It appears, that what the many of us have been saying for years, is now once more confirmed. Diets are a waste of time. Spectacularly. In fact diets are such a waste of time you could compare them to going to Chewbacca for a haircut. Which would be snazzy, I’m sure, but not quite the sophisticate look you’re going for.
Let me go through this article adding bits from my own experience of loosing weight because this blog is obviously about me, me, me and I like talking about me. 😛
Diets are not a good way to lose weight in the long term, according to researchers. They found that although dieters can lose significant amounts of weight in the first few months, most will return to their starting weight within five years.
“Diets do not lead to sustained weight loss or health benefits for the majority of people,” said Traci Mann, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“You can initially lose 5% to 10% of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back. We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more. Sustained weight loss was found only in a small minority of participants, while complete weight regain was found in the majority.”
Don’t I know it. This is ringing very true at the moment. I’m very short, officially petite which simply means under 5 foot 4 (in fact this blog title came from me going over possible names and mispronouncing “minute” into “my newt” which I tend to do. I am told this is cute. Obviously I must now resign from my feminist position as it is well known we are a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” No mention of cute there and quite frankly it would undermine our whole evoool agenda.) Back on topic; this shortness means that whilst I weigh a lot less than most of my peers, I keep more visible curves- especially in the hip and bum area.
Last year, partly due to financial concerns (i.e. a £1 difference) I stopped buying the proper meals at my canteen and lived off soup and bread alone for lunch, and cut off all snacks.
I went from 9 stone 3 at the beginning of (I think) November to 8 stone 5 by mid January. When I weighed myself yesterday it was back up to 9 stone. Being honest, I’d love to loose the weight again but quite frankly I have better things to focus on and I can’t find the motivation to be dissatisfied with myself.
Repeatedly losing and gaining weight has been linked in previous studies to cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and altered immune function.
Mmm… Soup is nice, but not quite nice enough to risk that if you ask me.
Of course I would encourage anyone to loose weight if they are feeling unhealthy but not to do so for aesthetics and not to do so as a regime. I’m not going to lie; It felt absolutely fantastic when my mother told me I should try on the size 14 jeans and it turned out I was a size 8. It felt great having a friend I hadn’t seen in ages say I looked “so totally hot” in my corset at the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I loved seeing the numbers on the scale going down and it made me feel very confident and accomplished.
But during the same time period a friend of mine got anorexia. I believe she was at the lower end of seven stone?
I remember her going around her house and her rolling her eyes and joking about how if she had any cherry coke it would give her a heart attack and kill her. She’s a really tall girl and this is important because the doctors told her that she needed to weigh 9 stone minimum for her height. We think that there is only one template for the body and this is where we go wrong. There is no template. We all have individual BMI charts and we all have different metabolisms and shapes. This obvious truth should not need to be said. If you are living a healthy lifestyle don’t you dare loose that weight. It belongs there and is part of you. It is not an anomaly you can “correct”. You might as well chop of your arm.
My friend is okay now but it was incredibly scary (she’s the third I know to go down from that and the one who recovered the best); it wasn’t a long time after I found out I weighed less than my friend suffering from anorexia that I stopped trying to loose weight.
They have to look at it not as a diet where they’re denying themselves because eventually people get sick of that and go back to their previous lifestyle.
“What they’ve got to think about moving towards is a new lifestyle but doing it through small, sustainable changes. They’ve got to find a physical activity they enjoy, whether it’s walking or going to the gym or taking up a new sport.”
The above is very true. The only way I could motivate myself to loose was by hating; my body, my lack of self-control. It was the promise of beautiful as something ahead of me, something I had yet to reach but not yet. It was that “just a little bit more” and then… and then what? Another little bit more. Followed by yet another. My original target had been simply 9 stone. Then 9 stone 10. 9 stone 8. What about 5? And if the scale went up, I felt that promise of beauty slipping from my hands into the abyss of my stomach.
Here’s the beauty; when I was younger and living in France I sometimes felt like I was having out of body experiences. Actually I’ll call those “in body experiences”. They happened when I was feeling clumsy and awkward. My hands would seem disproportionate, I’d be towering like a giant over the slim petite French girls (damn their bone structure), I felt like my body was too big and heavy to move around or live in. I felt like my mind was sinking in this gargantuan vehicule I had no control over.
But now this is reversing. Jane Austen said “To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.” This, I found to be true. But that beauty and prettiness came to me through the realisation that I had something to be confident about and proud of; my intellect, my smile, my personality.
It came when I was standing in a harshly lit dressing room, trying on jeans and ironically joking to myself whether “my bum looks fat in that”. And then I thought “yes, yes it does. It’s huge and that gives me presence. I exist. And my body is just the right size to hold my spirit; I don’t want to be smaller because I feel like I’d flow outside of myself.” So I bought the jeans and quoted some Maya Angelou “Phenomenal Woman” to myself and went home.
I haven’t dieted since.
I don’t know if I never will again but I’m certainly not going to add to the coffers of a mega-rich industry that will never offer me fulfilment.
So that’s my experience. Don’t bother; don’t diet. Really love yourself; every single bit of you; right now. The more you do, the more you’ll be able to focus on what real self-improvement means because all the red herrings will be swept away.
Besides that, we are so much more than perpetual works in progress. Ultimately life is too short to count on the way we hope tomorrow’s photo’s turn out.
But don’t forget to wear sunscreen. 😛
Source: Why dieter’s have fat chance of loosing weight- The Guardian