Do you know any person who has gained and reduced a lot of weight, many times in his/her life? Do you know any person who always looks after him/herself and keeps trying it in different methods?
Many times, these efforts to take care of oneself hide a deep desire to fit in with the current beauty standards. Notwithstanding, many difficulties are found to get this aim. Why does it happen?
We live in a society in which two phenomenons occur simultaneously: obesogenesis and fatphobia. On the one hand, the system gives ease access to all sweet, hyperprocessed and fast food, which fits well with our life rhythm and our palate. On the other hand though, there’s a huge social pressure to keep ourselves fit and slim, which is caused by a deep believe about the close relation between slimness and beauty.
On the contrary, overweight will be considered synonymous of laziness, ugliness, low willpower, unhealthy, etc. What are we offered with to battle it? We all already know the answer: diet and physical exercise. The problem is that both are hard to maintain in the long-term, especially diet, whose efficacy is in question.
Let’s talk a bit more deeply about it.
The diet culture. What is it and which consequences has it?
To understand this phenomenon, first we need to know what diet means for most people. For many of us, a diet is a weight-loss food plan. To do so, a plan like this implies some food restriction, referring on it quantity, as well as on the type of food it permits.
There has been a wide variety of diets throughout the history. The best known are the Dunkan diet, the dissociated diet, the points diet, the intermittent fasting… Some others promise express results, such as the artichoke diet, the watermelon diet, and a long etcetera.
All these diets, even though they differ in content, they share the same object (losing weight) and the same basic method (some kind of food restriction). As this scheme is followed, any other effort to food intake self-control could be considered a diet. Some examples of this might be going off carbohydrates, fasting, avoiding frying, etc.
Which is the problem of this concept of diet? Its main problem is its lack of long-term efficacy (people is able to lose weight in a short time, but they end up giving up and regaining weight). Why does it occur? The reasons for this are both biological and psychological.
- On a biological level, many theories may explain the problem:
- Genetics: There are people with a higher genetic predisposition to overweighting. Despite this, obesity is a multifaceted condition: its curse and maintenance are influenced by genetic, psychological, behavioural and social-environmental factors.
- Metabolic efficiency and the yo-yo effect: the metabolic and brain mechanisms for weight, hunger and satiety regulation have not changed for thousands of years. This brings our body to the highest energy efficiency. These mechanisms are activated on a diet, warn the organism to face a hunger period and cause a huge urgency to eat. Once we’ve gone off the diet, these mechanisms remain active, so our weight increases again, which may end up with a higher weight than the initial.
- The “set point” theory: our weight tends to fluctuate around a medium point, which is firmly settled over time. No matter if the weight erases or decreases, it will tend to the set point anyway. If our set point is on the overweight range, it is recommended to lose weight slowly, in a staggered way, letting the set point gets established in a lower range. This idea, though, does not match well with diets nor with people’s urgency to get thinner.
- On a psychological level, the theories are the following:
- The forbidden apple effect: the more we difficult the access to some specific food, the more sensitive we turn to it, so that we end up going off the diet. This, in extreme cases, might lead to real binges.
- Affective regulation through food intake: Related to the last point, the physiological mechanisms in charge of the hunger and satiety signals would be impaired by an emotional-cognitive intake regulation mechanism. It means we would self-regulate our emotions by eating.
- Chronic overeating tendency: it happens when one is used to eat too big food portions according to one’s activity level. We get used to eat too much, so then normal portions feel too little.
As it can be seen, our body and our mind do not react well on a diet, leading to continuous failures when aiming to lose weight. Despite this, the perceived pressure to stay thin keeps playing its role, resulting in new efforts to lose weight. This fact turns out to important weight fluctuations throughout life, which is related to higher health risks, even more than to overweight itself.
Going back to the beginning concepts, both phenomenons’ cocktail (obesogenesis and fatphobia) leads us hopelessly to a chronic and complex public health issue. In other words, an eternal problem and an eternal solution have been created. This is the diet culture.
This “culture” implies a net of services, businesses, contents, etc., that unfortunately do a counter-education job. This leads to many myths and preconceptions, not only about the body and its weight, but about the way to look after oneself: what we should eat and what we should not, if fasting is good or not, if sweeteners are good or not, if gluten is good or not, and a long etcetera.
We are also said how we should measure our progress. Nowadays, a lot of people keep limiting themselves to a maximum weight goal. Some others, a bit better informed, calculate their Body Mass Index (BMI; population measure to categorise if one is underweight, normal weight or overweight). Very few people talk about measuring their waist circumference, finding out the proportions for their body mass composition, searching for their localized fat… These measures, on their whole, DO indicate our nutritional health status, and help us design the best plan for everyone.
Fatphobia
Besides the notes about the concept done at the beginning of this text (overweight will be considered synonymous of laziness, ugliness, low willpower, unhealthy, etc.), fatphobia need to be understood like all those acts against overweight people, that are justified by those preconceived idees.
That is to say, stigma surrounding overweight implies discrimination to those people who are overweight, in many areas: social, work, institutions, and sadly, healthcare.
This discrimination could lead to dehumanize the person, defining it exclusively for his/her body condition. Some examples of this are:
- Bullying to kids with overweight.
- Mobbing to colleagues with overweight, and glass ceilings for the same reason.
- Health personnel who refuse to carry out diagnostic tests because they classify the person’s health problem as an unequivocal consequence of being overweight.
Nor should we forget that, apart from these extremes, there are also continuous microaggressions, such as comments about low willpower, comparisons with other people, the lack of large sizes in clothing stores, etc.
All this, as expected, will imply stress on the overweight person, which will add to their sense of failure and lack of control for not being able to maintain his/her diet.
Psychological consequences from the diet culture:
Every time someone gives up on a diet and regains weight, he/she also gains lack of control, low self-esteem, profound frustration and emotional exhaustion.
If, as previously stated, we add the social pressure to this, the result tends to be a self-concept based on the body weight and figure. This may lead us to serious psychological problems such as eating disorders, body dysmorphic disorder, or any other type of emotional disorder.
Recommendations:
If we believe we have a problem related to our weight, and/or if we have an unhealthy relationship with food or our body (we count calories, restrict concrete foods, binge, can not look in the mirror…) the best we can do is put ourselves in hands of a professional. People in this situation may go to seek for help to their general practitioner or endocrine, to a nutritionist or to a specialized psychologist. Anyway, these three professionals shape the multidisciplinary team for these cases. Their coordination must be continuous, so it is common to find out specialized units.
The doctor will monitor and treat all those pathologies parallel to the weight / eating problem. The nutritionist will educate the patient to establish new habits, adapted to each person. The aim will never be losing weight, but gaining health and creating more healthful habits.
The specialized psychologist in eating behaviour will help us to:
- Keep ourselves motivated,
- Mark short- and long-term goals,
- Adjust expectations,
- Accept ourselves and relax the way we value ourselves
- Intervene in other life areas that may be interfering with our progress.
Guillem Nicolau Coll
Psicòleg General Sanitari
Col B-02773