Dietitian Explains Why You're Gaining Weight From Dieting
According to the Cleveland Clinic (1), 80-95% of dieters regain the weight they have lost.
Over the past century, diet culture has endorsed and advertised countless diets, giving you and so many other people inaccurate nutrition information. Diet culture insists that the constant pursuit of weight loss will give you happiness and satisfaction. But what no one tells you is that diets are designed to fail you. In fact, it’s likely that you’ve fallen down the the path of diet cycling which looks like this:
You are unhappy with your body, and wish to lose weight. Diet culture convinces you that a restrictive diet is the best way to do so.
You begin a diet that restricts calories, or foods/food groups
You lose weight initially and feel temporary happiness, but the diet is unsustainable so you stop.
After quitting the diet, you gain all of the weight back and thensome.
This causes you to feel negative emotions and feelings, you feel like the weight gain is your fault.
Your unhappiness leads you to begin another diet and “start over”, and the cycle starts again.
The diet cycle leads you down a path of self-doubt, causing you to believe that you’re a failure, have no self-control, and that you’re unworthy. And although dieting may provide short-term weight loss, over the course of a lifetime most dieters end up gaining all of the weight back and thensome! Diets are designed to make you feel like you have failed, when in reality diets are failing you.
Why are diets failing you?
The term dieting is synonymous with a less-used word: restriction, and diets are often a a gateway to the restrict-binge-shame cycle. In fact, the whole premise of a diet is restriction of some sort, including:
Restricting certain food groups
Restricting certain macronutrients
Restricting the amounts of food eaten
Restricting the kinds of food eaten
Restricting the variety of food
Restricting the flexibility of your food patterns
Diets are restriction, and restricting food groups can lead to what is known as “disordered eating” that includes dieting, binge eating, When you don’t allow yourself freedom and flexibility with food, you’re significantly more likely to binge on the foods that you have restricted. For example, if you cut out carbohydrates completely, your body understands that it’s being deprived. When you finally eat a carbohydrate-rich food at that birthday party or work celebration, your body feels like it’s going to be the last time it’s ever going to have carbs and wants you to keep eating them. This is due to the carb-restrictive diet.
Dieting creates an endless cycle of fear, shame, and guilt and severely impacts your mental health and leads to preoccupations with food.
1. Diets lead to yo-yo dieting or weight cycling.
Yo-yo dieting describes the process of flipping back and forth between states of dieting and not dieting.Yo-yo dieting is related to another term known as “weight cycling”, which involves fluctuations in weight as a result of continuous dieting. Yo-yo dieting takes a serious mental and physical toll on the body, as research shows evidence of psychological and metabolic impacts of weight cycling on the body. For many, regaining weight after dieting leads to wanting to diet again, which can lead to even more weight gain. This entraps you in an endless cycle of weight fluctuations.
2. Diets are not personalized.
Diets present a “one-size-fits-all” solution, when in reality, everyone’s food needs are different.
Apps, programs, and memberships that you pay money for are sometimes designed by individuals who have little-to-no nutrition education and often promote low-calorie diets in the name of “health and wellbeing.” To make matters even worse, these diets that are in the form of apps and programs don’t account for any existing medical conditions.
3. The human body is extremely smart and has a miraculous ability to adapt.
Metabolically-speaking, the human body has no way of understanding the intentionality of a diet. Rather, it senses that you are in a state of caloric deficit and draws itself to one conclusion: starvation. Your body will respond with what is known as “thrifty metabolism”. In other words, your body will slow down your metabolism to conserve energy and avoid starvation.
Additionally, restricting food has a significant impact on the hormones and signals of the digestive system, including grhelin and leptin levels. Ghrelin, also known as the hunger hormone, is released when your body needs more energy and requires food. In other words, this is the hormone that causes you to feel hungry. Dieting and weight loss significantly increase ghrelin levels in the body, leading you to feel even hungrier than before the diet even when eating the same amount of food.
Leptin is known as the satiety hormone aka what helps you to feel full. Dieting and weight cycling contribute to leptin levels decreasing over time. Because your body thinks it’s in a state of starvation, it stops producing as much leptin to make sure that you continue to eat. Together, dieting induced changes in ghrelin and leptin lead you to think about food more often and feel significantly hungrier and less full. To make matters worse, these changes in appetite regulation are long-term changes meaning that these effects last far longer than the short-term results of a diet.
4. Dieting and related psychological impacts create stress and increase cortisol.
It’s no secret that dieting takes an enormous toll on an individual’s mental health, as it creates stressful emotions like fear, shame, guilt, etc. Additionally, dieting often leads many to continuously track calories, check nutrition content labels, and frequently weigh themselves, all leading to more stress. Not only does the body have to endure these negative feelings, but the body also has to endure the stress of constantly changing metabolics associated with yo-yo dieting. All of these negative emotions, in combination with the biological effects of caloric restriction, put the body at an increased state of stress.
The biological and psychological impacts of stress significantly increase levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. In fact, one study examining the relationship between low-calorie dieting and cortisol found that, “Restricting calories increased the total output of cortisol, and monitoring calories increased perceived stress.” (2). Increased levels of cortisol change the way your body utilizes food, leading to changes including increased fatty deposits, weight gain and weight retention, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure (3). All of these symptoms are risk factors for serious chronic conditions, including stroke, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes.
What are alternatives to dieting?
If you are tired of endless diets that don’t work and failed weight loss attempts, there are alternatives to dieting that will help you mend your relationship with food:
Intuitive Eating
Intuitive eating is an approach to eating that is designed to reconnect you with your internal cues of hunger and satiety. Quite literally the opposite of a diet, intuitive eating focuses on giving you freedom when it comes to food. By integrating both the mind and body into the healing process, this framework explores thoughts and feelings about food and body image enabling you to listen to your body’s needs with compassion and respect.
Health At Every Size (HAES)
HAES stands for Health At Every Size , and represents a healthcare approach and social justice movement aimed at ending size-based discrimination. The HAES movement works to expose weight bias in society and health care, and encourages the belief that weight does not determine worthiness or health. It comprises 5 basic principles: weight inclusivity, respectful care, eating for well-being, life-enhancing movement, and health enhancement.
Body Positive Movement
The body positive movement aims to end the harmful and problematic beliefs that result from weight stigma and promotes inclusivity especially for those in fat bodies. It encourages the acceptance of all bodies, regardless of weight, size, or shape. For more information, consider visiting our page for books and podcasts on body positivity.
So many people fall victim to the false promises of dieting and diet-culture, and you are not alone. If you are struggling with dieting or weight gain and are looking for a way out of the endless diet cycle, consider meeting with our dietitian nutritionists at Bravespace Nutrition . Our Seattle-based dietitians are trained to help you heal your relationship with food and restore your self-compassion. Schedule a discovery call for more information!
You’ll also love…
Portion Control Is A Diet And You Deserve Better
Can Intuitive Eating Help With Binge Eating?
What's Diet Culture And Why Is It Harmful?
What Does An Anti-Diet Dietitian Do?
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-people-diet-lose-weight-and-gain-it-all-back/#:~:text=Experts%20think%20as%20many%20as%2080%20to%2095%25,the%20weight%20they%E2%80%99ve%20worked%20so%20hard%20to%20lose.
Tomiyama AJ, Mann T, Vinas D, Hunger JM, Dejager J, Taylor SE. Low calorie dieting increases cortisol. Psychosom Med. 2010;72(4):357-364. doi:10.1097/PSY.0b013e3181d9523c
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22187-cortisol
Are you struggling with weight gain after years of dieting and feel frustrated and defeated? Our Seattle eating Disorder dietitians want to help you!
Despite being told that dieting would help you loose weight over time, the reality is that for more people they gain the weight back from dieting plus more, over time. And this, in combination with feeling confused about food and having a poor body image, can leave you feeling frustrated and sad. This is where our eating disorder dietitians come in! Our dietitians are trained eating disorder experts who specialize in helping people to heal their relationship to food and their body so that YOU can live a life free from rules about food and hatred of your body. Reach out to our caring dietitians today to schedule a discovery call to see if they would be a good fit for you so that you can learn how to become and intuitive eater and stop dieting once and for all.