My Personal Experience On The Diet Roller Coaster
I love food. I come from a food loving family and as a result have struggled with my weight for as long as I can remember. My mom tells me I was a skinny little girl. But I have no recollection of this period of life; it must have been very brief! I just remember being chubby and most childhood pictures confirm my memories. I progressed from ‘chubby’ to ‘big’ to ‘overweight.’ It is no fun being a fat teenager, especially in our ‘model perfect super thin is always in’ society. The summer prior to my entering 9th grade I went on my first diet subsisting on green salad, cottage cheese, and fruit. I slimmed down, but it didn’t last.
The struggles continued through the college years, where I vacillated between celery and popcorn deprivation and ice cream and Cheese-It binges, all the while over-depending on aerobics classes in a feeble attempt to compensate. Weekends at home meant loading up on Mom’s wonderful cooking and indulging in my favorite local pizza & beer and promising to start a new diet first thing Monday. The ups and downs were exhausting. Eating and dieting were an obsession.
Over the next ten plus years the dieting ups and downs continued. I gained and lost the same 10-30 pounds over and over and over. I tried every diet out there–Atkins, Pritikin, South Beach, Grapefruit, Weight Watchers, Sommersize, Schwarzbein, Fat Flush, low carb, high carb, vegetarian, and through it all my love of food continued.
Why Diets Don’t Work
According to Drs. Roizen and Oz, in their bestselling book, You: On A Diet: The Owner’s Manual for Waist Management, “When you try to ‘diet’ by going for long periods of time without eating or by eating way too few calories, your brain senses the starvation and sends an SOS signal through your body to store fat because famine is on its way. That’s why people who go on extreme fasts and extremely low calorie diets don’t lose the expected weight. They store fat as a natural protective mechanism. To lose weight, you have to keep your body from switching into starvation mode. The only way to do it: “Eat often, in the form of frequent, healthy meals, and snacks.”
Other reasons diets fail include:
Eating the wrong foods, like overly processed chemically laden foods, simple refined sugars, refined flours, high fructose corn syrup and saturated foods. We have gone from consuming 7.5 pounds of sugar a year in 1700 to 114 pounds in 1967 to 150 pounds on average today! And it has virtually no nutritional value at all–no vitamins or minerals–just ‘empty calories.’ Studies have linked this increased sugar consumption to increased rates of obesity and diabetes. The more processed foods we eat, the less room we leave for the whole grains, fresh vegetables and protein-rich foods our bodies really need to help us stay healthy and grounded. According to USDA data, people who eat diets high in sugar get less calcium, fiber, folate, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, magnesium, iron, and other nutrients. They also consume fewer fruits and vegetables. Foods made from white flour also have very poor satiety value, says the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, so you end up eating more to get full and increase the likelihood that you will end up overweight.
Emotional Eating. We don’t just eat when we are physically hungry. Many of us eat when we are happy or sad, tired or stressed. We eat for lots of reasons beyond physical hunger. Sometimes we eat because something looks good or smells good even if we just had a big lunch and aren’t hungry or to fill an emotional void. Most diets fail to address this important aspect of feeding ourselves.
Restrictions, Restrictions, Restrictions. A lot of diets tell us what we can’t have and leave out whole categories of foods. We may be able to sustain this eating style for a while, but usually, in time we begin to crave what we are missing and revert to old ways. Cycling between all or nothing thinking. The most successful change occurs slowly. It takes at least 28 days to form a new habit. A better approach may be to focus on slowly introducing new foods and learning to gradually make healthy replacements for less healthy foods. For example, using salsa instead of sugar laden ketchup or whole grain bread instead of white bread.
Through the years I have learned a lot about food and nutrition and cooking, about what works and what doesn’t. It has included lots of trial and error. I have read more books than I care to admit, taken cooking classes, worked in restaurants and for a caterer, and even cooked as a personal chef for a while. For a time, transferring my passion from eating food to cooking food worked as a weight management technique. There is something about cooking all day and being up to your elbows in food that is overwhelming to the senses and strangely satiating, although not altogether healthy! Replacing one obsession with another is not a viable solution.
A healthy balanced life requires a healthy relationship with food. In our society we tend to treat food as the enemy, something to be constantly feared. Trips to France and Italy helped me learn a new appreciation for food. It is an important component of life, something to be enjoyed and savored. There I learned that it is possible to enjoy food, to have a healthy relationship with food while maintaining a healthy weight. I have lost 30 pounds and kept it off for several years. I still go up and down a bit–my weight tends to fluctuate 3-5 pounds depending on the time of year and life circumstances, amount of exercise I am getting, and overall satisfaction level with my life. Minor adjustments are required from time to time, when a couple of pounds sneak up, but no major dietary overhauls.
