Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works

Chapter 1

Hitting Diet Bottom

“I just can’t go on another diet, you’re my last resort.” Sandra had been dieting all her life and knew she could no longer endure a single diet. She’d been on them all, Atkins, Dukan, The Zone, South Beach, grapefruit diet … diets too numerous to itemize. Sandra was a dieting pro. At first dieting was fun, even exhilarating. “I always thought, this diet would be different, this time.” And so the cycle would recharge with each new diet, each and every summer. But the weight lost would eventually rebound like an unwanted tax bill.

Sandra had hit diet bottom. By now, however, she was more obsessed about food and her body than ever. She felt silly. “I should have had this dealt with and controlled long ago.” What she didn’t realize was that it was the process of dieting that had done this to her. Dieting had made her more preoccupied with food. Dieting had made food the enemy. Dieting had made her feel guilty when she wasn’t eating diet-types of foods (even when she wasn’t officially dieting). Dieting had slowed her metabolism.

It took years for Sandra to truly know dieting doesn’t work (yes, she was familiar with the emerging concept that dieting doesn’t work, but she always thought she would be different). While most experts and consumers accept the premise that fad diets don’t work—it’s tough for a nation of people obsessed with their bodies to believe that even “sensible dieting” is futile. Sandra had been hooked into modern-age social mythology, the “big diet hope,” for most of her life since her first diet at the age of fourteen.

By the age of thirty, Sandra felt stuck—she still wanted to lose weight and was uncomfortable in her body. While Sandra couldn’t bear the thought of another diet, she didn’t realize that most of her food issues were actually caused by her dieting. Sandra was also frustrated and angry—“I know everything about diets.” Indeed, she could recite calories and fat grams like a walking nutritional database. That’s the big caveat—losing weight and keeping it off is not usually a knowledge issue. If all we needed to be normal weight was knowledge about food and nutrition, most Americans wouldn’t have weight problems. The information is readily available. (Pick up any women’s magazine, and you’ll find diets and food comparisons galore.)

Also, the harder you try to diet, the harder you fall (it really hurts not to succeed if you did everything right). The best description for this effect is given by John Foreyt, Ph.D., a noted expert in dieting psychology. He likened it to a Chinese finger puzzle (the hollow cylindrical straw puzzle, into which you insert an index finger on each end). The harder you try to get out, the more pressure you exert, the more difficult it is to get out of the puzzle. Instead you find yourself locked in tighter … trapped … frustrated.