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.
The press release may sound scientific, or may even be issued from a reputable university or research institute. The ‘experts’ quoted, however, may have some financial interest in the product they are promoting, or might even influence the editor by placing a full-page advert for the product in the magazine.
To enhance readers’ interest, the magazine will list famous people who apparently swear by the stuff. In recent years it must seem as though Geri Halliwell, Liz Hurley and Madonna are the recipients of every weight-loss and beauty aid invented!
What about adverts you see or hear on radio or television? How objective are they? When food manufacturers sponsor television programmes, how much could they, or do they, influence the content of that programme? Do we even think about it when we see the logos come up and hear ‘this programme is brought to you by’ or ‘in association with’? In one country, a well-known fast-food manufacturer even sponsors the news bulletins on one channel. Now how much critical comment are you going to get about junk food from that television station?
Newspapers and magazine editors and makers of lifestyle programmes for radio and television know that dieters love to hear the latest scientific discoveries. This audience, however, is not looking for the latest news about a cure for cancer; they just want to read that someone has invented a lettuce that tastes of chocolate. Editors and programme-makers therefore owe it to all of us to ensure that their stories about ‘diet breakthroughs’ are informed with broad research and deep scepticism—but don’t hold your breath for that.
The Triumph of Hope over Experience
You would think that people who have spent their adult years failing at diets would be relieved to discover that they don’t have to try every new one that comes out. But that’s not the case. If there is the slightest suggestion that they might be able to ‘Get Slim for Summer’, they want to give it a try.
Professor Janet Polivy, from the psychology department at the University of Toronto, conducted some very interesting research studies a few years ago. She found that simply going on a diet disrupted people’s physical sense of when and how much to eat – and this led to overeating. In experiments where dieters had to eat a high-calorie snack, thereby purposely breaking their diet, they ate much more than non-dieters in the same situation. Furthermore, they ate more than non-dieters when they believed the snack was high-calorie, even when it was in fact low-calorie.
In tests where dieters thought they were being watched after breaking their diet, they ate very little; but afterwards, when they thought they were alone, they would binge. Again and again the researchers provided evidence for what they came to call the ‘what-the-hell’ effect of overeating after breaking a diet—and what I call the ‘Oh sod it!’ syndrome.
Every time you put yourself on a strict diet you are trying to train yourself to give precedence to what the diet allows over what the body demands. That would be fine if the body demanded only what the diet allowed but this is rarely the case. The crucial problem with all restrictive dieting is that it drives a wedge between the person and her body; a struggle ensues and generally the situation deteriorates until the dieter has wrecked the natural signals, since these signals are what the diet is designed to over-ride.
So out goes eating on the basis of natural hunger cues and in come calorie calculations or peculiar nutritional combinations, in particular the current fashion of cutting out entire food groups such as wheat, dairy, tea, coffee, sugar and alcohol. This leads to emotional bingeing and being controlled by the vast swathes of foods you are trying to eliminate.
This turns you into a binger, eating on the basis of compulsion, obeying mysterious urges to eat that correspond neither to the original hunger that is entirely natural nor even to the diet that you substituted for natural eating.
‘Low-fat’ doesn’t mean ‘not fattening’ if you eat a lot of it.
The Binger
Let’s profile the binger for a moment. Not all dieters are bingers. Some people are overweight because they just eat too much of the wrong foods at mealtimes and do no exercise. Bingers are another category altogether and comprise a significant proportion of my clients.
Compulsive eating is more than an activity; it is an all-absorbing state of mind. Bingers come in all shapes and sizes and lead all kinds of emotional lives. What they share is their obsession with food and weight. This dual preoccupation with food and body shape is the hallmark of the compulsive eater.
The clients who consult me are not necessarily very fat. Although we are accustomed to equating fat with gluttony, I have found that the shape of someone’s body is not necessarily a reliable indicator of their relationship with food. Some people come to me just to learn how to stop bingeing. Although their weight fluctuates wildly over a six-month