Why yo-yo dieting is the toxic diet culture we need to be worried about
Maintaining a healthy weight is important. But yo-yo dieting has detrimental effects and is not the answer.
Study urges that people should be very cautious before going on a diet.
Fit pros should express concern when clients inform them they are going on a diet. That’s because a qualitative study from North Carolina State University highlights the potential negative interpersonal and psychological consequences associated with yo-yo dieting, where someone diets to lose weight only to gain it back and then restarts the cycle. Researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 36 adults—23 women and 13 women—who had experienced weight cycling where they lost and regained more than 11 pounds. All the study participants reported an urge to shed weight due to social stigma related to their weight, and/or because they were comparing their bodyweight to that of celebrities or peers. So participants did not start dieting for health reasons, but instead mostly to try to look better. A major finding of the research published in Qualitative Health Research was that regaining the weight led people to feel shame and further internalize stigma associated with bodyweight, leaving study participants feeling worse about themselves and less happy than they did before they initiated dieting. This, in turn, frequently led people to engage in increasingly extreme behaviors such as severe food restriction and excessive exercising to try to drop more pounds. Weight loss became a major focal point in their lives, to the point that it impacted their interactions with family and friends. Strategies some people used to combat these destructive behaviors included focusing on their health rather than the number on the scale, as well as exercising for fun rather than being preoccupied with calories burned, and not treating eating as something that needs to be tightly controlled. In the end, the majority of study participants were stuck in the up and down weight cycle suggesting that once someone enters the world of yo-yo dieting it is not easy to get out.
Want to learn more? Dieting Your Way Into the Lonely Hearts Club
References
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10497323231221666
Matthew Kadey, MS, RD
Matthew Kadey, MS, RD, is a James Beard Award–winning food journalist, dietitian and author of the cookbook Rocket Fuel: Power-Packed Food for Sport + Adventure (VeloPress 2016). He has written for dozens of magazines, including Runner’s World, Men’s Health, Shape, Men’s Fitness and Muscle and Fitness.
