the bathroom” or “I need to sleep” or “I’m dehydrated—I
need water” or “I’m very cold—I need warm clothes” or “Ouch! Move your
hand—that stove is hot!”
Obviously, you don’t do any of these things—at least not on a regular
basis. More important, you don’t feel guilty about listening to your body
when it sends you these messages. You don’t feel guilty if you move your

hand away from a hot stove. You don’t agonize morally over whether or not
you should go to the bathroom. You don’t worry about whether it’s a sign of
weakness to stop at a drinking fountain. You don’t try to go for weeks without
sleeping and tell yourself if you fail, “I’m just so weak.” And if you’re too
cold, you dress appropriately. You don’t say to yourself, “You’re such a failure—
why can’t you handle a little frostbite?”
Yet when it comes to food, you ignore your body’s warnings all the time.
When you’re dieting, and your body says, “I’m starving—feed me,” you don’t
heed that message. Instead you say, “I can’t eat now.” You label your appetite
as bad or weak, and you pretend that you can make it go away.
An odd (and very destructive) thing happens when your eating is no longer
hunger driven, but instead becomes diet driven. When you’re forced to follow
an artificial eating schedule, you decouple your appetite from your eating.
That means that you don’t eat when you’re hungry, but it also means that
you binge or graze when you are not hungry.
“Chronic dieters do not compensate [for eating high-calorie foods] by
minimizing further eating, as non-dieters do after eating a large amount,”
researchers Janet Polivy and C. Peter Herman say. “Instead, dieters appear to
become disinhibited; after being preloaded with fattening food, they eat more
than similarly treated non-dieters or than dieters who have not [broken] their
diets.”
As I explained earlier, this is partly a biological response, because your
body wants you to eat high-fat foods when it’s starving. However, it’s also a
psychological response. As Polivy and Herman note, dieters who think they’ve
eaten “bad” high-calorie foods will continue to binge on other “bad” foods
at hand—even if the food that began the binge was really low in calories.
Why? Because dieting makes forbidden foods seem compelling and simultaneously
trains you to believe that you have no willpower in the absence of
external controls. The result: when you finally rebel against these external
controls, and give in to the urge to eat “bad” foods, you eat until you literally
are sickened, both physically and emotionally, by your bingeing.
Dieters are also more likely than nondieters to binge or graze when they’re
upset, when they’re drinking, or when they’re sick. Bingeing and grazing temporarily
soothe both physical and emotional starvation, but at a high price:
each binge or grazing episode makes the dieter feel more and more helpless
and out of control, leading to a vicious circle of intensified dieting and
increased bingeing. It’s a perfect recipe for weight gain and self-hatred.
Of course, a handful of people—that supposedly lucky 5 percent—do
succeed at overriding their body’s needs and maintaining the weight they’ve
reached on a diet. But most do so only by sacrificing, forever, a relaxed and
normal relationship with food. Every food-related family tradition becomes
an inner conflict (“How do I tell my mother I can’t eat her hamantaschen?”),
and every special occasion becomes a crisis (“Can I sit through the whole
wedding dinner without eating ‘bad’ food?”). Even a simple restaurant mealor a box of Valentine’s Day candy is transformed into a danger to be avoided,
a temptation to be resisted. We never realize how large a role food plays in
our heritage, our family life, our holidays, and our celebrations, until we
attempt to reduce eating to a mechanical, calories-in, calories-out process.