You are tired of dieting and weight cycling but you still believe that if you can find the right diet that incorporates weight cycling, then you’ll finally crack it!

Even though, you also know from painful experience that the weight returns – sometimes quickly and otherwise slowly over the years due to weight cycling.
But you believe it’s your fault when this happens and sit in a soup of shame and despair not knowing how to eat ‘well’ until the next diet comes along – often with the fanfare of a celebrity endorsement to suck you back into weight cycling.

What’s happening here? And come to think of it what IS a diet?

Diets are generally based on defining good and bad foods with specific meal plans and a goal number of calories per day, with food restrictions to some extent. Some are more rules-based than others, but the overall theme is one of deprivation, leading to weight cycling.

Ok, so why doesn’t dieting work for 95% of dieters who experience weight cycling?

Negative body thoughts

Every diet starts here. “I look fat…. I need to control my eating….I hate the way I look…etc”. Sound familiar? It starts from a place of self-deficiency – something we learn at an earlier point in our life from someone or something. It is then reinforced through BMI measurements, peer group pressures, relationships, and the society and culture surrounding us, which contributes to weight cycling.

Did you know that a mere 3-5% of the population falls into the ideal female body shape?

Yet the myth of the attainable ‘perfect’ body persists in the media, with the dominant images in magazines and advertisements of unattainable bodies for most of the population. Moreover, your exposure to these images, of a mere 3 minutes, results in increased stress, shame, insecurity, and body dissatisfaction, contributing to weight cycling.

Fosters disinhibition

Dieting requires you to focus on external cues – becoming more distant and disconnected from your internal cues for satiety, fullness, and hunger. If you’ve been dieting most of your life – and it’s not uncommon in my experience to be dieting or to be put on a diet from the tender age of 5 years upwards, then you will have learned to tune out your natural internal cues when it comes to food and eating, contributing to weight cycling.

This can lead to what is known as a ‘last supper mentality’ or compulsive approach to food and eating when not following the rules of a diet. So, dieting can lead to compulsive eating, disordered eating, and in some can become a binge eating disorder, perpetuating weight cycling.

Dysfunctional eating

The disconnection from internal eating cues you may experience as a dieter, particularly because of diet cycling, leads to an unhealthy relationship with food and your body. You may get caught up in patterns of diet restriction, undereating, skipping meals, fasting, overeating, or bingeing leading to feelings of guilt and self-loathing, exacerbating weight cycling.

Perpetuates internalised weight stigma

Western cultural idealization of thin or specific trendy body shapes compounds what has become a social issue of fatphobia and more recently pathologized as a disease - obesity. The treatment for being overweight or ‘obese’ in the UK is access to a diet, with little to no acknowledgment of the links of body shape and size to genetics, cultural heritage, and the long-term damage of weight cycling through dieting. It’s a vicious circle encouraged by an industry that profits from the never-ending weight cycling, self-loathing, and desperation to feel and look ‘normal’, perpetuating weight cycling.

It can be really confronting to acknowledge this fact, especially when mainstream culture, society, and even medical practitioners do not, leading to weight cycling.

The mere thought of a diet gives hope, like a magic wand, and for many people with larger bodies so much of their lives are dependent on the diet working – it’s about their relationships, their children, their self-esteem, and confidence, their freedom of expression and protection from judgment in society as being ‘fat’ or ‘lazy’ due to weight cycling.

I understand the dieter’s predicament. I have lived it most of my life too and I have committed my work as a psychotherapist to seek out the best and latest research in this field to rediscover a better way to physical and psychological health, free from weight cycling.

I don’t offer a magic wand, but I can walk a path with you to better sustainable psychological health, by working on healing the body from the long-term impact of dieting and weight cycling.

Get in touch with me if this resonates with you and you are interested in learning more about the effective strategies and techniques for managing weight cycling.

Photo by SHVETS production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sporty-women-with-different-body-types-in-studio-6975558/