If you’ve ever felt like a disgusting pig after eating a slice of that oh-so-tempting birthday cake, then you can proudly say that you have experienced the diet mentality. If you’re wondering where it came from, it’s an odd combination of news organizations bemoaning the growing waistband of Americans and television programs having predominately skinny-as-hell actors. It’s normal, but it’s far from healthy.
All right, so let’s pretend for a moment that the people who experience this feeling actually need to lose weight (even though many people are obsessed with constant dieting despite being well within the healthy range). Well, most people are going to go about it incorrectly. Although many nonprofit and government programs have spent the past couple of decades trying to provide nutritional information to the world, most people don’t really know what’s necessary for a healthy diet, and many more don’t realize they are eating what is widely accepted as an unhealthy one.
When these people diet, they go for those infamous diets that most people know by name, like the South Beach Diet or the Atkins Diet. Any nutritionist worth his or her degree will tell you that these are some of the least healthy ones out there. Cutting out entire food groups is not good, nor is cutting your caloric intake to such low levels that a person is losing more than one to two pounds a week. But, other than the nutritional problems with these kinds of diets, another problem emerges – the idea that not feeling hungry means that a person is eating too much, that a person is being a “fat ass”.
And it’s this mentality that makes dieting so difficult for so many people. Most of us have heard of “yoyo dieting,” where an individual loses weight on one diet plan, quits, gains weight, goes on another diet plan, loses weight, quits – and so on. If you were wondering, it also isn’t healthy. It’s not because eating healthy is so hard that it can’t be maintained – it’s because these diets that are so crucially linked to the diet mentality aren’t healthy.
Starving yourself, if you weren’t aware, is bad for you – just as bad as being twenty or thirty pounds overweight. Cutting out entire food groups is just as bad. There’s a reason why humans eat – because it’s necessary to survive.
If a person “cheats” on his or her diet, that doesn’t make that person a failure – it means that tomorrow this person needs to work harder to stick to the plan. And if the diet regimen is so difficult to maintain, that it makes a person constantly feel sick or weak then it’s very likely that it’s an unhealthy diet. The problem isn’t the person – the problem is the diet.
Believe it or not, it is possible to eat a healthy enough diet to lose weight without being miserable. Unless you’re living off of deep-fried cheese, chances are that you can make small changes to your diet and see big results in the long run.
The diet mentality is not good for you. Feeling shame because of how you ate that day, feeling self-loathing because you didn’t lose those 15 pounds in a month like the advertisement said you would – none of that is healthy. It’s part of the problem, not the solution.
And we can look to all of those lovely ads on TV and on the Internet for why we feel absolutely obligated to be obsessed with losing weight.
You’re not a horrible person for eating a slice of cake here and there, for drinking a regular soda instead of diet soda for once, for having seconds at dinner because you were hungry for more; you’re not a horrible person for being 10 pounds overweight, for not being able to fit in the smallest size of those designer jeans, for not looking like that girl on TV.
And if you are overweight and you do want to do something about it, do yourself a favor and talk to a nutritionist – not Mr. Atkins.