If diets worked then you wouldn't have to start a new one every few months!

[marchplane]

I've just returned to the workplace and my colleagues (predominantly women between 30 and retirement age) have spent most of the week discussing weight watchers, slimming world, 5:2, basically every diet under the sun. It is doing my head in.

It's nothing new though and I'd forgotten all about it in the lockdown world as this inane chatter didn't translate over into zoom. It doesn't help that most people (myself included) have gained a few lockdown pounds.

I don't believe that dieting is healthy. Yes they work for the odd person (no doubt those people will be here to tell me!) but very few of them keep it off and most yo yo about all their adult life. Like my colleagues. These diets do nothing to address any psychological reasons they overeat and just encourage a devil and a saint attitude to food. One lady, doing 5:2 had eaten her 500 cals by 10am so is now having fish and chips for lunch because, well sod it.

I'm not perfect but I like to think that I have a balanced attitude to food and I like to exercise, I've worked really hard at it as I had an eating disorder when I was younger. Part of my recovery was to not engage in diet talk so I don't engage in these conversations unless I really have to. I really like my colleagues, they are lovely people generally but there are only so many times that I can be told that I should make roast chickpeas with spray oil, lemon and chilli for a healthy snack every 5 mins!

Diets DO work. It's when people come off the diet, they put on weight.
You can't really stay on a weight loss diet for ever- once you're at your ideal weight, you obviously shouldn't go on for ever losing 2lbs a week....
Then you need to stick to a maintenance plan- or 'diet'- which just has to become your lifestyle.

The language around this is all wrong, and it plays straight into the hands of the diet industry.

We talk about “going on a diet”. The implication being that it’s something you do for specific period of time (1 month to a bikini body!) or until a specific goal (Target weight) is reached - and then you stop, you “‘come off’ your diet”.

This doesn’t work, long term. The diet industry knows this: people coming back to them time and again are how they make their money. Yet because it is so hard to change ingrained habits around food, and to adopt healthier eating habits. The entire “treat” food ad drink industry is weighed against it.

My BIL is a classic case. Hugely overweight By his 20s due to poor eating habits, went on Exante (VLC shakes and meal replacements), lost a ton of weight, came “off” his diet and went straight back to his crappy eating habits. I think he’s done the meal replacements at least three times now, and currently is no lighter than he was at the beginning of all this.

Going “on a diet” didn’t teach him anything about eating healthily. It didn’t help him change any of his negative habits or ways of thinking about food or get used to, for example, having an omelette and salad for lunch rather than Greggs and coke.

The actual root problem is the dire eating habits a lot of people have, and which they think are normal. They aren’t. And the diet industry has zero interest in doing anything about that: why would they? Far more profitable to sell the idea of a magic cure to obesity, then keep banking the profits as people yo-yo their way through life.

Controlling your weight is simple, calorie deficit to lose, excess calories to gain fairly equal calories to maintain.

However for some people the reason for eating excess calories can be really complex. If you actually look into it people with higher ACEs are more likely to be overweight, as are those who had to clear their plates as children etc.

Yes, some people are just greedy. But for a lot of people for any change in diet to work longterm we need to identify why the person consumes excess calories and find a way to work through that issue.

@Smallsteps88

If the diet companies were actually about helping people lose weight and maintain it, then willpower would be the biggest focus of their product and their customers would be able to stay at their ideal weight.

Both slimming world and weightwatchers do a maintanence programme and free membership for people who remain within a few pounds of their goal weight. Guess it really comes down to the individual after all.

But for a lot of people for any change in diet to work longterm we need to identify why the person consumes excess calories and find a way to work through that issue.

I disagree. Yes there are people with psychological issues around food, but I think the vast majority of overweight people are overweight because of the tastiness and availability of highly calorific food. You don't need to be massively greedy or have a traumatic past in order to overeat to the point of getting fat. You just need to slightly or moderately exceed the calories you need over a long period of time.
I'm slightly overweight and have been considerably overweight in the past. As far as I'm aware, I don't have any psychological issues surrounding food. I just find it hard to resist fattening stuff, because it tastes nice!

Wstchagotcha - I agree that fad diets don't work, but for the majority of people neither does anything else. Going on a crash diet is hard, but it's not as hard as changing decades-old eating habits for the rest of your life!

No amount of re-education or extolling the virtues of healthy food actually makes it any easier to implement that level of willpower permanently, however well you may understand the nutritional wisdom behind it. Fad diets don't work, but neither do 'lifestyle changes', because people rarely stick to them either!

The title of this thread might just as well have been "If lifestyle changes worked, you wouldn't have to start a new one every month" or "If healthy eating worked, you'd never have to keep trying again at it".

Like many people, I've fallen off the "I'm just going to permanently eat more veg and less crap" or the "I'm going to permanently slightly reduce my portion size" bandwagon just as hard as I fell off the fad diet ones.

The actual root problem is the dire eating habits a lot of people have, and which they think are normal.

What tosh! I know that my ability (and propensity) to eat 12 Krispy Kreme doughnuts in a sitting without them hitting the sides is not normal! I don't think skinny Claire from the office goes home to massive bars of galaxy every night and some how is magically thinner than me. You seem to think fat people are stupid! We aren't.

"You seem to think fat people are stupid! We aren't."

Sorry, but I have known large people who didn't realise their portions were large or who think that everyone eats like they do.

Eat less, exercise more. That’s pretty much it! And as lots of pp have said, it has to be a permanent lifestyle change. I know that my weight gain is due to boozing ( and eating more junk as my appetite is stimulated by the alcohol). Just need to fix it!

I can't even remember how my portions got to the size the did, come to think of it. I think it starts with "ooh, there is a bit extra, let's add it" and then snowballs as the bigger you get, the more you require 🤔 I might be an idiot because at certain point I did not think there is anything wrong with my portions. As I said before. I eat healthy, balanced diet... Just for more people than 1. I think that's why I don't have issues like high pressure etc. Really just the actual weight so mobility and unfitness, joint and back pain. Oh and fatty liver. People often forget about fatty liver.