How to Stop Dieting
If you’re a chronic dieter and vacillate between hope and hopelessness, anxiety and guilt (not to mention your fat and skinny jeans), it’s time to call it quits – and be happier and healthier for it. The Savvy Psychologist offers 6 tips to put away the yo-yo for good.
Ellen Hendriksen, PhD
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How to Stop Dieting
If there’s just no chemistry between you and diets, maybe it’s time to break up. Diets make lousy partners; they make you feel hopeful at the beginning – like, “This one will be different!” – but ultimately leave you feeling bad about yourself. Plus, you keep cheating, anyway.
To leave it all behind, here are 6 tips to finally stop dieting:
Tip #1: Give Yourself Permission to Eat All Foods
Deprivation is not a force to be taken lightly. And self-imposed deprivation has both physical and psychological consequences.
For instance, I’ll bet the day before a new diet, you eat an entire pizza as a last hurrah. You might even be triggered by your deprivation rules themselves–promising yourself. “I will not eat chocolate,” might set off a chocolate-soaked binge.
Therefore, break foods out of their “good” or “bad” categories, which often get thinly disguised as “healthy” or “unhealthy.” When we disallow entire categories of food, like sugar or carbs, rule out “unhealthy” foods, or even buy “lite” versions of real food, the foods we deny ourselves take on a sparkling allure, and leave us feeling deprived and punished..
The solution? Radically accept all foods. If it’s edible, you have full permission to eat it. Now, this is not the same as saying, “eat whatever you want, whenever you want.” We’re not doing a real-life version of the old joke, “I’m on the ‘seafood’ diet; I see food, and I eat it.”
Instead, what I’m saying is that no particular food is “off limits.” Now, this rule may make you feel ungrounded at first, especially if you feel like you don’t know what to eat without a pre-planned diet telling you what you can and cannot have. So what will your guiding light be if it doesn’t come from a diet plan? This brings us to Tip #2…
Tip #2: Eat When You’re Hungry
If there was only one tip in this podcast, this would be it. Babies and toddlers inherently know when they’re hungry, and they’ll let you know it. You knew once, too–which means you can learn again.
It’s cliche, I know, but you do it by listening to your body. Rather than eating when the clock tells you, or whenever you see something appetizing, listen for signs of hunger. Feeling hungry includes a gnawing sensation in your belly, the beginnings of irritability, a sense of low blood sugar, or a sense of physical lightness or emptiness. If 1 is starving, and 10 is so stuffed you feel ill, you’ll know it’s time to eat if you’re hovering around a 3 or 4.
Signs of satiety, by contrast, include feeling satisfied, content, or subtly full. It’s a feeling of hunger neutrality – a hunger Switzerland, as it were, that’s neither hungry nor full. On our 1 to 10 scale, your body is ready to stop eating at a 5 or 6. (I know that seems low, but that’s the point – with large American portions and highly-palatable processed foods, we’ve learned to think that overstuffed equals full.)
Tip #3: No Deals or Compensation
Remember: radical acceptance of all foods when you’re hungry. If you find yourself thinking, “OK, I’ll eat this birthday cake, and then I’ll do 10 extra minutes on the elliptical,” or, “If I skip breakfast, I’ll be able to let loose at the buffet tonight,” you’re not listening to your hunger, or giving yourself permission to eat all foods.
Deals and compensation drive a deprivation-guilt cycle. When you deprive yourself, you feel righteous, disciplined, and, well, miserable–but at least you don’t feel guilty. Then, an irresistible jumbo margarita and combo taco platter later, you feel “bad,” uncomfortable, and horribly guilty…but at least you don’t feel deprived (though you’re probably anticipating the deprivation you’re going to punish yourself with, which leads to just one more margarita…and maybe a churro…because what the hell, right?…)
This is actually called “the what-the-hell effect” – or, to researchers, counter-regulatory eating. And it’s not just you: a classic 1975 study of dieters found that those who were instructed to drink a milkshake at the beginning of the experiment later ate more ice cream than dieters who didn’t drink a milkshake, and therefore didn’t perceive they had ruined their diets.
Likewise, in a 2010 study that compared non-dieters to dieters, dieters who perceived they had eaten a large slice of pizza followed up with more cookies than average, while non-dieters who perceived they had eaten a large slice of pizza ate fewer cookies than average. In short, the dieters’ mindset took away their ability to regulate and listen to their bodies.
Tip #4: Only Eat What You Want
If you try to substitute a plain baked potato when you crave fries, or cottage cheese when you want ice cream, it’s not going to work. The moral of the story? Eat what you like. But stop when you’re no longer hungry.
If you’re a chronic dieter, you may have no idea what you like. You may have been told all your life what you should eat, and never given a thought to what you actually like.
You may also think that eating what you like is what makes you go on a diet in the first place. Instead, I’ll gently suggest that dieting and deprivation has probably warped your view of what you like. Or, you may fully realize that you hate artificial sweetener, soy protein, or celery sticks, but think that you should eat them because they’re permissible versions of what you really want.
So do your own experiment. Spend a few days (or months) trying to figure out what you like. Eat slowly and skeptically, as if you’ve never tasted the food before–both foods you’ve previously categorized as “good,” and those you’ve categorized as “bad.” ”What is this strange thing called grilled chicken breast?” “Do I even like Pop-Tarts?” You may discover you’ve been eating with your diet-honed perceptions, rather than your taste buds.
Tip #5: Savor What You Eat
Tip #5: Savor What You EatTo savor all those new foods you like, you need to pay attention to eating. Sit down (the car doesn’t count), eat a bite at a time, and really taste it. Eat slowly and deliberately – don’t just mainline the whole thing. After all, with full permission to eat, suddenly there is plenty for everyone, and plenty of time.
This may be revolutionary for you. Indeed, for chronic dieters, when was the last time you savored food without an undercurrent of anxiety, guilt, or a sense of “getting away with” something?
Tip #6: Throw Out Nutrition (at First)
Nutrition Diva is going to kill me when she hears this one. But beware the trap of swearing, “I will only eat healthy food.” There: you’ve just put yourself on another diet. A politically correct diet-in-disguise, but a diet nonetheless.
For example, when the author Anne Lamott first started the recovery process from her chronic dieting and bulimia, the first foods she ate were Cheetos, frosting, and M&M cookies. For weeks. But she ate those Cheetos slowly and deliberately, and it changed her life. And then? She got tired of them. They lost their allure. And eventually, she genuinely wanted oranges, then brown rice, and then sauteed bell peppers. Read her powerful and hilarious essay here.
Given that it’s probably taken decades of chronic dieting to get to where you find yourself today, a 10 minute podcast is not going to be sufficient. But maybe it will plant a seed. To grow that seed, an excellent book is the classic “anti-diet” book, Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. Also any book by Geneen Roth, who’s been there – she gained and lost over a thousand pounds before she stopped dieting for good. A book of hers that has good stop-dieting guidelines is, Women, Food, and God.
Still not convinced? Consider this: 95% of chronic dieters regain the weight within two years. And a 2007 study at UCLA found that one of the biggest predictors of weight gain was recently being on a diet. Diets don’t work. So listen to your genuine hunger, slowly eat what you love, and feel liberated. Time to let that yo-yo gather some dust.
References
Herman, C.P. & Mack, D. (1975). Restrained and unrestrained eating. Journal of Personality, 43, 647 -660.
Polivy, J., Herman, C.P. & Deo, R. (2010). Getting a bigger slice of the pie: Effects on eating and emotion in restrained and unrestrained eaters. Appetite, 55, 426-430.
Mann, T., Tomiyama, A.J., Westling, E., Lew, A.-M., Samuels, B. & J. Chatman. (2007). Medicare’s search for effective obesity treatments: Diets are not the answer. American Psychologist, 62, 220-233.
About the Author
Dr. Ellen Hendriksen was the host of the Savvy Psychologist podcast from 2014 to 2019. She is a clinical psychologist at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD). She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA and completed her training at Harvard Medical School. Her scientifically-based, zero-judgment approach is regularly featured in Psychology Today, Scientific American, The Huffington Post, and many other media outlets. Her debut book, HOW TO BE YOURSELF: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, was published in March 2018.