While the new year is renowned for new beginnings, a sense of optimism and self improvement, it is also coupled with a notorious urge to begin a new fad diet in order to resolve one of the most famous New Year Resolutions: weight loss. In fact, January has been designated National Dieting Month. This is in correlation to a study conducted by The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which found that in 2019, 55% of all resolutions made by people in the United States were health, weight or diet related.
I am defining the word “diet” as a restrictive attempt at weight loss, compiled with food rules and proceeded by guilt and shame for breaking one of these rules. The kind of attempt that often takes over your life and leaves you feeling unfulfilled and usually hungry. And spoiler alert: this attempt at weight loss rarely, if ever, works in the long run.
Taking a biological approach, your brain quite literally does not allow your body to lose a large amount of weight in the long term. Our bodies have many feedback loops and their sole purpose is to make sure that our body systems remain in homeostasis. This includes regulating our metabolic rate around a “set point” which is unique for every individual and based on their genetics and environment. Once a dieter’s weight or metabolic activity drops below the set point, their bodies enter a so-called “starvation mode.” Once in this mode, the body does everything in its capacity to return to its set point, including decreasing the body’s metabolic rate (which decrease the amount of calories burned) and increasing the amount of hunger-activating hormones which causes an increase in appetite. The extra calories not burned are stored in fat reserves within your body
Basically, diets usually fail. According to a study conducted at UCLA, dieters generally lose 5-10% of their initial weight within the first six months. However, the same study found that approximately one-to-two thirds of the dieters regained more weight than they lost after four years. In addition, most diets cut out essential nutrients that are needed for your body to function and develop. The lack of nutrients causes your body to feel deprived, which inevitably leads to binge eating, negating any progress made from diets.
And honestly, following a strict diet is just plain draining. Obsessively tracking your calories and macros, constantly worrying about whether the food at a party or restaurant is “allowed” instead of enjoying the event or simply opting out of events because of the food they serve is “bad” is not worth it. Many people believe that if they simply lose a certain amount of weight, they will instantly improve their body image and develop a new found confidence, but that is impractical because the second that they gain the weight back, any esteem built will just dissipate. Building esteem is more than skin deep.
As cliche as this might sound, we really do only have one short life, so why spend your precious life constructing impractical rules about what food is allowed to enter your body instead of listening to your body’s natural intuition and just living. There is so much more to life than the diet culture.