The Dangers of Dieting

You didn’t know dieting could be dangerous? It’s true, it can. Check the internet. There are tales about unhealthy diets, fad diets and a veritable plethora of horror stories about how dieting can go wrong. What follows is my personal experience.

But first, let me say that I didn’t have a bad experience dieting. I think I dieted at a reasonable pace and was healthy as I lost the weight. I paired exercise with diet and was able to stick to my dieting goals because I picked a diet I knew I could live with for weeks on end. Today, my dieting phase ends. I reached my goal a bit ago, but that was an optimal weight. It wasn’t a real weight. I waited until I lost two more pounds and I’m glad I did. Over the past two weeks I’ve been hovering both above and below my goal. Now that I’ve lost a little more weight, I’m usually right about my goal during the day, a little above after meals and a little below in the morning. It’s just what you need to feel confident you’ve really made it instead of feeling you’ve backtracked the minute you stop dieting.

Now I can start maintenance. The maintenance diet is a lot like the weight loss diet, only with more calories per day. I just don’t know that I can do without my broccoli, and I am certainly not going into a candy store until I have the confidence that I won’t gorge and overeat. Mmmm… candy.

Strange thing is, I feel comfortable now watching what I eat. It seems like the normal, natural thing to do. Only six months ago I was trying to eat more, making sure I consumed enough calories each day so the baby would be big and healthy. Now, I feel normal when I tell myself, “no, you don’t need those calories. Save up for dinner. There’s going to be salmon for dinner. You love salmon and you don’t need a granola bar now.”

But back to the dangers of dieting. In the past, I’ve had a hard time dieting. Anyone who has dieted, and failed, can tell you how hard it is. Our bodies don’t like to be deprived of food. Our stomach complains and our mind starts to work us over. It tells us how we need to eat something and gives us great reasons why we really have to have that Cinnabon. Our mind lies to us. It doesn’t have to bear the weight of all the extra fat on our bodies. The brain doesn’t have to worry about how heavy everything else is below it.

When you get into a dieting groove where you truly want to be dieting, where your mind is committed, a strange flip can occur. Food can start to look like a bad thing. That’s the danger I’m talking about. I’ve never been anorexic. I’ve never once thrown up a meal unless I was truly sick (or, okay, too drunk.) But I got a very mild taste of what those people go through.

I started taking notes on things I was thinking, things I was planning on writing here, once I finished dieting. My entire attitude about food changed. Food was a necessary thing, but something I needed to use as a tool to get to the next day. Historically, I had a hard time dieting because I would crave an item or a taste. With the attitude that food contains calories and calories are bad, it was easier to pick a menu item that might not have been as tasty sounding, even if it was my main meal of the day, because it was “less bad.”

If I did well, I was very proud of myself. I found that once I had truly committed myself to losing the weight, it was easier to stay on the diet than break it. It’s why in the twelve weeks, I don’t think I had a bad day.

Sounds like a good thing, but it has its dark side. If I perceived I had done poorly on a day, maybe I didn’t know how many calories I had eaten or I just thought I had eaten too much, I felt like I needed to go running, biking, walking or something to burn calories to make it a good day. This perception of eating too much was stronger at times. If I had a poor weigh-in one day and thought it was because I ate too much weight in broccoli (which is very low in calories) I would decide I needed to eat even less broccoli the next day.

My mood for the day could be affected if I had a bad weigh-in in the morning. If it wasn’t good, I would double down, be more committed, and decide to eat less to catch up from the day before. That’s right, from the day before in which I didn’t overeat or go over my target calories. There was a feeling that because I didn’t drop in weight, I had to punish myself and do more exercise or eat more cautiously the next day.

If I had been dieting well for several days but hadn’t shown any weight-loss I would talk to my husband about it. I would tell him I knew I was doing well, but I was frustrated it wasn’t showing on the scale. Shortly, there would be a big drop in weight and I would be relieved. And yet…

The new low never seemed good enough. While I would worry over any lack of progress at length, I would immediately dismiss the new low and feel a need to keep focused for the rest of the day so I could make another new low the day following. The new low was low, but it wasn’t low enough. No slacking, no taking a break was my line of thought.

Then I had eye surgery and I had to stop exercising for a week. Initially I’d feel like I’d totally failed myself because I hadn’t exercised that day. I’d feel lazy and could imagine the weight piling back on, even though I knew I wasn’t overeating. If I felt I’d failed myself in any way, I could feel like the day was a total loss, even though it clearly wasn’t. And the strangest, most bizarre of all, was feeling, “I’ve just eaten, therefore I’m fat.”

Keep in mind, these are impressions I had while dieting. These aren’t true issues I had. I wrote them down and wanted to reflect on them when I was done because some of the thoughts that went through my head made me understand, for the briefest moment, what it might be like to have an unhealthy attitude about my weight.

The opposite could be true as well. I could have very unhealthy thoughts about food. I could be consuming too much, focusing on food for comfort and gaining lots of weight as a result. Instead, I worked hard, lost the weight, and got an interesting perspective in the process.

Now, about that next project I get to work on… maintenance diet.

The Big Boy Update:  Eating from a plate.  At lunch today, I got him a nuggets meal with fries.  He sat all meal with the plate in front of him, eating the food and not trying to tip the plate over once.  I was impressed. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  ahhhhh ahhhh ahhhhh ahhhhh ahhhh.  My goodness, she likes to make that sound.  If she's hungry or if she's bored.  It's the sound that means we need to figure out what is up and make it stop.

Right-size Countdown:  -2.2 pounds.