There’s nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight. But if your diet is just another attempt at controlling a world that’s beyond your control, it’s unlikely to last.
I’m not anti-weight loss. I’m actually weight-neutral in my approach as I want to help ppl to achieve their goals. I don’t have an emotional interest in whether that’s weight loss or not. However, I will work to help ppl explore how they approach it and what those motivations are.
Diets are rarely about the diet. It’s instead about attempting to return to a time and place where we felt we had control over our outcomes. It often goes like this:
“When I did keto/vegan/macros I lost a bunch of weight. I keep going back and it’s not working.”
Or: “when I was 22 I ate whatever I wanted. My metabolism is just much slower now.”
There’s a reason I don’t care much about the weight loss industry, because I’m in the business of health. And weight loss isn’t about health. It’s about money. Weight maintenance, on the other hand, is where the health benefits lie. And that’s in both the mental & physical sides.
Weight cycling, or yo-yo dieting is likely more detrimental to health than continuous overweight/obesity because it involves muscle loss. From a mental health standpoint it also reinforces the self-doubt that sustainable weight loss is possible. That’s crushing.
A sustainable model to long term weight management probably isn’t as sexy as you want. It’s probably not gonna look like those transformations on Tik Tok. It’s not gonna have a cute name or FB group that gives you an identity to attribute to your food choice. It’s probably going to be a lot of small habits stacked on top of one another over time.
A diet won’t make you happy. A diet won’t solve your fears and anxiety. A diet won’t fix your relationships. Maybe the reason diets fail is because we put these expectations on something that it’s not intended to do?
