Due to my 11+ years of maintaining a large weight-loss, I consider myself to currently be a “dieting success”. 

For the past 63 years, I’ve spent lots of time thinking about, reading about, and actually participating in a great many Diets that were designed to produce weight-loss.

Every Diet that I’ve ever been on involved my ability to withstand the physical, mental, and/or emotional hardship of living with various eating restrictions.

Although we can successfully put our primary focus on the positive aspects of a particular diet, or dieting in general,  negatives still exist; and, on occasion, these thoughts will fill our minds.  

What does “suffering” mean?  Suffering is bearing, or enduring, pain or distress, which can be either physical, mental or emotional.  Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts.

What is “dieting”?  Dieting is when a person gives their body less food than it needs to survive in the hope that it will eat itself, and thereby become smaller.  Call it a diet, call it a lifestyle change, when a person starves their body hoping that it will eat itself to achieve the result of intentional weight loss,  they are on a diet.

Most people perceive Dieting  …a restriction of one’s food intake…  to be a form of suffering, and weight-loss is considered the reward for enduring that suffering.

Successful dieting depends on the ability to make sacrifices. A sacrifice is something you give up for the sake of a better cause. 

When dieting, a person continually sacrifices by eating less-food-than-their-body-wants-and-needs-to-maintain-its-status-quo, in order to make that body’s physical size smaller, i.e. to lose weight.

When the weight-loss payoff for that sacrifice, which involves suffering, is reduced or disappears, …. people tend to fail in their efforts to restrict their food intake.

Great loves affairs have a honeymoon period and dieting is no exception.  A great many people do very well during the first two or three weeks of a diet.

It doesn’t matter how extreme the effort might be, how much restriction is involved, or how much hunger we might be facing; if the scale is moving, especially if it’s moving quickly, it’s easy to deny that we are suffering.

People who have come off the most extreme diets will often say that their restrictive diet was “great”, and that they just failed to stick with it.

But if their diet really was so great, why couldn’t they stick with it?  Why wasn’t the promise of “thin” (aka: “healthy”) enough to keep them restricting their food intake? 

In almost every case, people who are on an intense diet give it up once the scales slows down.  While the scale is regularly whispering sweet nothings in their ears, it is easy to live in denial of their actual suffering that is involved with that eating behavior.  After all, the numbers on that scale are flying down.  But eventually and inevitably, their weight loss slows down. 

This is the problem with weight loss; it simply doesn’t last forever.  It slows down because the body loses weight, physiologic changes called “metabolic adaptations” occur that are designed to protect us against what the body perceives as some sort of famine. It slows down because, as we lose weight, there’s literally less of us to burn calories. 

Weight loss also slows down because, in the diet’s early honeymoon-like days, dieters are usually more vigilant and strict.  Eventually, if the scale slows down too much, stops, or …worse…starts going back up, suddenly all of that suffering becomes too much for them to endure.  After all, why suffer if there’s no payoff?


I see a great deal of truth in what obesity specialist, Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, M.D. says in his book “The Diet Fix”.

Dr. Freedhoff says, "If you don't like the life you're living while you're losing, eventually you're going to find yourself going back to the life you were living before you lost."  Doing this will cause your body to re-gain the weight-loss.

 
About weighing and scale addiction, Dr. Freedhoff says that physiologically, plateaus do not exist.

He acknowledges that there are periods of time when the scale doesn’t immediately and accurately reflect a person’s fat loss; but then he says ….”Unless it’s a temporary trick of the scale, . . . if you're not losing, either you're burning fewer calories than you think; you're eating more than you think; or some combination thereof.“



He says although there's really no such thing as a “Plateau”, there IS such a thing as a "FLOOR". If you've truly stopped losing weight, there are really only two questions you need to ask yourself. 


1. Could I happily eat any less?


2. Could I happily exercise any more?


If the answer is "yes" then you can tighten things up, but If the answer to both is "no", there's nothing left for you to do.  The number of your BMI is not an issue. You’ve Arrived.  You’re There.

This is because IF you can't happily eat any less and you can't happily exercise any more -- then it's unlikely that doing this will ever become part of your permanent behavior.  If your new eating behavior is only temporary, eventually your former eating behavior will return…along with your lost weight.

Eating isn’t really only about health or weight management.  Food isn’t just fuel.  If it were, we would all swallow our calorie pills, followed by our vitamin pills, and be whatever weight we wanted, because we would easily take in more calories, or less calories, depending on what body size we wanted. 

Food really isn't ONLY about fuel or sustenance.  It also exists for pleasure; to comfort; to celebrate; to bolster; and to support. 

Some people are able to endure a great deal of suffering in order to reach a weight-goal that they greatly desire.

However, long term weight management has to somehow become more than just the entrenchment of suffering. 

Individuals who want to succeed at maintaining long-term weight loss must find some long-term method of eating that allows them to be be able to eat less food in a way, that for them, doesn’t qualify as suffering.

I’m  continually searching for that way.

NOTE:  Bumped up for new viewers. Originally posted on 2/1/2016

I find the article below intriguing as well as appealing. Throughout my lifetime of dieting, I’ve seen a great deal of evidence supporting many of the statements it contains, such as: 

“The desire for more life … grew into an obsession with transforming the self into a perfected object.”

When we make the choice to follow the rules of any “recommended” diet, we do this because we want to make our bodies conform to cultural standards of “beauty” and/or “health”.  Which means, of course, our goal is … to transform our bodies into a more “perfected object”.

Another such statement is:

“People willingly, happily, hand over their freedom in exchange for the bondage of a diet that forbids their most cherished foods, all for the promise of relief from choice.”

Every voluntary action we make, or don’t make, is a choice.  When we choose one action, … it eliminates the ability to choose an alternative action  …. at least for that present time. So, when we choose to follow any specific outside dieting rules, our choice is also to give up making our own ongoing individual food choices.

My current choice is to read, think about, and share the concepts contained within this following article. 

Eating Toward Immortality
Diet culture is just another way of dealing with the fear of death.
by MICHELLE ALLISON posted in The Atlantic in 2/2017

Knowing a thing means you don’t need to believe in it. Whatever can be known, or proven by logic or evidence, doesn’t need to be taken on faith.

Certain details of nutrition and the physiology of eating are known and knowable: the fact that humans require certain nutrients; the fact that our bodies convert food into energy and then into new flesh (and back to energy again when needed).

But there are bigger questions that don’t have definitive answers, like what is the best diet for all people? For me?

Nutrition is a young science that lies at the intersection of several complex disciplines—chemistry, biochemistry, physiology, microbiology, psychology—and though we are far from having figured it all out, we still have to eat to survive. When there are no guarantees or easy answers, every act of eating is something like a leap of faith.

Eating is the first magic ritual, an act that transmits life energy from one object to another, according to cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker in his posthumously published book Escape From Evil. All animals must feed on other life to sustain themselves, whether in the form of breastmilk, plants, or the corpses of other animals. The act of incorporation, of taking a once-living thing into your own body, is necessary for all animals’ existence. It is also disturbing and unsavory to think about, since it draws a direct connection between eating and death.

Human self-awareness means that, from a relatively early age, we are also aware of death. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Becker hypothesized that the fear of death–and the need to suppress that fear—is what drives much of human behavior. This idea went on, in social psychology, to the form the basis of Terror Management Theory.

Ancient humans must have decided, once their bellies were full, that there was more to life than mere survival and staring mortality in the face. They went on to build things in which they could find distraction, comfort, recreation, and meaning. They built cultures in which death became another rite of passage, not the end of everything. They made structures to live in, wrote songs to sing to each other, and added spices to their food, which they cooked in different styles. Humans are supported by a self-created system of meanings, symbols, rituals, and etiquette.

Food and eating are part of this. The act of ingestion is embroidered with so much cultural meaning that, for most people, its roots in spare, brutal survival are entirely hidden.

Even for people in extreme poverty, for whom survival is a more immediate concern, the cultural meanings of food remain critical. Wealthy or poor, we eat to celebrate, we eat to mourn, we eat because it’s mealtime, we eat as a way to bond with others, we eat for entertainment and pleasure. It is not a coincidence that the survival function of food is buried beneath all of this—who wants to think about staving off death each time they tuck into a bowl of cereal? Forgetting about death is the entire point of food culture.

When it comes to food, Becker said that humans “quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment,” and that the desire for more life—not just delaying death today, but clearing the bar of mortality entirely—grew into an obsession with transforming the self into a perfected object that might achieve a sort of immorality. Diet culture and its variations, such as clean eating, are cultural structures we have built to attempt to transcend our animality.

By creating and following diets, humans not only eat to stay alive, but they fit themselves into a cultural edifice that is larger, and more permanent, than their bodies. It is a sort of immortality ritual, and rituals must be performed socially. Clean eating rarely, if ever, occurs in secret. If you haven’t evangelized about it, joined a movement around it, or been praised publicly for it, have you truly cleansed?

As humans, we are possibly the most promiscuous omnivores ever to wander the earth. We dine on animals, insects, plants, marine life, and occasionally non-food: dirt, clay, and chalk.

We are not pandas, chastely satisfied with munching through a square mile of bamboo. We seek variety and novelty, and at the same time, we carry an innate fear of food. This is described by the famous omnivore’s paradox, which (Michael Pollan notwithstanding) is not mere confusion about choosing what to eat in a cluttered food marketplace.

The omnivore’s paradox was originally defined by psychological researcher Paul Rozin as the anxiety that arises from our desire to try new foods (neophilia) paired with our inherited fear of unknown foods (neophobia) that could turn out to be toxic.

All omnivores feel these twin pressures, but none more acutely than humans. If it weren’t for the small chance of death lurking behind every food choice and every dietary ideology, choosing what to eat from a crowded marketplace wouldn’t be considered a dilemma. Instead, we would call it “the omnivore’s fun time at the supermarket,” and people wouldn’t repost so many Facebook memes about the necessity of drinking a gallon of water daily, or the magical properties of apple cider vinegar and coconut oil. Everyone would be just a little bit calmer about food.

Humans do not have a single, definitive rulebook to direct our eating, despite the many attempts nutrition scientists, dietitians, chefs, and celebrities have made to write one. Each of us has to negotiate the desire for food and fear of the unknown when we are still too young to read, calculate calories, or understand abstract ideas about nutrition. Almost all children go through a phase of pickiness with eating. It seems to be an evolved survival mechanism that prevents us—once we are mobile enough to put things in our mouths, but not experienced enough to know the difference between safe and dangerous foods—from eating something toxic. We have all been children trying to shove the world in our mouths, even while we spit out our strained peas.

Our omnivorousness gives us an exhilarating and terrifying amount of freedom. As social creatures, we seek safety from that freedom in our culture, and in a certain amount of conformity. We prefer to follow leaders we’ve invested with authority to blaze a path to safety.

The heroes of contemporary diet culture are wellness gurus who claim to have cured themselves of fatness, disease, and meaninglessness through the unimpeachable purity of cold-pressed vegetable juice.

Many traditional heroes earn their status by confronting and defeating death, like Hercules, who was granted immortality after a lifetime of capturing or killing a menagerie of dangerous beasts, including the three-headed dog of Hades himself. Wellness gurus are the glamorously clean eaters whose triumph over sad, dirty animality is evidenced by fresh, thoughtfully-lit photographs of green smoothies in wholesome Mason jars, and by their own bodies, beautifully rendered.

There are no such heroes to be found in a peer-reviewed paper with a large, anonymous sample, and small effect sizes, written in impenetrable statistician-ese, and hedged with disclosures about limitations. But the image of a person you can relate to on a human level, smiling out at you from the screen, standing in a before-and-after, shoulder-to-shoulder with their former, lesser, processed-food-eating self, is something else altogether. Their creation myth and redemption—how they were lost but now are found—is undeniably compelling.

There are twin motives underlying human behavior, according to Becker—the urge for heroism and the desire for atonement. At a fundamental level, people may feel a twinge of guilty for having a body, taking up space, and having appetites that devour the living things around us. They may crave expiation of this guilt, and culture provides not only the means to achieve plentiful material comfort, but also ways to sacrifice part of that comfort to achieve redemption. It is not enough for wellness gurus to simply amass the riches of health, beauty, and status—they must also deny themselves sugar, grains, and flesh. They must pay.

Only those with status and resources to spare can afford the most impressive gestures of renunciation. Look at all they have! The steel-and-granite kitchen! The Le Creuset collection! The Vitamix! The otherworldly glow! They could afford to eat cake, should the bread run out, but they quit sugar. They’re only eating twigs and moss now. What more glamorous way to triumph over dirt and animality and death? And you can, too. That is, if you have the time and money to spend juicing all that moss and boiling the twigs until they’re soft enough to eat.

This is how the omnivore’s paradox breeds diet culture: Overwhelmed by choice, by the dim threat of mortality that lurks beneath any wrong choice, people crave rules from outside themselves, and successful heroes to guide them to safety. People willingly, happily, hand over their freedom in exchange for the bondage of a diet that forbids their most cherished foods, that forces them to rely on the unfamiliar, unpalatable, or inaccessible, all for the promise of relief from choice and the attendant responsibility. If you are free to choose, you can be blamed for anything that happens to you: weight gain, illness, aging—in short, your share in the human condition, including the random whims of luck and your own inescapable mortality.

Humans are the only animals aware of our mortality, and we all want to be the person whose death comes as a surprise rather than a pathetic inevitability. We want to be the one of whom people say, “But she did everything right.” If we cannot escape death, maybe we can find a way to be declared innocent and undeserving of it.

But diet culture is constantly shifting. Today’s token foods of health may seem tainted or passé tomorrow, and within diet culture, there are contradictory ideologies: what is safe and clean to one is filth and decadence to another. Legumes and grains are wholesome, life-giving staples to many vegan eaters, while they represent the corrupting influences of agriculture on the state of nature to those who prefer a meat-heavy, grain-free Paleo diet.

Nutrition science itself is a self-correcting series of refutations. There is no certain path to purity and blamelessness through food. The only common thread between competing dietary ideologies is the belief that by adhering to them, one can escape the human condition, and become a purer, less animal, kind of being.

This is why arguments about diet get so vicious, so quickly. You are not merely disputing facts, you are pitting your wild gamble to avoid death against someone else’s. You are poking at their life raft. But if their diet proves to be the One True Diet, yours must not be. If they are right, you are wrong. This is why diet culture seems so religious. People adhere to a dietary faith in the hope they will be saved. That if they’re good enough, pure enough in their eating, they can keep illness and mortality at bay. And the pursuit of life everlasting always requires a leap of faith.

To eat without restriction, on the other hand, is to risk being unclean, and to beat your own uncertain path. It is admitting your mortality, your limitations and messiness as a biological creature, while accepting the freedoms and pleasures of eating, and taking responsibility for choosing them.

Unclean, agnostic eating means taking your best stab in the dark, accepting that there is much we don’t know. But we do know that there is no One True Diet. There may be as many right ways to eat as there are people—none of whom can live forever, — all of whom must make of eating and their lives some personal, temporary meaning.


The author of the above article, Michelle Allison, is a registered dietitian based in Toronto who blogs at TheFatNutritionist. com.

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