Most modelled themselves on Victoria Beckham and admitted to skipping meals in their efforts to adhere to the latest manifestation of a world gone mad, where women are supposed to look like pre-pubescent boys with big tits. By the time these girls become young adults, they will have internalized the belief that there is something wrong with them for being their natural size or slightly bigger. They think it is their fault and collude with the culture that tells them they should be thin to be worthwhile.
Guilt
This is why all dieters feel guilty about eating—whatever they eat. Even though they enjoy the taste of food, they usually gulp it down quickly. This is because, subconsciously, they feel they are doing something wrong by eating anything at all – although logically they know they have to eat to stay alive.
Guilt is also the reason they put themselves on horrendous detox regimes, living on just fruit juice for a week with all the discomfort, headaches, weakness and coated tongue that are the inevitable results. And when they feel that bad they think they deserve it because this is the price for eating too much and becoming fat.
People go on strict diets to punish themselves for being fat – for overeating.
Once you understand that diets are punishments for bad behaviour, you can understand why they fail. Eating is not a crime but you behave as though it were. Diets are like being in prison where you do ‘time’ for not looking right: ‘I’ve done three days now’. Prisoners, however, become rebellious. Regardless of how willingly you entered your diet-cell, after a while you begin to think about breaking out. Convicts fantasize about a cake with a file in it. Dieters just fantasize about the cake.
A Distorted Self-image
Most dieters have such a distorted view of their own bodies that they don’t know what their genetic shape should be. They accept the idea that there is an ‘ideal’ body and that theirs is far from it. So whenever they feel bad about themselves, regardless of the cause, they say they ‘feel fat’.
Although you see yourself as weak-willed, self-indulgent and lacking in self-discipline, none of this is true. No-one has ever tried more diligently to solve a problem than the chronic dieter. You have followed every recommendation ever made regarding the best way to approach what you see as your problem. You have deprived yourself of food in endless ways, and spent time, energy and money in your efforts to find the answer.
Unfortunately, the diets you have embarked upon have always failed you in some way because, if you are an over-eater or binger, once that urge to eat is upon you, there is no way you could stick to a diet devised by someone else. These diets never address your need to turn to food when under stress. That is why only four dieters out of every hundred keep the weight off.
Even now, scientists are testing production of a new, ‘safer’ diet pill—one that will eliminate hunger without the damaging side-effects of previously used amphetamine-based drugs. They might as well not bother. Most overweight women do not eat because they are hungry. They eat because they are tense, stressed, bored and often because they are depressed at being fat. How many times has the following scenario been played out by a woman and her concerned partner:
Him: Why are you eating that?
Her: Because I’m fat.
Him: But if you finish that whole packet you’ll be even fatter.
Her: I know. I don’t care.
Him: But you do care. You keep saying how miserable you are because you’re fat.
Her: Just LEAVE IT will you! I’ll do it when I’m ready.
That’s it, mister, leave it. She will do it but in her own time. Any word from you will send her diving into the biscuit tin.
You may not believe it, but you are not deliberately being self-destructive if you eat when you’re not hungry. You eat at these times because it feels ‘right’ to you – as if food will ‘help’. And you’d be right. For many years, compulsive eating has provided you with a coping mechanism.
So it makes no sense to assume that the thousands of people who are currently dieting are somehow deficient, that they lack the strength of character to achieve anything, particularly when many of them succeed in their pursuit of goals in other areas of their lives. Those shapeless women Members of Parliament who reach the front benches and look as if they get dressed in the dark are a good example. Clearly there must be something in every diet that ensures its ultimate failure, regardless of how long it’s been in the bestseller list.
Dieters always assume every aspect of their lives will be perfect in a smaller size. They cling to the belief that the next diet will be their passport to a better life, and they are putting everything on hold until this magic moment arrives. Compulsive eaters can’t imagine not being on a diet – the only alternative lifestyle they see involves eating everything in sight.
The truth is that if people ate natural produce all the time, including grains, fish, chicken, fruit and vegetables – even a certain amount of butter or oil – they would be slim and have adequate nutrition. Highly processed, fatty, artificially sweetened stuff just confuses your system. Your body simply doesn’t know what to do with the chemicals. Ultimately, this sort of food is not satisfying so you crave more of it, and you lose track of the brain’s usual regulatory signals that tell you whether you are hungry or full up. When your body doesn’t get what it wants, it keeps trying, eating till it is satisfied.
As a seasoned dieter, you probably welcome the rules and regulations of a new diet and feel relief to be able to hand over your food decisions to the author, assuming they must know what they are talking about. But diets never live up to their promises if they prescribe some quirky food permutation or are very restrictive. You will always find a reason to go back to what you consider to be ‘normal eating’.
Media Pressure
The media doesn’t help. Editors of women’s magazines are constantly under pressure to come up with news about dieting to feed their readers’ presumably insatiable desires for weight-loss advice. Although some of these magazines are cautious and thorough in their approach to nutrition reporting, a ‘diet breakthrough’ is just too hard to resist writing about—as the editors will tell you, they have to give the readers what they want!
You will have seen countless articles in magazines saying ‘Diets Don’t Work’ followed, 20 pages later, by a ‘Get Slim for Summer’ feature. Everyone who reads the message that diets don’t work resists it. You cling to the belief that you can find a way to make one work. Look at all those ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures of people who have tried to lose weight for those beach photos. Surely if it works for them it will work for you. (Secret: what the magazine didn’t tell you is that the people in the ‘after’ pictures didn’t make it through to ‘Still Slim in Spring’, and neither will you.)
Some writers are paid by product companies to place promotional articles in magazines. The pressure on editors to fill their magazine content every month with new stories can lead to reporters and feature writers falling back on ‘press-release journalism’, which means they will simply reproduce material sent to them by PR companies—and every magazine editor is bombarded with press releases all the time eulogizing new products and services for their readers.
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