Why is losing weight so hard?
Let me place to one side for a moment, my own situation post eating disorder.
Dieting: Dieting requires that you operate on a negative energy level. That is, that you expend more energy than you use to fuel your body. This has a number of problems. Firstly, this is, by it's very nature, a physically exhausting process. Maintaining it for a number of weeks or months is hard. Maintaining it for over a year, as most chronically obese people would have to do, would be a mammoth achievement. Not impossible - but certainly hard work - to spend every day for over a year operating on less fuel than your body requires to easily go about its work.
Secondly, the body is not designed to operate on less fuel than required, and will perceive that you have entered a period of starvation. It will cling on to fat reserves, and send signals to the brain craving high fat foods. That bag of chips that seemed a bit "meh" before you started the diet is now all you can think of.
Another problem with dieting is that it sets up a polarised idea of foods. Some foods are permitted, some foods are "bad". The bad foods are banished and so on the one hand, the dieter focuses on them (don't think of an elephant. what are you thinking of?), and on the other hand, if you do transgress and eat the doughnut, it becomes a major problem. What also happens by the same token, is that when the diet is over (or temporarily broken) the banned foods become fetishised and the feeling of having been deprived of them makes the dieter overindulge on them. In fact, it needent be specific foods. An experiment described in one of my BED books says how a group were given a restricted diet of 1500 cals per day for a period of days ( a month, iirc) over the next month, this group ate nearly twice as many calories as they had done the month before the experiment.
Emotional eating. The binging after a diet to comfort the feeling of deprivation is emotional eating in itself, but many people - particularly women - suffer from emotional eating. Eating as self medication. being fat often leads to depression. Dieting is stressful. Failing on a diet is upsetting. all of these emotions can trigger an emotional eater. Then the self loathing of realising you've made the situation worse kicks in, and can cause destructive behaviours - in my case, self harming through overeating.
I hated myself so much, hated my mind for letting me do something so stupid as buy and eat food my body didn't need; hated my body for being so ugly that complete strangers abused me in the street (or pub, or dentists, or bus), hated my body for aching and hurting as I walked down the street - that I wanted to punish myself. So I would shop, and then I would sit and force food into my mouth until it hurt. Then more, until i was in tears from the pain. More. until i really couldn't eat any more - so i'd wait five, ten minutes - until the pain subsided just enough to force more food in.
Not all long term dieters will do that - of course not - but a massive majority of dieter have net gain of weight one year after finishing their diets. Diet five, six times - more - and you're looking at a massive weight gain. A messed up body image. A really bizarre attitude to food.
My eating disorder was 3 years ago now. I'm still working on having a normal, healthy attitude to food. If i want pizza, i have it - because then I'll have a normal sized portion, and not four family sized ones.
Dieting works for some people - but i'd say if the weight goes back on, it's a slippery slope.
Exercise. Exercise is a less attractive option. It's uncomfortable and the weight takes much longer to shift. You're still looking at a negative balance of calories in to energy spent, too.
Many overweight people have problems with their joints and/or back. They are embarrassed to wear a swimming costume.
The answer does lie with exercise, but it's a really long term solution, and because of this requires massive will power. What do i hate more, being fat or spending the next few years feeling embarrased, sore and achy? Rationally, I know it must get easier but it's a hard sell - i'm working on it.
To be honest, I get a real kick out of it and the thing I hate most about my weight is the way it stops me getting those drop shots at badminton or squash, doing 1500 metres in the pool in the same time as I now 1000 metres now, or being able to run 3x round Brockwell Park as opposed to getting aches in my ankles from walking.
