Saturday was International No Diet Day, a day to ditch the diet and celebrate freedom from the obsession with weight. In other words, a day to live life as it should be lived. Perhaps it passed you by, it did not exactly get the media attention awarded to World AIDS Day or International Women’s Day. But why should it? After all it’s hardly a life-shattering issue.
Or is it? Perhaps not quite life— shattering but it is an issue that is damaging to the quality of our lives. Dieting and all the obsession and dissatisfaction that come with it is like damp creeping into a house; slowly but surely it destroys the very foundations of the house. It has become endemic to society and global in its reach. Whether it is Atkins or the South Beach Diet or the Zen Macrobiotics Diet, it’s hard to go through a day without someone refusing a piece of bread or a lump of sugar “because they’re on a diet”. And it affects every body: Men, women, rich, poor, even children as young as eight have been found to diet. It’s a wave of global stupidity because quite simply diets don’t work.
The evidence is clear. No matter which restrictive diet you choose, all the weight you lose in the first six months will be regained, usually as quickly as within a year, definitely within five years, and quite often it is accompanied by more weight gain. The net effect of dieting is not weight loss but weight gain.
The diet industry is a multibillion-dollar business. It also comes up with the most ingenious gimmicks and marketing ideas. The medical profession has reiterated again and again that none of the pills and potions available on the market make any real difference. There is no cream you can apply to your thighs which will make cellulite disappear, nor is there a pill you can swallow or a tea you can drink which will “drain” the fat as you sleep. Yet we consumers are gullible — either gullible or desperate — because we buy these products and faithfully claim to see some signs of improvement.
You can understand the desperation. Being fat is unacceptable in today’s world. Worse still, being just a couple of kilos more than skinny is enough for the “fat” label to be assigned, particularly if you are a teenager. Not only is being slim now a prerequisite for being attractive, but being fat has come to be associated with all kinds of prejudice and negative stereotypes. Of course all of them are false. You can be fat and beautiful just as you can be slim and unattractive. Moreover, you can be slim and be unhealthy, unfit, undisciplined, lazy, and all kinds of other attributes people erroneously assign to those who fall into the overweight category.
What makes me angry is that we have been disabled. We are relentlessly being bombarded with images of slim successful people. Our shelves are being filled with food that has had either its sugar or its fat taken out. There are health clubs and exercise classes round every corner; every day there is a new diet or exercise fad sweeping the nation and yet, obesity levels are rising and so is dissatisfaction with weight.
All that the diet industry campaigns have done for us is frustrate us without giving us the tools to regain a healthy balance in our lives. Quite the opposite, they reinforce the cycle of feast and famine that wrecks our body’s healthy functioning, take away the joy and blessing of eating and replace it with guilt and longing and push us into extreme lifestyles where we spend hours slumped in front of computers and television screens followed by short bursts of killing ourselves on a treadmill at the gym.
Dieting is supposed to give people a sense of control over their lives. A psychological aspect of dieting is that by controlling your food intake, you feel that you are controlling your body and consequently your life. The more out of control we feel by circumstances around us, the more controlling and restricting what we eat gives us a sense that we are regaining the upper hand. To put it another way, when you don’t have many choices in life, choosing not to eat becomes a channel of power. Just look at the way infants can terrorize their parents by refusing to eat. But by making this part of adult behavior, we are infantilizing ourselves. Obesity is a serious global problem. Over a billion adults are overweight and at least 300 million are obese. It is a problem in both developed and developing nations and a growing one, particularly in the Middle East. What is even more worrying is that childhood obesity is also on the rise and at an alarming rate. Obesity is, to put it mildly, not good for your health. It increases the risk of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, stroke and some cancers. But clearly dieting and stigmatizing fat people have not succeeded in dealing with this worldwide problem.
The message of health campaigns has failed us because it has been drowned out by the more appealing messages of the diet industry. Being told you should eat a balanced diet, which includes complex carbohydrates, fiber, fruit, vegetables and protein and that you should exercise every day for at least thirty minutes is just not sexy because it does not promise the rapid change in body image that say Atkins and its Hollywood proponents can entice us with.
The truth is that a change in culture is needed — one which limits misinformation and controls unorthodox practices which promise fast weight loss but at an unacceptable price. Just recently in Paris one person died and fourteen others were hospitalized, five of them in a serious condition, because they took slimming pills with thyroid extracts (made from pigs’ thyroid glands according to some reports). In this case it seems the pharmacist who prepared the pills may have accidentally overdosed them but it has highlighted what many doctors think is an unscrupulous use of drugs. As one endocrinologist put it on a news program I saw, it is wrong but not illegal to prescribe these kinds of drugs for weight loss. Most doctors would not do it.
We need both to be better informed and to move away from a culture that stigmatizes to a culture that supports and enables us to change our lifestyles. We should throw away the scales, delete the word dieting from our vocabulary and look at life from a holistic perspective. Don’t ask yourself whether the food you eat has too many calories or too many carbs, but ask yourself whether the food you eat has too many chemicals and additives. Don’t ask yourself whether you are fat but whether you are fit and healthy. Don’t worry about whether you fit into the smallest dress and trouser sizes, but do worry about your waist-to-hip ratio. Forget about the chore of exercising and think about the joy of being more active. Think of food as being full of nutrients and flavor and eating as a source of pleasure and delight. It’s time we ditched the diet and regained control over our lives and well-being.
