Lifestyle Choices

Dieters become preoccupied with the very substance they are trying to avoid — food. Not all foods, but those which are forbidden and outside the limitations set by the diet. Dieters see these foods as more exciting and pleasurable, and they become increasingly so if they are not eaten for a while.

A well-documented behaviour shown by dieters suggests that if they do actually eat a forbidden food, such as a chocolate bar or a piece of cake, they will then eat more food after it than if they had not eaten that piece of chocolate in the first place. You would expect them to eat less.

Many studies have been carried out both in America and Britain to illustrate this paradoxical behaviour, during which dieters are asked to consume a high calorie food. This is often very hard for the experimenter to do, although not as unethical as it may seem since the dieters always have the choice to say no. They are then asked to take part in a ‘taste test‘ and to sample a selection of foods. The dieters are left alone in a room so they can eat as little or as much as they like. The amount they eat is then measured. It has been found that if the dieters are given a ‘forbidden food‘ before the taste test, they eat more during the taste test than if they had been given a neutral food such as a cream cracker. This is paradoxical — you would imagine that they would feel fuller and therefore eat less. The non-dieters do eat less.

Dieting causes dieters to respond differently to forbidden foods; forbidden foods trigger overeating. Imagine dieting for two weeks, sticking to a diet of low calorie foods, eating less than people around you and missing out on social eating and family dinners. A friend has a party, and before you is a wonderful display of all the foods you have been avoiding. I am not going to eat, you tell yourself. Just one sausage roll, you tell yourself, just one plate of trifle. And before you know it you have eaten two whole platesful, way beyond your limits set for the evening. Is this because you are simply weak-willed? Is it simply because you cannot control yourself? If you hadn’t been dieting in the first place all that food wouldn’t have appeared so exciting. One plateful would have been enough; you would have felt full and too involved in enjoying the evening to concentrate on eating.

Yet dieting changes this. The foods which dieting have made forbidden cause you to eat more than if you had not been dieting at all. They trigger a reaction. And this reaction is overeating.

So what has dieting changed?

Dieting changes the thoughts that go through your head when you eat the first ‘forbidden food‘. Instead of just enjoying eating it, dieters find that certain foods trigger specific thoughts. I asked several women what they thought after eating something that they felt they shouldn’t have.

‘Now I’ve eaten that I might as well make the most of it’ was common. Dieters see the episode of overeating as an isolated event which they cram full of food.

‘I’m sick of having to diet, I’m just going to eat loads.’ A lot of women said that they felt like rebelling against the diet. They felt angry at having to worry about food and their weight and wanted to have a good time. They ate to rebel against the pressures which tell them they shouldn’t eat, and to show that at that time they were no longer going to conform.

‘Now I’ve eaten that I might as well give in to all the drives to eat.’ Many women felt that, whilst they are dieting, all the drives to eat well up inside and a constant effort is required to ignore them. They felt that it was a balance between the drive to eat and the drive to diet, and that eating a forbidden food meant that the drive to eat won. It broke down their resistance and they ate enough to compensate — and more — for all the times when they had eaten less than they wanted to.

One woman said ‘I’m fed up with saying no all the time. I want to eat normally. Why should I deprive myself of nice food?’ She felt that she wanted to react against all the pressure to be thin by asserting herself and eating like everyone else. She said ‘Everything is focused on food, your body and other people’s perception of your body. Eating is saying “to hell with all that pressure”. Why is my acceptance conditional on me having a nice body?’

Dieting makes high calorie foods become treats, and these treats seem to trigger a chain of thoughts which can lead to overeating. In a study by Dr King and her colleagues in 1987 dieters and non-dieters were asked to rate different types of food for a variety of qualities. They found that the dieters were more likely to see foods in terms of guilt than the non-dieters.

In addition, these foods seem directly to change the way dieters feel about themselves. In a study carried out in 1989 the researchers examined the effects of eating on body image. They found that not only did the dieters show a more negative body image but that this body image became more negative after eating a high calorie meal. It would seem that not only do dieters respond to specific foods by overeating but these foods also directly affect their body image.

These reactions to food would never happen if the dieters were not trying to eat less in the first place. They would eat what they wanted when they wanted and food would not take on such an important role in their lives. Dieting means that food becomes attractive and yet it has to be avoided. It is like an elastic band. Hold it back, then let it go and all the energy needed to retain it is released. If it is not held back in the first place there is no energy to be released. Food becomes a trigger to the behaviour dieters want to avoid — eating — and eating becomes the trigger to further eating.

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