Recently on an episode of The Maintenance Phase, one of my favorite podcasts, hosts Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes had queried their listeners about fad diets they had tried, and not at all to my surprise, I recognized every single one. And it got me thinking about all of my different attempts at weight loss as well, some of which I've even chronicled on this blog:
- Slim Fast (and other meal replacement diets, including the Special K Diet)
- Weight Watchers
- Jenny Craig
- Nutrisystem
- Whole30/the Paleo Diet
- Intermittent Fasting
- the Change One diet (I could be remembering the name wrong)
- the Abs Diet (I could also be remembering the name wrong, but I think it had a bright orange cover)
- a number of different diet pills/diet pill regimens
- plus any number of nameless meal plans recommended in various magazines and fitness athletes
I'm sure there are some I've forgotten. I also tried being vegetarian for a month, just for health reasons, but that didn't work.
And where did they get me? They always work at first, and I was able to keep some of them going for longer than others, but regardless of the diet, I found myself feel completely obsessed with what I was eating, to an unhealthy degree. I was miserable.
It's so hard to unlearn this behavior, too. I consider myself fairly anti-diet at this point, but it doesn't mean that I don't still get pinging in the back of my mind that, hey, maybe I would be happier if I were a smaller size. Maybe if I tried, REALLY tried, I could actually do it this time, and I just need to be willing enough to make these changes stick.
I am grateful that I follow a lot of anti-diet/intuitive eating/HAES accounts on Instagram, because that's usually when a post will pop up and remind me that, no, it's not going to work, and if I keep trying to diet, I could damage my metabolism worse in the long run.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Studies have shown that the vast majority of dieters gain back the weight they lost and THEN some, but diet culture is so pervasive that even when it actually HAS happened to us, we're still trying to tell ourselves, "Nah, that's not going to happen to me. I'm special and different." And for the people who HAVE lost it all and kept it off, they are likely working with some great luxuries and privileges, or it's their JOB to look that way/work out that much. Their lives are not my life.
I don't really have a point for this post other than to list out all those diets and show myself, plain as the text on the screen, that none of them have worked, and none of them WILL work if I want to try them again, and that to try the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result, is the definition of insanity.
Don't do it, Thu.
It's not going to make you happy, and it's not going to make you thin. Instead, you need to figure out why you feel like you need to be thin to be happy.
(Fun fact: Insanity is also the name of a HIIT video workout regimen, and I tried that too.)