Why Diets Will Never Work
Years ago I wrote a post about my struggles with a long-term eating disorder, and how I was finally able to turn a corner on it.
Here is a link to that post -- if you are so inclined. To date, it remains the most read/circulated post of my entire "writing career."
The response to this personal story about my severe struggles with weight, food, and body issues was so immense that I realized just how NOT alone in this struggle I was. I know right now, as I type these words, there are literally thousands of women (and men) who are killing themselves on a treadmill, or hungry as hell because their new diet plan only allows them so many calories for the day, and they have already maxed them out. I know there are young girls out there grabbing whatever loose skin they can find on their already diminished forms and cursing the God that made them.
That was me only a few years ago. Honestly, it feels like another life time ago now. At the time of my addiction, I honestly and earnestly never thought that my life would or COULD ever be different than what it had been for so many years. I could not conceive of a day where I would be able to look at my naked form in the mirror and not feel disgust. To be honest, there were many years where I refused to look at myself naked at all. I could barely look myself in the eyes, let alone the thighs. I hated the image of the person I saw gazing back at me. I wanted to be someone else. I wanted to look in the mirror and see the girl that I saw in my minds eye. As weird as it might seem...there were times when I would look in the mirror and literally not know who it was I looking at. Not in an amnesia sort of way, but in the sense that the image in the mirror was SO different from the girl I saw in my mind that my brain couldn't make sense of the incongruity. It was a complete rejection of myself, and of reality.
All of this might come as a surprise to those who knew me at the time. For the better part of my 20's I was caught in a vicious cycle of food deprivation, over exercise, and then when my body couldn't take it anymore, binge eating. I was obsessed, I was frenzied, I was so incredibly....unhappy. To the outside world however, I was the sarcastic wise-cracking quirky girl who seemed to have no problem getting a date or getting up on stage in front of a packed house. I was also deeply religious, and totally devoted to my faith. I was a student, an employee, and a budding writer. I loved things like parties, social events, going country dancing every Thursday night, and I had an amazing circle of good friends.
On paper, there was nothing wrong with my life, and yet, I hated myself and at times living seemed to be more trouble than it was worth. Not because I didn't love life, but rather, I hated the fact that I had to be ME in this life. Behind the veneer of confidence I was a sad little insecure girl who wanted desperately to be loved, but at the same time found it preposterous that anyone would love me. I knew I was a decent person, I knew that I had qualities and attributes that many would consider to be "attractive", but none of that mattered because, for whatever reason, I believed myself to be totally unlovable. It would only be later in life that I realized that one of my biggest mistakes was to project this false belief directly onto my physical appearance. Does that make any sense? Basically, I hated myself because I felt myself to be unlovable, but the lie I told myself was that the reason I believed myself to be unlovable was because of my physical appearance. This false belief not only prolonged my struggles by distracting me from the real issues, it also served to provide me with another lie, which was if only I could get down to X amount of weight, or be a size 0, THEN I would finally be worthy of the love I so desperately wanted.
This mentality might help to explain why it is that I never got married in my 20's the way so many Mormon kids do. You know that whole thing about not being able to love someone else until you can truly love yourself? Well that's kinda true, but also kinda bullshit. What I came to discover is that is that you absolutely can love someone else even if you don't love yourself....BUT good luck trying to make a relationship work.
Now, I am not going to lie, I know I broke my fair share of hearts back in the day. I haven't always been on the receiving end of rejection, but I certainly have had my fair share. Now as I look back, I wonder how many of the men who rejected me did so because of my self-esteem issues. Conversely, I wonder how many of them stayed were more interested in me for the exact same issues. I can tell you that there was at least one guy who cited my poor self-esteem as to why he was ending things. This was of course months after he had ended things and there was literally an ocean between us -- but still he told me to my "face" that he ended things because he felt like he got cheated. He said that when we first met I seemed like this sassy confident girl, and then throughout our relationship I became this simpering insecure thing, and that made him no longer attracted to me.
To be fair, this guy was kind of an asshole. Nobody in my family cared for him, and when he left me, there were more than one or two sighs of relief from the peanut gallery -- but I loved him. I was SO in love with him -- and you know what? He wasn't entirely wrong. I was insecure. I spent our entire relationship just waiting for him to leave me because it was "obvious" that he was "out of my league", and I felt as though I had some how "fooled him" by getting him to be with me in the first place.
Like I said....It was a dark time for me.
Every break up only solidified my paradigm. Every rejection only served to remind me of how unlovable I really was. Unfortunately, after each heart break I would double down, refocus, and get even deeper into the pursuit of "the perfect form," because again, I had deluded myself into believing that the reason I was unlovable and that people kept leaving me was because I wasn't pretty enough, or skinny enough. So every time a relationship ended, it only served to make me even more obsessed with my physical appearance, a thus would spurn the deeper decent into addiction and suffering.
A lot of times, when it comes to people who struggle with eating disorders, it is said that even though the obsession focuses around the body, it really has nothing to do the body at all. I believe that this is absolutely true.
What it really comes down is the need to feel in control of some aspect of our lives. And it makes sense. The world is chaos, life is chaos, love is chaos, and we are all just trying to figure out a way to navigate through the shit storm that we call existence. It makes total sense to me that a girl who feels like she has been largely powerless for most of her life would cling so hard onto the one thing she feels like she does have control over -- namely her weight.
Here is just a sample of my mentality back then:
I may not be able to change my childhood, or my family, or anything else in my life...but by God I can be thin...and maybe if I am thin enough then I will finally be worth loving...and then maybe someone will want to keep me forever instead of just use me for a night. Maybe I will finally be worthy of real love....and maybe...maybe then I will love myself too.
Notice how I was falling into that oh so stereo-typical thought trap of believing that I had to be externally validated before I could validate myself. I had to be loved before I could feel lovable. I mean, it's not totally unreasonable to think that I suppose. At the time I figured that self validation was largely useless if the end result was that I was still alone.
Why the hell does it matter if I love myself if nobody else does? What does loving myself do for ME? I can love myself all day long, but if nobody else loves me then I am still alone. Loving myself would be great if it was my opinion that mattered, but it's not. It doesn't matter what I think about me, it matters what others think about me because they are the ones deciding whether to take me or leave me.
I think it is also important to note that when you are a person who feels so totally broken, you also tend to be a person who believes that they need someone not only to "take them"....but also to take care of them.
Again, this took me years of therapy and hindsight to figure out, so go easy on yourself if you are just starting to figure all of this out. Also, just get comfortable with cliches'.....trust me, there are going to be a lot of them that absolutely apply to your situation that you are going to reject at face value (just like I did) because you believe yourself to be the exception to the rule. We all think we are so unique in our sufferings, and in our neurosis.....but we aren't....generally speaking.
I know a lot this makes no sense to a person who has never been through something like this, but I can tell you that when you are in the throws of addiction, you can make the most insane thoughts sound perfectly reasonable. You can also find a way to justify every single destructive thing that you do -- because make no mistake, I knew that what I was doing was hurting my body, but I justified that because I never had to go into an "In Patient" program, and never wound up in the hospital, I figured that whatever I was doing I was "getting away with." Maybe I was. Maybe I could have kept going on like that for years and years without anyone knowing, and without any major medical issues. I'm glad I didn't of course, and not specifically because of the physical risks, but because of how dead I had to make myself inside in order to hate myself that much.
In fact, in terms of turning points for me, I have to say that it wasn't until I was able to see myself as not myself that I was finally able to treat myself the way that a person deserves to be treated....namely with love, consideration and respect. It wasn't until I was literally able to visualize "Me" standing outside of myself that I realized how abusive I was being to me. As weird as it might sound, I find it extremely helpful in situations like this to picture yourself as a child, and then step outside of yourself and look in on that child as your adult self. I know, I know, this is all sort of froo-froo and pop psychology. I'm not saying that you need to set up an empty chair and pretend your child self is sitting there and have a conversation. That would be weird. Just try and look at the way that you treat yourself, and ask yourself if that is how you would ever treat a child that was trusted to your care. In most cases, if you wouldn't do those things to an innocent child, then you probably shouldn't be doing them to yourself. Of course, you have to use your adult judgement when it comes to certain things that no sane adult would ever allow a child to do (like sex), but I hope you get the idea.
As me, standing outside of myself, looking in on myself as a little girl, I for the first time felt the sheer horror that comes when you realize that you have been doing serious damage to another human being. It just so happened that that "other human being" was me. At that moment the separation the distinction was enough that I could no longer allow myself to do damage to this "other person" anymore. I knew that it was my responsibility to take care of her because I knew nobody else would. If not for me, this girl was going to continue to waste away physically, emotionally, and mentally until there was nothing left. And as meta and frankly ridiculous as this is going to sound....Even though I had been able to justify hurting myself for YEARS, I couldn't bring myself to justify hurting her.
And so began my long journey back to health.
It's been over 6 years now, and I can honestly report that I feel pretty comfortable in my own skin, a feat that I NEVER thought would be possible. I'm not saying that I don't have bad days here and there, but considering my whole life used to be bad days, this is pretty incredible. Before, I could never conceive of a reality where I could get dressed without thinking about my weight, or eat a bowl of sugary breakfast cereal and not think about how I was going to have to "repent" for it at the gym later. And while we are on the subject of gyms...There was a point during my recovery where I basically refused to set foot in a gym or any other kind of organized fitness center because it was such a trigger for me. I told myself that I would return to the gym when I no longer felt that compulsive need to go. It's the difference between, I have to go to the gym, and I want to go the gym. And guess what? I didn't step foot in a gym for over a year. I am not going to say that I am free from all compulsion, and I am not going to say that I feel particularly good about myself when I eat junky foods, but mostly that is because junky foods make me feel junky, and I don't really like feeling junky.
That being said, nowadays if I want a donut, I am going to eat a donut. If I was pizza 5 times in one week because that is the only thing that sounds legitimately good to me, then pizza it will be. I don't beat myself up about crappy foods on a moral level, because I realize that eating crappy foods has nothing to say about my moral character or my worth as a person. It might mean that I get diabetes someday, and if that ever happens, I will have to own my part in getting me to that point.
I wish that there was some way to bottle this idea and sell it to people instead of whatever whack-a-doo diet they are on currently......This idea being that if there is ONE thing I know to be true about humans and human nature it is this.....and if you take nothing else away from this post I hope you hear this....like....really HEAR this.
The very moment you tell yourself that you CAN'T have something, be it a certain food, or groups of food, or sex, or a day off, or a healthy relationship, or a positive body image, it is in that exact same moment that you will become totally, utterly, and completely obsessed with whatever it is that you believe that you can't have.
This is, in my opinion, why any diet, however well-conceived and well-intentioned will never work. It may work in a short term situation, and it might have to work if your life depends on it, (such as in the cases of food allergies and diabetes) but in general, whatever it is that you try to avoid you will heap onto your head ten fold. When you tell yourself you can't have something, something in your brain freaks the fuck out and sends up every alarm you have and every impulse hormone available in order to convince your brain that the thing you can't have is the ONLY thing that is going to make you happy. Also, when you finally do "cave" and give into the forbidden fruit, I would bet the farm that you are going to indulge in that thing past the point of excess.
For example, if you tell yourself you can't have cookies, then all you are going to want is cookies, and so maybe you go a month without cookies, all the while you are spending day and night obsessing about cookies, reading cookie recipes, walking by bakeries just for the sniffs, and then finally one night you have a "weak moment" and you go out and by a box of your favorite cookies, and instead of eating one or two, you eat the whole damn box because your brain knows that if you don't eat the whole damn box that you are going to punish you by taking away the rest of the cookies and not allow you to have cookies again until you can "behave."
Sound familiar at all?
That's the bad news....But there is also good news.
If you are anything like I was, then you believe that, left to your own designs, you would end up ballooning up the size of a zephyr, while eating nothing but cookies, and pasta, and Crisco straight from the can. You believe that you can't trust yourself with something as important, and as complex as your diet. You believe that in order to stay at a healthy weight you have to deny yourself of the foods you love and spend hours upon hours each week sweating on cardio equipment and pushing weights around. You believe that you have to count calories, or carbs, or macro nutrients, or stars in the sky in order to shed "those last 10lbs." But most of all, you believe that if you let up just even a moment....if you let yourself just eat what you want, and exercise when you want, then you are going to lose control and spring board miles past any sense of sanity.
Or, going back to the prior analogy....You believe that you have a naughty child that lives inside of you that you must constantly parent, restrict, and control, lest they run a muck and eat everything in the entire house. It's a fair analogy. Have you ever tried to tell a child no? Go ahead. See how well that goes for you. Tell "yourself" that you can no longer have sugar starting ......Now.....and just feel your blood pressure start to rise. Notice how the only things that sounds good to eat are things that are riddled with sugar. Even better, give yourself a timeline to stick to...an end goal...you know...like putting a child in time out.
You see, you are already treating yourself like an unruly child, you just didn't know it.
But wait...I said there was good news didn't I?
Well you are just going to wait until the next post to learn more about how I believe it is possible to stop the cycle of obsession without sacrificing your health or your waistline. I know it's possible because I am doing now. And trust me, when I was where you are now and somebody tried to tell me how "possible" it was, I literally wanted to punch them in the throat. I thought they were liars. Bold faced liars trying to sell books. Well, I don't have a book to sell, but I do have a desire to see some of the madness around me disappear.
Honestly, I sort of feel like I have a moral obligation to tell people that they don't have to be miserable anymore -- at least -- not in this regard. But the thing is...I knew I couldn't talk about this until I was sure that I was truly recovered myself. Also, it took me YEARS to get to this place, and I can already bet that the vast majority of people reading this just saw the word YEARS and promptly stopped listening. I am not saying that YOUR process is going to take years, remember, I was coming from a pretty dysfunctional place. You might not have as far to go as I did. I hope you don't.
So I guess I will just leave it at that for now. I hope that you will join me for part two of this post wherein I will go into more detail on why diets never work, and why that is actually the best news of all.
Take care.