Lifestyle Choices

Dieting changes your mood and mood changes can cause overeating. Dieters often report feeling positive and motivated at the beginning of a diet. It provides a structure and a goal, and a way to confront life’s problems. However, dieting can also cause misery and feelings of inadequacy.

Women set themselves targets. They aim for a specific rate of weight loss and decide that all they have to do is eat less! However, it is not as simple as this and not losing weight or diet-breaking is depressing. Not being able to achieve these goals can make you feel a failure. Diet-breaking is understood in terms of being weak-willed, and this idea is promoted by the dieting industry which suggests that weight loss is a sign of control, thinness is a sign of control, and not sticking to its diet sheets is due to weakness and not the fault of its diet.

Dieting also disrupts family and social life. So many of life’s pleasurable activities are centred on eating. A celebration involves dinner, and a family get-together revolves around the dinner table. Yet dieting means denying yourself these pleasures. Having to watch others whilst you tuck into your defrosted, pre-packed, microwaved, low calorie meal is not much fun. Shopping for others and buying yourself a special lettuce is frustrating, and lettuce after carrot is boring.

Dieting is depressing. You miss out on so much and, while constant self-denial may be rewarding in a nunnery, for the majority it results in feeling fed-up, bored and isolated.

Many women said that the whole experience of dieting and diet-breaking was quite upsetting.

One woman said: ‘I’m just totally hopeless and weak, and though I hate being fat, I just don’t have the willpower to do anything about it.’ She hated herself for not losing weight, and felt inadequate and depressed because she could not stick to her diet.

Other women called themselves ‘a dustbin and a pig’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘depressed that something as simple as eating cannot be controlled’.

One woman said: ‘I feel weak and ashamed that I let myself down.’ She felt disappointed with herself and inadequate.

Several women also said that they found dieting depressing because they didn’t get any support from anyone else, in particular their husbands or boyfriends.

Many women diet because they want to be more attractive and they believe that if they lose weight their partners will appreciate the difference. In fact, many women are told to diet by the men in their lives. Recently on a popular television programme I was angered to see an attractive middle-aged slim woman being told to lose weight by her overweight husband. She told the chat show host that what she wanted most in the world was the perfect body, because it would make her husband happy. ‘He thinks my thighs are too big’, she said. He sat there nodding away in agreement, oblivious to his own fat thighs.

However, many women find that when they try to lose weight their husbands are not at all supportive.

One woman said: ‘I’m annoyed that my husband doesn’t encourage me. I wanted to prove to him that I could do it.’ Her husband felt that she should lose weight and yet did not make the process of weight loss any easier. He resented the fact that she bought low calorie food and felt deprived because the cupboards were not as well stocked as usual. He also said that she had tried to diet so many times before and not lost weight and why should this time be any different? On the one hand, husbands can make women feel overweight either by casual comments or by directly suggesting that they diet, and yet when it comes to dieting they find the whole process irritating.

Another woman said that her boyfriend actually encouraged her to break her diet. He used to make endless comments about her size and then when she started to lose weight he would buy her food and offer to take her out for dinner. In fact, he seemed quite worried that she might actually become thinner. He appeared to be threatened by other men and was worried that if she lost weight she would leave him for someone else. He thought that she was fat, but was frightened of her becoming thinner.

This feeling that they did not get any support from husbands and boyfriends was quite a common complaint, and seemed to add to the difficulty of dieting and feelings of inadequacy from not losing weight.

And the consequence of these mood changes? — eating. Feeling fed-up can reduce your determination to eat less. The drives to eat outweigh the drives to restrain and diet-breaking occurs. Depression lowers your resistance and the pleasures of eating become greater.

It was originally believed that fat people ate differently from thin people and in particular ate for comfort. It was believed that food reduced their depression and provided a source of security and a reward. It now seems that regardless of weight most people eat for comfort and find food a reward. In particular, this is true of dieters. Dieters‘ self-denial is rewarded with food, weight loss is rewarded with food, and feeling fed-up is compensated for with food. Dieters alleviate the depression caused by dieting with eating. They eat more to eradicate the low mood caused by trying to eat less. Dieting becomes its own worst enemy. It causes changes in mood which themselves cause diet-breaking and overeating.

Dieting causes misery. It causes feelings of failure, inadequacy and isolation. Eating helps to reduce these feelings.

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