Before you start your next diet, consider this:
- Diets don’t work. Even if you lose weight, you will probably gain it back, often regaining more than you lost (yo-yo dieting and weight cycling)
- Diets can make you afraid of food. Food can be nourishing, comforting, pleasurable and celebratory. Dieting can make food seem like the enemy and can deprive you of all the positive things about food.
- Dieting interrupts our relationships with our bodies and appetites so that we are no longer in touch with when we are hungry and when we are full
- Dieting disrupts normal eating patterns and is a significant risk factor for eating disorders, binge eating and eating past fullness
- Dieting stunts the growth and development of young people, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually.
- Diets don’t improve your health. Rather, they are psychologically taxing, and can contribute to disease and mortality
- Diets are expensive and ineffective. They make promises they cannot keep e.g. life will be perfect if I am a size 10
- Diets are boring. People on diets often talk and think about food and practically nothing else
- Diets can rob you of energy and cause fatigue and lightheadedness. If you want to lead a full and active life, eat according to your body’s needs.
- Dieting increases size prejudice, and makes people more judgemental and critical of themselves and others
- Dieting diminishes women, subverting their dreams and ambitions, keeping them playing the anticipation game. There is a lot more to life than this
Giving up dieting and learning to love and accept yourself just as you are will give you self-confidence, better health, and a more enduring sense of well-being
