Myth 3: Diets (Don't) Work

In my first food post (Feb 26) I shared the latest scientific consensus that diets don’t work—that is, diet plans have not been proven a sure path to substantial, permanent weight loss.

Yet if we are to understand our options, we need to go further in figuring out why diets don’t work, or, in what sense that they do. For we keep dieting (or obsessing about why we aren’t), even when the small print of every before and after diet ad confirms: “Results Not Typical.” Why?

The logic of a diet seems difficult to assail. It is based on science, the law of conservation of energy, applied to the body as machine. A body takes in energy, a body expends energy, and the difference is stored as fat. All we need to do, it follows, is: 1) reduce energy intake, 2) for a limited amount of time, 3) during which the body will drop its extra stores. We assume that we must suffer (See Myth 1: Food Equals Pleasure), but only temporarily, as our bodies undergo a minor correction and get rid of what we aren’t using.

In response, a diet business booms. Diet plans, jumping into a glutted market, make a splash by promising that their strategies for reducing food intake will best soften the anticipated pinch of saying “no” to our desires.

So we learn to eat what we want (as long as we count calories); or eat as much of these foods as we want (as long as we avoid carbohydrates or fats, monitor glycemic indices, do so at these intervals); or eat normally at one meal (as long as we replace the others with bars, shakes, or bowls of cereal). We join support groups, keep food journals, and enlist the peer-pressure of family and friends. As a familiar cereal box says: It’s just this easy.

But it isn’t. Why not?

Look through the perspective of bodily becoming laid out in this blog. Our bodies are not machines. Food is not fuel. Our bodies are movement—the movement of creating and becoming the patterns of sensation and response that we are. And our desire for food is one moment of this movement. It is not something “we” can control at will. Rather, it is a capacity for discernment—a capacity for feeling pleasure—whose potential for guiding us to our maximal health we can learn to unfold. Or not.

When we go on a diet, the “not” rules. We practice denying our desire for food as the condition for sticking to the diet and succeeding. We practice turning to experts and authorities to tell us what to eat and how we should look. We practice getting pleasure from the pain we are causing ourselves. And with every pound we lose, we convince ourselves that Descartes was right (Jan 8)—I am in control of my body. My mind does know better than my animal-object-container-body about what is good for me.

When the diet ends, pounds return. Why? Because we have not learned how to find, trust, and move with the wisdom in our own desire for food. We can only imagine “it” as a “force” acting against our selves that we control (while on a diet) or not (now that the diet is over). Repress or indulge. That is all we know. And we simply cannot sustain a battle against ourselves forever. In most cases, our success weakens our determination—I deserve a reward.

Without an internal sense of what, when, and why to eat, we easily fall prey to the messages bombarding us. We develop patterns of sensing and responding to food that are determined by what advertisers, food companies, grocery stores, and consumer culture teach us that we want: MORE. More sugar. More salt. More pleasure.

Diets don’t work because their mind over body approach to eating prevents us from cultivating a sensory awareness of the rhythms and nuances in our desire for food. Diets thus reinforce the problem. They address the symptoms without touching the cause.

In this sense, diets are highly effective—though not in helping us lose weight. They work to sell more diets. They work to addict us to an illusory rush of self control that we can manage for a while. They work to train our attention away from ourselves so that we function as good consumers, buying (and eating) more than we want or need.

The movements we are making are always making us. Our persistent dissatisfaction with diets, food, and our bodies is letting us know that there is a deeper pleasure possible.

It is a pleasure to be found when we learn to tune into what it is we really want from food. We want more than cheap and plentiful calories. We want an experience of being nourished. We want an experience of following the arc of our pleasure to a sense of enough.

A “diet” will only help us if it guides us in finding this wisdom in our desire for food.

Reflection:
Ever been on a diet? Think back to how it felt. Did you enjoy the feeling of resisting your desire for food? Many people do. It gives them a sense of power—a feeling that they can get what they want out of life.

As the diet progressed, how did that feeling evolve? How did your experience of your desire for food evolve? What were you creating in yourself? Were you creating a desire to honor your own sensations of eating for life—or a desire to eat what you are missing as soon as the diet ended?

Next week:
I take on the myth that complements the diet plan: instead of reducing intake, increase energy expenditure. Exercise to lose weight. The following week, I address the question of our desire for food itself. Can we really trust it?