Part 4: HARD TRUTH. Lose Weight And Be Happy?
No Chance…
There’s an inherent danger in trying to lose weight to find happiness - even for those who had some weight to lose in the first place.
It’s true. Dieting can leave you feeling good in the short term because it’s possible to celebrate the small successes and feel good about not eating “bad” foods for a set period of time. However, as we have seen, these results are rarely sustainable.
That’s because dieting never fulfills the promise. In fact in most instances it has the opposite effect.
It has you…
It’s hard-hitting stuff that we need to explore in more detail…
Dieting limits your everyday experiences
When you start to diet and focus on a weight-loss goal, this direction starts to control and dictate your life.
Your life goes on hold and you put off doing things until you’ve reached your ideal weight. You won’t allow yourself to feel good until you fit into that bikini or that dress. And in turn how you look limits what you say you can and can’t do.
What’s more, your obsession with dieting, food and shape causes you to lose perspective on everything else that’s important in your life. Dieting, counting calories and denying yourself “off-limit” foods becomes draining and tiring and your relationship with yourself and others suffers as your priorities shift.
And in the longer-term it can lead to opportunities being wasted, lost or unnoticed. It caps your true potential and stops you living the life that you deserve and desire.
Ironic when you consider a diet is supposed to make you feel better about yourself.
Dieting is a destructive lifestyle choice that makes you beat yourself up
And what do you do when the diet doesn’t work and you resort to your previous eating patterns or console yourself by indulging in unhealthy foods?
Failure to lose weight can leave the dieter feeling like a failure. What’s more, the dieter is led to believe it’s their fault the diet didn’t work. They were just too weak because they couldn’t fight off the cravings and lacked the motivation or confidence to see it through. Instead they broke their diet and even started bingeing.
In comparison, the physical body sees the failure of the diet as a success because it got the fuel and sustenance it required.
But emotionally, you feel rubbish.
Self-confidence is eroded because dieting has placed happiness and fulfillment in the future. In addition, your self-esteem has become connected with how you look not who you are as a human being.
And that’s when damaging self-loathing and harmful self-talk can become a dark problem.
Dieting leaves you with a distorted body image
Many people embark on a diet because they believe it will make them feel sexier, more confident and more beautiful.
However, in this report we’ve seen the opposite is true.
Instead of feeling good about yourself, you end up at war with food and even more dissatisfied with yourself and your body. In fact, even when people do lose weight, they often remain unsatisfied with their appearance. Instead of feeling slimmer, they actually feel fatter, they take more notice of their perceived flaws and when people compliment them, they often refuse to believe the feedback.
Interestingly, this fact was also observed during the wartime experiments we discussed in Part 2.
Despite losing a significant amount of weight, the male volunteers complained of being overweight and began to experience critical evaluations of their body shape and size.
And this distorted view of body image goes some way to explaining why some people continue to diet even though they are seriously underweight. In fact a distorted body image and self-critical evaluations of shape and weight could be considered a warning sign that the dieter is on the slippery slope to an eating disorder such as bulimia…
The link between dieting and bulimia
As we’ve seen an unsuccessful diet can be the start of a slippery slope.
That’s because the reason to diet in the first place remains (only you now have more to lose) which in turn sets up the cycle to fall for the temptation of the next fad diet.
It means:
Can you see the dark side of dieting?
But it doesn’t stop there – there’s an even darker side.
That’s because that distorted body image, low self-confidence and need to lose weight even when it’s not necessary can lead to eating disorders.
And if your restrictive eating plan has led to binge eating, it’s possible that purging and bulimia can start.
And this darker side of dieting is the subject of Part 5.