Why to make 2022 the year that does NOT start off with a diet
As published on Psychology Today.
It’s the New Year and with that comes—you guessed it—resolutions. Nothing seems to top the “New Year, new me” priority list quite like going on a diet to lose weight.
And yet for many people, every year it’s the same cycle: Find the latest fad, try it for a few weeks, maybe even a few months, and then “fall off the bandwagon.” There’s a reason this pattern doesn’t work—and it’s not because of lack of trying on your part. It’s a system that sets you up to fail.
So before you start repeating the same old thing, here’s why to make 2022 the start of a new relationship with food and eating.
Diets Don’t Work
There, I said it. Diets do not work. Maybe you’ve seen this firsthand for yourself, but research also tells a similar story.
Meta-analyses, which are a method of analyzing data from multiple studies in order to summarize results, find that the large majority of individuals who endeavour to lose weight end up regaining it. For example, findings from one meta-analysis that looked at 29 different studies (Anderson et al., 2001) found that two years after losing weight, most people had regained more than half of what they had lost. After five years, this jumped to a regain of about 80 percent of what was initially lost. It’s a pretty dismal statistic for a behaviour that so many people engage in.
Even If You Change For a Little While, Diets Are Not Sustainable
Why is it that diets set people up to fail? A number of biological, environmental, and behavioural mechanisms have been proposed.
For one thing, the multi-billion-dollar diet industry arguably thrives off of people’s failure. But more importantly, the physiology of our bodies and our underlying survival mechanisms are set up in a way that makes weight loss very difficult. In short, our bodies are smart. When faced with consistent deprivation, they learn to adapt to conserve energy, which makes a lot of sense. This phenomenon, a slowing of the resting metabolic rate, is often referred to as “metabolic adaptation.”
You may remember the "Biggest Loser" study that was released a few years ago. Effectively, they found that the drastic weight loss that occurred on the show was associated with significant metabolic slowing that was maintained six years after the weight loss occurred (Fothergill et al., 2016). Slower metabolism means that you need to consume fewer calories in order to maintain weight loss. Unsurprisingly, the study found that most of the participants regained the weight, likely because of how difficult it would have been for them to maintain the caloric restriction required to keep their body weight down.
Dieting Doesn’t Inherently Make You Healthier
Regardless of whether or not diets work from a weight-loss standpoint, it also begs the question: Does living in a smaller body actually make you healthier? You might be surprised to learn that it may not.
You can’t judge someone’s physical health based on their size. There are plenty of people living in larger bodies who are perfectly healthy and don’t struggle with any medical concerns or conditions. Conversely, many people live in smaller bodies and do struggle with their health. All of this to say: Using weight as a proxy for health is pretty inaccurate.
Let’s say you do struggle with health concerns and have been given the one-size-fits-none answer to simply “lose weight.” Well, it’s not quite that simple. The good news? While your weight may not be 100 percent within your control, your behaviours are. While you can’t will yourself to be a different shape or size, you can change what and how much you consume—and these habits, independent of weight loss, have been shown to positively impact health. Striving to make dietary changes, regardless of whether or not this comes along with tangible weight loss, has been shown to reduce the risk of both diabetes and heart disease in different studies (Appel et al., 1997; Gannon et al., 2011; Gaesser et al., 2011).
Diets Can Contribute to Disordered Eating and Eating Disorders
The restriction promoted towards the end of achieving weight loss can be a slippery slope down a path of disordered eating. In one study, researchers followed adult dieters over two years and found that almost 4 percent developed a diagnosable eating disorder (Fairburn et al., 2005). This percentage may seem low but it’s still higher than the prevalence of eating disorders in the general adult population.
Other studies have looked at predictive factors that may make it more likely that individuals transition from dieting to disordered eating. Following a cohort of adolescents over 10 years into adulthood, Loth et al. (2014) found that weight concerns and weight importance were linked to the higher levels of disordered eating at follow-up.
While it’s not a given that dieting leads to disordered eating in all cases, it is concerning given the proportion of youth that endorse weight- and body image-related concerns. Dieting isn’t just something that adults do; children and adolescents are just as susceptible, if not more so. This is pretty scary given that adolescent girls who diet may be five times likelier to develop an eating disorder than those who don’t (Golden et al., 2016).
Food is Meant to be Enjoyed
... and yet we live in a world where pleasure is framed as the problem. Obesity researchers often talk about the “obesogenic environment,” which is just a fancy way of saying that it’s really difficult to eat healthier in a world where fast and processed foods are the cheaper and more accessible options. This is true—although the bigger issue that I’ve faced in my clinical practice is the extent to which people have learned not to trust themselves around food because they’ve been given the message that they can’t.
The environment may be part of the issue, sure, but being told that certain foods are “bad” and other foods are “good” is a recipe for wanting all of the forbidden fruits and then beating yourself up after you’ve had them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with eating ice cream, or chips, or whatever it is that you have a hankering for. In fact, taking the time to give yourself full permission to eat all foods, and to enjoy and savour each and every bite, is associated with a more balanced relationship with food, not a more hedonic one (Kristeller & Wolever, 2010).