The Danger of Dieting
affects you and your family daily
The danger of dieting may not be apparent until you dig a little deeper...but you don't have to look far to find really good reasons to ditch diets and live light instead!
I'm really curious to know how many health professionals (and ordinary citizens too) ever stop to contemplate just how dangerous is the never-ending call to lose weight? One of the biggest dangers of dieting is that it is the swiftest route to disordered behavior and eating disorders.
(Click here to access all our eating disorder quizzes)
As a psychologist working in the arena of eating, I cannot help but notice that the danger of dieting is increasing:
• the variety of eating-disorders has grown;
• the age ranges it attacks have spread;
• it's target populations have margarined to include both men and previously unaffected ethnic groups and;
• the geographical locations they’re found have leapfrogged to areas where eating disorders were once unknown.
The danger of dieting is without doubt one of the best kept secrets to gaining poor health, disordered behaviour and eating disorders.
I was a weight loss idiot and diet dummy
Why are so many otherwise pretty sensible people like me taken in by the dieting industry? Why did I never stop to consider the danger of dieting?
After all, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if diets worked, we wouldn't have a new one out ever season, weight and eating disorders problems wouldn't be on the increase, and the diet industry woudn't be a multi-billion dollar enterprise.
Why did I never even consider the danger in dieting??? Why? Why? Why?
Aha! The billion dollar question. Millions is spent on seductive advertising, and we're gullible. I desperately wanted to believe something would work.
I was also given few other options - I supposedly 'had' to lose weight and the all the tips for weight loss were about dieting. That was before the gym craze!
Diets also gave me a false sense of being in control (at least for how ever long the diet lasted) and they were a sure-fire way to get nagging people off my back. When you’re on a diet, you can at least shut your critics up by telling them you’re doing what society condones as 'the cure'.
I also dieted because it gave me a sense of membership to the sisterhood of girls/women who were all frantic about their bodies. Now more than ever, It's practically gaspworthy to admit to feeling comfortable in your own skin....especially when you don't fit the 'body beautiful' mould.
To be in vogue, there apparently has to be at least one part of your body you are in despair about. But being the little extremist I am, I didn't limit myself to just one. No, not me... I hated just about all of me!
People who attend
my workshops
are absolutely relieved (and amazed) to hear that about the danger of dieting and that dieting is what has made them progressively fatter. It’s as if a light-bulb goes on and they can finally say, “Oh, my, you mean all my frantic restricting and deprivation is what has got me to this state and I can do something different?”
The diet danger you may not have realized
• Diets disregard the inherent wisdom of your body. They rely on external control and fickle diet willpower.
• Diets dictate rather than educate, they disconnect us even further from listening to our bodies.
• They treat symptoms rather than the cause and they don’t prepare us for the stresses of being thin – they assume (erroneously) that being thin will be great for everyone (and it isn’t).
• They don’t teach the importance of self-love or enjoying body-movement, nor do they aim for health: thinness is their only goal.
• They mislead: in their adverts they emphasize their short-term successes and hide long term weight regains.
• Diet regimes demand that we treat our bodies in disrespectful ways, as if they were 'things' to be deprived, pummeled and punished into shape. They ignore the fact that our bodies, minds, hearts and spirits are inter-connected.
• Even 'healthy-eating' weight-loss programs unwittingly sabotage healthy self-regard: they convey the message that only weight loss (and a specified amount) justifies self-respect or self-love. What nonsense!
• Diets are unnatural because they clashes with both our biology and our psychology. Few people can, or even want to, live unnaturally for the rest of their lives and diets cause many other harmful effects.
But by far the greatest danger of dieting is that it is absolutely the best way to develop not only disordered eating patterns but severe eating disorders.
Click here to jump ahead to Eating Disorders
Don't be fooled by 'Disordered Behaviour'
Not only do the dangers of dieting mean that dieters resort to so-called ‘disordered eating’, they also resort to what some might consider to be very disordered behavior between weigh-ins too.
I've had many a weight watcher confess to feeling humiliated by their lack of ‘progress’ at weekly weigh-ins, or by having the ‘diet police’ weigh and lecture them, that they take laxatives or diuretics (or both), or resort to food-vomiting for days before a weigh-in just to beat the scale. Ironically, immediately after being weighed, the first thing weight watchers often do is binge.
Weigh-ins impact on people either positively or negatively. 'Negative' weigh-ins often lead to comfort eating and 'positive' weigh-ins often result in 'reward' eating or a sense of relief.
Maybe such apparently ‘disordered’ behavior is a natural response in a disordered society where scales have become barometers of our ’goodness’ or ‘badness’?
Disordered eating is caused by dieting
In a classic study done by Keys in 1960, 36 men volunteered for a 6-month period of food restriction as an alternative to military service. Their food was restricted so they lost approximately 25% of their body weight.
Personality testing showed changes after a rapid loss of only 4,5 kg. These men, who had originally been psychologically healthy:
• became progressively more preoccupied with thoughts of food.,/b.
• became psychologically disturbed, reporting
• Some had to be hospitalized.
• One became so disturbed he even chopped off three of his fingers.
Click here to see what happened to their weight after food was once more available and what obesity research tells us about this weight cycling phenomenon!
The obvious danger of dieting we often ignore
Eating disorders
Anorexia Nervosa
Click here to see why you cannot develop Anorexia Nervosa unless you go on diet.
Click on the question mark to jump to our Anorexia Nervosa Quizz
Drunkorexia
Click on this sentance to see how cutting food calories and substituting them for alcohol calories can lead to drunk-arexia.
Orthorexia
Click on this sentance to see how progressively striving to eat more and more healthily can lead you from eating well straight into eating hell.
Click on the question mark to jump to our Orthorexia quizz
Bulimia Nervosa
Click on this sentance to see why between 96-98% of Bulimia Nervosa sufferers state that their first episode of their bing-purge cycle started with a restrictive diet.
Click on the question mark to take our Bulimia Nervosa eating disorder quizz.
Exercise bulimia
Click here to see how 'body worry' gets us to purge food using exercise instead of vomiting, enemas or laxatives.
Click on the question mark to jump to our exercise bulimia quizz.
Bigorexia
Click her to see how even body dysmorphia (distorted body image) also has a dieting component.
Click here to jump to our Bigorexia quizz
Binge Eating Disorder
Click here to see how restrictive diets and food triggers lead to binge eating disorder
Click on the question mark to jump to our binge eating disorder quizz
Night eating disorder
Click here to see how daytime dieting often leads to nighttime nibbling (and more)
Click on the question mark to jump to take our night eating disorder quizz
Now if you're puzzled about why I'm saying diets are dangerous and yet advertising them on my site....well here's where I need your help and you couldd possibly win a copy of my book for taking my poll on that:
Click to join MindoverfatterWe have many requests to link to our website - and it always thrills us to know that what we are doing is valued, so thanks in advance for sending visitors our way. Please copy the above text onto any page of your website to link to us.
And by the way - I have to tell you this - when I was creating this web page, Sitesell - the amazing company whose web-building tools I use have this incredible little program called Brainstorm It! It tells you about demand, supply and profitability of keywords - it really holds your hand when it comes to optimizing your website.
Anyway - I was absolutely amazed to see how much more popular searches are for diet products than the dangers of them. And Brainstorm It! is only one of many amazing tools Sitesell offer. If you want more information on this click here to see what it's done for me
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