Truth in Dieting Analysis

1. Take several sheets of paper. At the top of each sheet, list the name of
a diet you’ve tried. This should include any plan that imposes limits on
what you can eat. (For instance, Dean Ornish’s book Eat More, Weigh
Less contains a section on what you should and shouldn’t eat, making
it a diet plan.) On additional sheets of paper, list diet pills or diet foods
you’ve used.
2. On each sheet, list your recollections of how you felt before beginning
the diet or using the diet product. Did you buy a book promoting the
diet? Did the book list many impressive-sounding scientific reasons why
the diet would work? (For instance, did it promise that the combination
of foods it allowed contained special chemicals that would “melt off”
your fat or say that you would lose weight by putting your body in a
state of ketosis?) Did the pills or diet foods promise miracle results in a
convincing way?
3. Describe how you felt when you began each diet or started using each
diet product. Were you hopeful, excited, optimistic?
4. Describe what happened during the first few weeks that you dieted or
used the diet product. Did you lose weight quickly? Did you enjoy the
compliments of friends and family? Did you believe that the diet would
solve your weight problems—perhaps all of your problems—for good?
5. Describe what happened as you continued to diet or use the diet pills or
foods. Did the diet or diet product continue to work, and did you lose
the weight you had hoped to lose and keep it off? Or did you regain the
weight and possibly even more? If so, how did you feel, physically and
emotionally, when your diet failed?
6. Now look at your list and make several estimates. First, calculate how
much time you invested in each diet or diet product and how much
weight you lost over the long term as a result. Second, calculate the
amount of money you spent on each diet or diet product. In addition,
note the emotional effects of each diet you tried.
If you’re a typical “serial dieter,” your results will show that you’ve invested
a tremendous amount of time and hundreds if not thousands of dollars for
no long-term benefit at all. In fact you probably weigh more now than you
did when you first decided to lose weight! In addition, your list will reveal the high emotional price of the diets that failed you. Typical postdiet emotions
that dieters list in point 5 are “sadness,” “tiredness,” “a sense of failure,”
“a feeling of hopelessness,” and “self-loathing”—a poor reward for weeks or
months of deprivation.
What does this mean? It means that unnatural cultural expectations have
suckered you into becoming a perpetual dieter and that the diet industry is
benefiting by taking you for hundreds (or possibly thousands) of dollars—
while you wind up feeling overweight, ugly, and defeated. You’re a victim of a
one-two whammy: a society that holds up impossible images of beauty and a
profit-crazed industry that uses those images to sell you modern-day snake oil.