Why I Think Diets Don’t Work

We’ve all heard it a million times, “Diet’s Don’t Work”, yet we keep going back for more, over and over and over again.

We’re smart women, you and me, and we’ve heard the statistics that pbrt 95% of the time, you gain back any weight you lost on a diet, plus some more, yet we try another diet and then another in complete belief that “this will be the one”.

Diets have ruined pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving and sugar cookies at Christmas. Every bite fills us with guilt and thoughts of a ballooning waistline as we calculate the calories or points. Even worse, we sometimes shamefully hide in the corner and gobble down these glorious, once a year treats praying no one catches us eating the forbidden food.

Then there are the weddings, high school reunions and summer vacations that we starve ourselves for in hopes of fitting into that little black dress or just being able to pull off something that didn’t have a “W” after the size. And invariably, we’re a week or two out from the event, hangry, frustrated, ready to slap the first person that offers us food and we’re not any closer to fitting into that dress. We throw our hands up and say, “f*ck it, I can’t lose 50 pounds by next weekend”, and start piecing together the frumpiest outfit we can find to cover the hideous body that couldn’t lose weight if our lives depended on it. At least that was my story.

This is an exhausting and painful way to live. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know. You’re probably living some version of it right now.

There is no better feeling than liberation from the “fixing me” project. Fix this weight problem and my life will be perfect. Fix this weight problem and I will be enough for the world. Fix this weight problem and I will love myself. It always comes back to the weight. But is the weight really the problem?

Through the lens of experience and self-compassion, I now know that my weight was never the problem — it was a by-product of a very different problem. If I blamed my weight, I didn’t have to face the things that really needed fixing — the problems that no one else could see but me. The weight was real and tangible. It was an easy scapegoat because everyone could see my fat and most would agree, it was the problem that needed solving. Pursuing weight loss made sense, it gave my brain something to solve and distracted me from having to deal with real ugly, festering wounds created by a lifetime of self-loathing and never feeling like I was enough.

Dieting served two purposes for me. Dieting felt productive — like I was doing “doing something about it”. Our brains love a good problem to solve, and it likes efficiency, so logically it zeros in on the most obvious problem — weight loss. We research diets, we read books and follow all of the “gurus”. We watch the videos, hire the nutritionist, join the gym and fill our refrigerators with produce destined to become a science experiment before we figure out what to do with it. We consume information and then consume some more, but stop short of taking real, meaningful action.

Dieting is also a deceptively effective way to punish yourself for “letting this happen to my body”. I’d mask it with words of grandeur like, “getting healthy” or “eating clean”, but dieting was nothing but a self-imposed punishment for me. I believed I didn’t deserve for weight loss to be easy, because I did this to myself. I obviously didn’t care enough to put the Oreos down and I clearly was lazy or I’d get my fat ass off the couch and exercise. Writing these words pains me beyond belief. The depth of my self-loathing alarms me to this day. It makes me sad that I spent so much of my life beating myself up. But it is my truth, and if I had to guess, some version of it is probably yours too.

Dieting doesn’t work because it’s nothing more than a superficial attempt to heal a bigger problem. It’s like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. I know, that’s a little graphic, but I think it’s a good representation of how many of us are approaching our “weight problem”.

We typically approach the whole process of dieting as a punishment. In the form of dieting, we go to battle with our bodies from a place of self-loathing and dare I say hate, desperately trying to ‘fix’ ourselves. Pursuing weight loss from this place is doomed to fail.

Without self-compassion and love for the woman who has sacrificed her own happiness over and over again in the pursuit of a thinner body, weight loss will continue to elude you.

I have compassion now for the past me because I believe she needed to exist in order for me to become who I am today. I am grateful to her. She is my hero now. She was braver and wiser than I ever gave her credit. She had the courage and foresight to recognize there was something amazing under all of those layers of fat she had been blaming and battling. She saw the spark and locked up her arsenal of diets, hung up her shame shawl and got to work on figuring out how to love herself.

A handful of years later, and over 100 pounds lighter, I am waging a different war. I want every woman who has spent even a second hating their bodies and conditioning their happiness on weight loss to stop, right now, and hang up their dieting career for good.

The moment you agree with yourself to stop dieting, you start healing. The wounds of militant control over your food and eating behaviors slowly start to close and you feel lighter for the first time in years. You can breathe again.

Self-compassion starts with thanking yourself for even considering the possibility of a life without dieting. When approached from a place of real, honest to goodness self-love, weight loss is possible. Not because you found the perfect diet, but because you found yourself.

I am a Life Coach and Integrative Nutrition Coach on a mission to dismantle diet culture so that women can stop measuring their self-worth by the number on the scale or the size of their jeans. If you are ready to ditch dieting and lock arms with me, visit www.normafrahncoaching.com. I’d love to have you in my world!