Perspective is a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.

Our Culture has an obsession with diets. Historically, diets were for health reasons, rather than for weight and appearance. Now diets are mainly concerned with weight reduction, significantly referred to as "slimming," the slim figure rather than the healthy body being the aim ... despite the many, many Pious claims to the contrary.

Diets are a major part of the food-fashion industry. I often say that every diet works for someone, but no diet works for everyone.  The truth is that no diet actually works very well for very long. If any one did, then there wouldn’t be so many and we wouldn’t be faced with a weekly announcement about a new, different, and infallible one.

Diets come in quick succession.  The business of how not to eat too much food has paradoxically turned into one of the biggest food industries. It has become the science of what to eat and not gain weight - more or less impossible with any reasonable calorific regime.

Studies have shown that diets more often than not lead to weight gain. Because the body does not know the difference between dieting and starving, once a severe dietary regime is concluded it will voraciously store food as fat as a protection against further unreasonable onslaughts. But it is with diets that fashion and fads play their largest part. Diets have replaced the weather as the basic item of polite conversation.

This is all part of Western society. The search for the perfect life embraces the search for the perfect food, which can easily tip over into fanaticism.  Only Organic whole foods, Only Non-processed foods,  Only “Real” Foods, only “Healthy” foods, No-carb, Low-carb, Paleo, Low-fat, Low-calories, Very-Low-Calories, Eat moderately, Eat on alternative days, Eat only at certain times of the day, Eat very little, mostly plants, Eat vegetables only, Eat proteins only,  Eat very small amounts of everything, Fast intermittently, Eat only a few bites, OR the "ultimate" temporary solution, go on a total water Fast ...meaning.. go without eating food entirely until your body has eaten up all of it’s own excess fat.

In the pursuit of perfection, to be on a diet illustrates that you are a worthy and serious person, not a slob. It is the Puritan Ethic applied to food.  Obesity has become for our present age what adultery was for our Victorian forebears. The real modern descent into sin and wickedness is a dieter who goes on a junk food binge. And hunting down offenders against food purity joins the list of popular witch hunts along with smokers, polluters, and people who use sexist pronouns.

The current Diet Culture includes Diets … i.e. ways of eating… that are labeled as “non-diets”.  Most of these are some variation of the “Intuitive Eating” concept which includes a philosophy that the Body knows what and how much food it needs, and if one pays close attention to whether one is hungry, or full, and eats accordingly, one’s Body will arrive and stay at it’s own natural weight.   The problem with this is that the Bodies of fat people (and previously fat people) want to be Fat. Being Fat IS the natural weight of fat (or formerly fat) bodies. 

Since our culture is extremely biased against Fatness, even to the extent that Society has now decided to wage a War against it, what are fat people who don’t want to stay on a Forever Diet to do?  The only reasonable alternative seems to be to adopt a Health-At-Every-Size Approach, and work towards Fat-Acceptance.  Currently this is not a very popular stance, and it probably won’t become so until our Society’s Marketing Concerns figure out how to make a great deal of money through the use of that philosophy.

So, where do I stand PERSONALLY?  An article I wrote 3 years ago about my own experience is still on point. See: “Slipping” in Maintenance.

We’ve all seen those advertisements from companies trying to make money by telling us that 'the holidays’ are coming, and we are somehow too fat for them. .. Like: 

"the holidays are just around the corner,
will you have a body you can be proud of?”

which is, of course, an attempt to make us feel insecure and then profit by playing on those insecurities.

I agree with Ragen Chastain, of danceswithfat, who says:
 

“..now I'm supposed to worry that I'll embarrass myself just by existing in a body that hasn't been manipulated to some size I can be "proud of" which, based on the picture that accompanied the message, would require me to lose about 150 pounds and grow 6 inches in the next two months.

If they were honest their ad copy would have read "The holidays are coming so it would be great if you would hate your body and make a desperate bid to change it that won't work but will make us a boatload of money so that our last quarter numbers look good."

Since I was a kid I've seen what now seem like unending permutations of the message "you're too fat" delivered to me by those who hope to profit from my believing it. "The holidays are coming and you're too fat. It's New Years and you're too fat.  Bikini season is coming and you're too fat."

Screw that.

We may not be able to stop the diet companies from trying to ruin the next three months ...(and the month after that with their New Year's Resolution, and the months after that with whatever they try to use to create a giant chasm between us and loving ourselves)... but we can decide that they aren't going to succeed. 

I recommend a secret little mantra that I've created that I say whenever I see diet industry ads.  My mantra is "HEY, THAT'S BULLSHIT!"  Works like a charm to remind me not to buy into any of this.

The holidays are coming and I'm just fine.  New Year's is coming and I'm just fine.  Bikini season is coming and I'm just fine.  This diet industry that spends so much time and money oppressing me with a product that doesn't do anything successfully except make them money, runs on our time, our money, and our energy.  We take the fuel away and the machine stops.  It happens as one person at a time changes the channel, throws out the postcard, or rolls their eyes and says "No more. I'm done with this."

Quoted from “Too Fat for the Holidays”, by Regan Chastain, at danceswithfat.

Our culture’s current standards of beautiful perfection are impossible to achieve.

Yet most females harbor secret, dream-like fantasies of accomplishing that standard, and undertake difficult and daunting tasks with this goal in mind.

The following video addresses this issue.

Here's a copy of an article about embracing imperfections as a path to success by Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, M.D. which was published Aug 10, 2014 in the Globe, Health Advisor.

Aim for the healthiest life you can enjoy,
not just tolerate.

Would it surprise you to learn that according to a recent poll, more than 60 per cent of those who struggle with their weight have failed more than six weight-loss efforts? Amazingly, of those who have failed more than six times, a third of them report having failed more 20 times. An incredible 20 per cent report they’ve failed so many times that they’ve lost count!

Our shared weight-management failures aren’t a great surprise, however. Dieting is predicated on suffering and humans aren’t built to suffer in perpetuity. Yet we keep coming back for more. Every year there’s a new crop of New Year, New You books, each boasting its own set of draconian rules. Oh, you’ve tried a low-carb diet before, hmm, well perhaps this year you should give up dairy and grains. Been there and done that – maybe now eschewing sugar is the way to go.

Why, despite knowing better, do we blame ourselves when the nonsense fails? Could it be a case of suffering from post-traumatic dieting disorder (PTDD)?

Because, really, what are modern-day diets, if not traumas? They’re generally some combination of undereating, overexercising or blind restriction. People on diets are trying to live the healthiest lives they can tolerate, rather than the healthiest lives they can enjoy.

Merely tolerable lives, given food’s starring role as one of our lives’ most seminal pleasures, are understandably short-lived. Many who crash their weights down via overrestrictive diets are surprised when they regain not only what they’d lost, but more. In reality, though, it’s not a shocking outcome given the known negative impact an overrapid loss has on metabolism.

PTDD is not a formal diagnosis, but rather a shared constellation of symptoms that I’ve seen in my practice having worked with thousands of people trying to manage their weights and who have been through the diet trenches. These are people whose recurrent dieting has led to feelings of failure, shame, hopelessness, insecurity and sometimes even deep and abiding depression. Their body images are often worse than when they started dieting in the first place and their relationships with food are anything but healthy – in many cases they feel threatened by the very foods they love most. They can also become socially withdrawn and their personalities can change, which in turn can negatively impact their closest relationships and lead some to believe themselves unworthy of love, marriage, intimacy, health or a normal lifestyle.

The triggers of PTDD lie not just with a person’s chosen diets, but with society as a whole and the hateful weight bias that permeates it. Whether it’s shows such as NBC’s The Biggest Loser, which teaches that scales measure not just pounds, but also success and self-worth, or whether it’s well-intentioned health professionals suggesting that unless a person reaches a particular weight their health is doomed. Celebrities’ weights are endlessly critiqued, with popular magazines shaming women, mostly, when they “pack on the pounds.”

Even a seven-year-old reads in the Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling’s brilliant but incredibly ugly portrayal of one family’s weight as a direct personification of their gluttonous, sloth-like evilness. Society’s overarching message is that thinness is attainable if a person wants it badly enough; failure is simply a reflection of personal weakness and laziness.

People don’t fail diets, diets fail people. Diets fail people because they regularly insist upon the adoption of lifestyles that are merely tolerable. The past 100 years of diets, regardless of their actual recommendations, have tended to be strictly prescriptive paths where dietary transgressions are tantamount to sins.

For dieters to succeed, their approaches can’t be traumatic, nor can we continue to perpetuate the narratives that suggest success is suffering and that scales are somehow able to measure the presence or absence of health. For diets not to be traumatic, we need to understand human nature and evolution; that in an environment where food, in all its succulent, sugary, aromatic, colourful, decadent glory surrounds and tempts us, it is hard to resist the siren call when we’re wired not to.

Rather than deny imperfections, we need to embrace them, and in turn dieters, instead of trying to live the healthiest lives they can tolerate, need to start cultivating the healthiest lives they can enjoy.


Dr. Yoni Freedhoff's book, "The Diet Fix" is featured here at DietHobby inside the BOOK TALK section.    He is a medical doctor; an assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa; and the founder and medical director of the Bariatric Medical Institute.