The worst (and best) times to start a "diet"

Some people say that they feel they could succeed if only everything in their lives were nearly perfect. They think that having a personal chef, access to a room full of an assortment of Lean Cuisine meals, not having to work, a full assortment of exercise gear and a personal trainer, and having no stress in their lives would lead to weight loss nirvana.

The truth is that having everything you want will not lead to you successfully controlling your weight. Oprah Winfrey is proof of that. She has all of the money and control/power that a person could conceivably need or want, and she still has weight problems. The answers lie inside of us, not outside. That's not me being folksy or spiritual. It's a cold, hard fact as reflected in the lives of countless wealthy and powerful people who have struggled with weight issues. Besides Oprah, there was also Christina Onassis, one of the richest women in the world. She was constantly miserable with her weight. Among current celebrities are Wynnona Judd, Kirstie Alley, and Rosie O'Donnell (among others). Wealth, power, access to every possible resource, and a strong motivation to lose for career reasons and to diminish public ridicule doesn't help these women lose weight or maintain it when they do lose. It really is in your head, not in your wallet.

That being said, your environment definitely has a profound impact on the potential for success. While "perfect" life conditions do not guarantee success, very imperfect ones and bad timing will greatly increase the chances of failure. It would certainly seem that failure is easier to influence or increase the chances of than success. I suspect that this also points to the internal battle, which is all the harder to win under adverse circumstances.

I'm on record in some ancient posts saying that I think sometimes failure is worse than not even trying when it comes to weight loss. The reason I think this is that undertaking any endeavor and repeatedly failing at it undermines your confidence in your ability to ever accomplish the goal. If you wanted to paint well, and painted dozens and dozens of pictures with little improvement, you'd likely give up and believe you would never be an artist. The same goes for weight loss. If you try again and again an fail, you're eventually going to believe you're incapable either biologically or psychologically.

I've been following a lot of blogs and have more than a little personal experience behind me, and I've reached some conclusions about circumstances and factors which will greatly decrease your chances of long-term success. That is not to say no one can succeed, but rather that you're bucking the odds if you do. I've come up with the following, and keep in mind I'm not saying "everyone will fail" under these conditions (and please, please do not make a comment as if that is what I'm saying - one of my pet peeves is people setting up a straw man to knock down based on not reading what I'm actually saying but some grossly inaccurate inference), but rather that it will be much harder to succeed with these circumstances or motivations.

The worst times or reasons to diet (in my opinion) are:

1. after a period of free and excessive eating or bingeing

The classic example of this is holiday binges followed by New Year's resolutions to lose weight. Statistics show that all hope is abandoned by the vast majority of people by May of the year in which they express their resolve.

The problem with making an effort to lose weight on the heels of a full stomach and a sated psyche when it comes to the food you love to taste is that it's easy to proclaim you'll do better when you have no real need for food-based pleasure or satisfaction and are full of the sense of having been indulged and gratified. It's like how you are so happy to be home after a vacation as compared by how sick of being in the house you are day-in and day-out. Strong contrasts bring about easy proclamations of change and short-term behavioral alterations that are harder to sustain as the memory of the satisfaction and related guilt become distant memories.

Though resolutions to do better after binges are almost inevitably undermined after a period of prolonged deprivation, if this sort of situation tends to motivate you, there is a way to use it. Essentially, see a day of excess once in awhile (like once every three or four weeks) as a pressure valve. Be in control and let loose on occasion until you find a better balance. If you have a cycle of feast followed by a proclamation that you will now experience famine, then perhaps you need to plan some feasting from time to time to keep up your momentum.

2. because of fear

Fear is a horrible motivator. It wrecks biological havoc on your body and is unsustainable mentally. Holding fear in your mind is no small trick, and it is really not a good thing to do to yourself.

Keep in mind that the chemical reason for fear is to help you survive. It feeds into multiple neurochemical and biochemical processes that tell you to "escape" one way or another (either eliminate what you fear by vanquishing it or run from it). Holding onto fear as a motivator, such as experiencing the death of a family member due to weight related illness, will place your body in a state of biochemical readiness which will not only create stress in the long term, but will fatigue you. Both of those factors make you want to eat more and more, not stop eating.

Additionally, fear over a particular event or experience is something which you will become increasingly psychologically desensitized to through time. Humans are not meant to face the same fear over a long period of time. They are meant to escape it, or stop fearing it. This makes sense because your body cannot tolerate the chemical upheaval fear puts it through for an extended time.

Since fear creates circumstances which make you want to eat, and is an unsustainable motivator, it's a bad reason to change your lifestyle to lose weight. It's one of the reasons why people who have health scares related to weight may not lose weight. It's not that they don't care, but rather that even fear of your own mortality won't spare you the biological and psychological truth about fear as a motivation. Eventually, most people go into denial and place the fear out of their conscious thinking. They don't do this because they want to. They do it because their bodies can't live in the rigors of fear everyday.

Fear can be used, however, as a kicking off point for a more reasoned approach to your life. It shouldn't be your core motivation, but it can help you find other motives. Fear can be a catalyst, but it should never be central to your thinking or reasons for losing.

3. self-hate or disgust

A lot of people start off losing weight because they hate themselves, and a lot talk about hating themselves even when they are losing successfully. I certainly have. Note that there is a difference between hating yourself and losing weight, and using self-hate as the fuel that continues to feed your weight loss mojo. You can lose weight and be self-hating, but it is unlikely to sustain you throughout the duration of the process.

As a central motivation, self-hate is ultimately self-defeating. If you feel you are weak, worthless, lazy, ugly, pathetic or lacking in character traits that will help you control food intake, you are in essence telling yourself that you aren't capable of succeeding on a deep, personal level. What is worse, you're conveying the unconscious idea that you're not worthy of effort and expense (in all sense of the word, not just money) that success will cost you.

Self-hate is one aspect of losing weight that I think people really need to work with as they go about losing weight. They need to change their self-image to a positive one, but not because of their improving body image. They need to love their fat self's psyche much as their thinner body so that they feel capable, worthwhile, and valuable aside from their bodies. A sustained sense of self-disgust to motivate you will only make you give up eventually (if not sooner) because you won't think you're worthy or capable of the effort.

4. to please somebody else

If you lose weight in the hopes that that guy you've had your eye on will start to see you romantically, think again. Losing weight for other people is fraught with complications, not the least of which is that you probably think they will value your thinness (or you) more as a result of your changed body far more than they will actually value you.

Many people aren't as shallow as we think they are and they don't discount others wholesale on body alone. It's one of the reasons that men who are friends with women who are fat and lose weight don't suddenly fall in love with them when they lose it. We like to believe this because it fulfills the "fat worldview" where all sorts of bad things happen to us only because we are fat. This is not exactly a complete fantasy, as it is true that fat people are mistreated, treated worse than others, and have trouble finding significant others based on their bodies, but it's not all that there is to the picture.

What happens when you lose weight so that men will take an interest in you and then they end up not being interested in you? Your motivation is gone. It's just a bad idea to place validation for your actions outside of yourself, particularly when you are uncertain of the reaction of the person you're hoping to please. Even if all of the men start flocking to your new thin self, the situation becomes immensely complicated when rejection or difficulty for other reasons come into play. Do you start eating again after the dream relationship ends in acrimony because your significant other cheated on you? Affirmation of the rightness of your choices needs to solely or at least greatly lie within yourself.

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As far as "good" times and reasons to "diet" or change your lifestyle, there are actually probably more of them than there are bad ones. The main difference is that people don't tend to act on the "good" ones because acute negative motivation tends to be a more powerful taskmaster than long-term positive motivation.

1. long-term health improvement (often without an acute issue)

Mainly, I think that people who have chronic conditions which are not immediately life-threatening have a better chance of succeeding than those who operate out of fear of imminent death or dire consequences. They don't operate out of a sense of desperation or fear, but with long-term quality of life improvements. A solid motivation with the potential for actual life improvement (as opposed to a lack of further degradation or death) works more effectively, though it really does depend on how much pain you can tolerate and how bad the pain is.

2. the beginning of summer

When I talk about summer and weight loss, I don't mean losing to look good in a bathing suit. The start of summer is a good time to begin a diet because the heat will naturally suppress your appetite and make one turn to lighter food (especially watery fruit). You can start to pick up good habits during this time which you are more likely to carry on through time.

Also, moving in the heat will burn more energy than moving in the cold and summer is often the time when people pursue movement-oriented activities as part of their vacations. It's also a time which you can thoughtfully approach your eating as it normally is rather than make a change on the heels of a powerful holiday overeating jag. Changing your habits after weeks of your average eating will make you more thoughtful about changes than trying to do so after bingeing on Christmas goodies and New Year's party food.

Finally, if you start at the beginning of summer (around May or June), you'll have losses behind you by November that you will want to continue your progress. Having been rewarded with lost weight for your actions, you may not so easily decide to go on an all-out binge during the holidays for fear that your gains will be mitigated. Essentially, you are being rewarded long before the most profound temptation comes along, and may feel less deprived when passing on the goodies since you already have something you may feel is of greater value than immediate gratification with food.

3. for a long-term, concrete, meaningful goal


I've lost weight successfully and over a long period of time twice (including this time around) and that was because I knew I'd have to seek a job at both times. I knew the change was coming years before and I started acting to make the changes such that I'd be able to reach the goal by the deadline. Of course, I regained the first time, but I'm hoping this time to avoid that pitfall because of the psychological and behavioral changes I've made this time (last time, much of my success was based on unsustainable practices like 90 minutes of exercise 5 days a week).

Some of the other successful people who I have followed have had meaningful long-term goals. The type who don't tend to do so well have vague desires for improvements for the sake of looking better or feeling better in a generalized fashion. Others act out of a sense of urgency or immediacy and often choose rapid loss programs that cannot be sustained.

If you want to lose it and have an increased chance of keeping it off, it really is better to look at it as the dreaded "lifestyle change" and to take it slow. This allows your body to adjust as well as your mind. Focusing on expediency rarely results in lasting change in anything in life, let alone something which requires your biology to come around to a new way of living.

And, as before, I'm not saying everyone is guaranteed success under these conditions, but just that the odds are likely improved.

Why other people care about your weight loss

Sometimes I feel quite fortunate to be losing weight in relative isolation. In fact, aside from my husband and those who read this blog, I never receive any unsolicited advice or input on what I'm doing. That's in no way some oblique way of saying I don't want commentary from those who are kind enough to read what I write, but rather that I often read from others how unwanted or unhelpful input often makes things that much harder for them and this got me thinking about how this hasn't been an issue for me.

For me, I live in a situation where people would not involve themselves in my business in this regard. I could talk about it with them if I chose to (though I don't), and they'd nod and smile and express that they were happy for me, but they would never comment on my progress or offer advice. It's just not what is done here. Luckily, I am insulated from even the busiest of bodies in this regard.

Lately, I've been pondering the forces that motivate people to involve themselves in the dietary habits and weight loss processes of others and think it is useful to keep such things in mind when receiving input from others. Here are the general (and broad) reasons I think people care about the weight loss of others:

1. genuine concern

This is the type of thing which is rare and comes from those who are close to you like your family members. They are emotionally invested in a deep and meaningful way in your life and health and want you to be well, fit and happy. However, such concern is not always unconditional.

2. empathy

Mainly this comes from those who also have struggled with weight and understand the difficulties that you are going through. They know your suffering because they have experienced similar feelings. Many people who read blogs and comment on them are motivated by empathy.

3. vested interest

These are people who have something to gain by your efforts. This is perhaps one of the more complex motivations because what a particular person has to gain is very personal, and can be highly abstract. This is the motivation I'll be discussing in greater detail later.

4. education

Some people simply want to know what others are doing and how effective or ineffective various approaches are considering the variables involved in a person's life.

No person who is interested in the weight loss of others fits discretely into any one category. Most people will belong to several, if not all of them. The main thing that tends to define whether their interest in your weight loss is a force for ill or good in terms of your life lies in their "vested interest". The truth is that most people are far less interested in you than in how your actions impact them. At all times, even when you seem to be the focus of their scrutiny, support, or attacks, it is not about you; it is about them.

When I talk about how your actions affect others, I don't mean merely the direct effects. One thing that is important to keep in mind is that people are just as troubled by that which challenges their thinking than that which directly changes their experiences or lives. This thought crystallized for me when I was pondering the oft-cited motivation for bitter responses to weight loss as being jealousy. I don't think people are jealous, but rather that they are threatened because your actions challenge their perspective about weight and lifestyle.

When I consider all of the facets of "vested interest", I come up with a lot of sub-categories of motivation for involving oneself in the outcome of another person's weight loss efforts:

1. schaudenfreude (shameful joy)

Some people like to watch others fail because it elevates them for their meager successes in life.

2. inspiration

People want you to succeed because it helps them feel that it is possible for them as well.

3. reflection

These are people who feel that your appearance reflects their value. More often than not, this is a spouse or partner who thinks other people will think they are a better catch because he or she has an attractive significant other. However, it can also be about someone who is thinner than you feeling that your change in appearance to one which is socially more acceptable will reflect on them by making them look less attractive by comparison. People want you to stay as you are so they're better by comparison.

4. validation

People who follow the same plan as you and want to see success so that they can feel they are on the right track and have a good chance of succeeding as well. Validation can also be about education or information gathering.

5. invalidation

People who are following different plans want to see you struggle or fail in order to make them feel their plan is a better choice. This is slightly different than schaudenfreude because this motivation is based in a somewhat different insecurity, though they are related. Invalidation, like validation, is sometimes about education or information gathering.

6. involvement/need for community

Some people, quite frankly, have too little going on in their real lives or lack a sufficient support network and add meaning by involving themselves in the lives of others. They want to help, and they believe that they are motivated by a desire to assist others, but the bottom line is that they need to talk about weight loss and fitness and are seeking an audience which is likely to appreciate their input. That is not to say that there is no genuine desire to be helpful, but rather that most people who get involved act first on their own need, and second to meet your needs.

I am by no means immune to acting on vested interests in this regard. I comment on other people's blogs for reasons "4", "5" and "6" on vested interest list as well as reasons "2", "3", and "4" on the general list.

I think that most negative responses to weight loss blogs are motivated by the need for validation/invalidation. That is, most people need to believe you will succeed or crash and burn in your efforts for various reasons. In regards to wanting to see your failure, often, that need is simply so that they can quiet their own cognitive dissonance about the status quo with their bodies. People believe they can't lose weight, and that you can't either. They think you're just fooling yourself and that you'll succeed for awhile and then regain, become dysfunctional, or live a very stressful and unbalanced life as a slave to your weight. The fact that, more often than not, they are correct, makes following the weight loss efforts of others a very good way of finding information to validate ones views and invalidate those of others.

"Jealousy" is not one of the reasons I think most people write scathing comments on weight loss blogs, though I think that there is an element of feeling like a failure while watching others succeed at something you desperately would like to succeed at, too. This element can often manifest in a what sounds like jealousy, but I think that it really is anger at ones own sense of "failure" turned outward. It really isn't about coveting your success. It's about their failure.

One thing I realize is that I'm very unfortunate to have to deal with a fairly oppressive climate which points out my weight and makes me feel like a freak at every turn. On the other hand, on a personal level, I don't have to deal with people involving themselves in my weight loss because none of them have a vested interest in the outcome either way. The only one who cares, and who I discuss it with in real life, is my husband and his interest is unconditionally about concern for my well-being and nothing more. He has no vested interests, aside from hoping I'll be healthier, stronger, and will spend more time with him.

Losing it for someone else

What is the number one thing that most people will say is absolutely required for happiness in life? Health. If you don't have good health, you can't be truly happy. All of the money in the world means nothing if you are in physical pain or at risk of becoming debilitated (or dying). After health, a wide variety of other factors contribute to happiness, but clearly the needs and demands of the body come first.

A psychologist named Abraham Maslow created a pyramid which defined the needs of people. His theory was that the needs at the bottom of the pyramid formed the base, and we had to have the base needs met before we could seriously concern ourselves with needs at the next higher level. Unsurprisingly, at the bottom of the pyramid are physiological needs - food, water, sleep, etc. The things which contribute to our basic survival as organisms are first and foremost. On the next step up, is health, and on the third step, family and love. This pyramid, which is an imperfect representation of the needs of humans, is nonetheless fairly accurate for most people. We act in accordance with it most of the time, though we don't always realize it.

During one of my many failed attempts to pull my act together and lose weight, I tried to motivate myself to succeed by seeing things as a choice between my husband (who I love so dearly that it's impossible to express in mere words) and food. I visualized the choice to help motivate me by conjuring up the image of a pile of delicious food and him. This worked for a very short time, but ultimately, I was unable to sustain it. In fact, the truth was that this only made things worse as failure felt all the more crushing when I viewed it in light of this type of choice. I was not only failing myself, but him and my "weakness" was seemingly greater than the person I valued more than anything in the universe.

Women who are trying to lose weight often say they want to do it so they're around when their kids grow up. They believe they can blackmail themselves emotionally into losing weight like I once did. If they taste some success, they soon want everyone around them who also may develop or who have already developed health issues due to weight problems to lose weight also. They display varying degrees of franticness about their spouses', parent's, etc. health risks and express frustration that these people, in their estimation, value the comfort of food more than their future as a family or couple together.

They see it as a matter of the value loved ones apply to them. They think that, if this fat person who claims to love me valued me more, they'd do what it takes to lose weight. I will note that generally these sorts of assertions are made by newly minted losers in the weight loss arena. They've been on a diet bandwagon and lost about 10-20 lbs. and now they play the loudest of anyone in the group. This tiny amount of success sets off a lot of judgment of everyone around them, and they generalize the concerns that motivated them to everyone else.

If choosing to lose weight or control your eating could be effectively motivated in this fashion, there would be very few overweight people in the world. In fact, if my love and value of my husband could drive me to eat well and be healthy, I'd be the healthiest person on the planet. I value nothing more than him. My husband once said that if he had to choose between having someone shoot me or him, he's not sure he'd choose himself because he knows I'd rather die than live without him. He knows he wouldn't be doing me any favors by sacrificing himself, though he clearly would want to do so.

So, if I love and value my life with my husband so much, why couldn't I lose weight "for him"? Unfortunately, the situation is more complicated than that. The relationship we have with food is intimate, deeper, and different than the one we have with other people. It is driven internally, by both biological and psychological factors. Both of these factors are not directly affected by our love of others. When my stomach is rumbling or my blood sugar is low, my body isn't going to squelch the desire to eat in response to my love for my husband and my desire to be with him.

You can't put off a "lower need" (food) by pitting it against a "higher need" (love and belonging). The lower need will win every time as Maslow's pyramid theory illustrates. The lower needs need to be attended to first. It's not just human nature that is at play. It is survival. People have to lose weight for themselves, and it's not about a choice of food or a longer life with loved ones, though they may often feel that is so. My relationship with food came long before the one I have had with my husband, and it is integrated with me on a cellular level. Placing one relationship in a competition against the other is not only counterproductive, but potentially destructive.

Mixing up love with food in this manner carries a lot of emotional risks. The primary one is immense guilt when you fail, but there is also the potential for resentment of the person you're hoping to benefit with your weight loss. Since food issues are intensely personal, linking your food and lifestyle choices to other people is placing control and motivation outside of yourself. It's a tenuous motivation. If your spouse makes you angry, are you going to decide it's not worth it and binge only to be filled with regret and remorse later when a level head returns and emotions are quiet? One needs consistent motivation, and looking to others for that is not going to be very effective.

I would encourage anyone who thinks others should lose weight for their sake, or who thinks they should lose weight for the sake of the ones they love to look inside themselves for motivation and not to associate food choices with personal valuation. People can't and shouldn't be blackmailed into losing weight in this manner and attempting to do so will make it all that much more painful when there is failure. Your body and food are an entirely different order than your love for those who are dear to you. The needs and desires of your body and mind cannot be placed aside for the greater interests of others. They need to be dealt with for yourself.

The Drill Sergeant Approach

I used to follow a low carb dieters on-line support group. The group was not moderated, so you'd get a large variety of people posting who clearly had no interest in supporting anything except their own perspective on low carb dieting.

I rarely posted to the group because it was such an unsupportive support group. Many of the people were arguing against the exclusion of fruit in particular, but some just seemed to hang out there so that they could bully all of the dieters into "confessing" that they were a bunch of lazy pigs who needed to take responsibility for their problems. One in particular, who I'll call "J.", took every chance to needle people and had a signature at the bottom of every post which was something like, 'stop eating and move, you fat f*ck'.

This is what I call the "drill sergeant" approach to getting people to lose weight. Some people think that the only way to get people to do something about their problem is to push them hard and make them hate themselves. The interesting thing is that some of the people in the low carb on-line group thought this was a good thing and expressed the opinion that J. was helpful to them. I should note that most of them had already had some success in their dieting so they probably already had some confidence in their capability to control their eating habits and lose weight. The more fragile members who were struggling to get a toehold on their problems were very discouraged and upset by J.'s comments and approach.

For me, being bullied and insulted has never lead to anything besides binge eating, and I have serious doubts that such a method is good for anyone unless they're already fired up inside about tackling their issues and want to add their attackers fire to their weight-loss fighting engines. The bottom line though is that I don't think any sort of negative mantra will ultimately be a good thing for anyone. If you're told by others that you're so weak and pathetic, and you embrace that idea, you're just going to give up because you'll have no faith in your ability to ever overcome your issues.

I've also found that telling yourself simply to "stop" something when you don't even know why you started or can't stop isn't a very effective approach in the long run. Wanting to eat all of the time (or too much) is a bit like a dog that is tied up on a short rope in front of his dog house straining to break free. The problem isn't that the dog is straining at his rope all of the time and telling him to simply stop won't help. The problem is that the leash is too short and the dog's nature is to run free. Put the dog in a large open pen and the problem is solved. Telling yourself simply not to eat (and calling yourself a 'fat f*ck') is just saying, "don't strain at the leash, stupid." The real solution is finding out how to set yourself free so you don't want to strain anymore.