Fundamentals: Here’s What Happens When You Go On a Diet

CW: This post discusses dieting and disordered eating and mentions specific disordered behaviours around food and calorie information that may be distressing for some readers. If this feels like it would be upsetting for you to read right now, then please do what you need to to look after yourself.

Welcome to another post in the Fundamentals series of Can I Have Another Snack? where we are covering foundational topics in the anti-diet cannon. For those of you who have been following my work for a while - you know all this stuff already. But hopefully this can serve as a handy link to share with your pals who are non-diet curious. And for anyone new around here, well, buckle in.

Before we get started, just a reminder that whatever you want to do with your body is your choice. My writing about why diets don’t work and are probably harmful is not an indictment on you. Diet culture is a pernicious system of oppression - it is the problem, not you, not your body. And I appreciate too that, for some, dieting is a form of survival.

And at the same time I’ve seen a lot of ‘pro-dieting’ articles come out lately - usually written by extremely privileged thin women who are so, so sad that they can’t openly diet in 2022. And without any kind of meaningful analysis of why this specific brand of choice feminism is pretty fucked, or the connections to other systems of oppression. You do you, hun. But let’s not project your disordered eating on to vulnerable people.

So I thought it was about time to strip it back to basics. What actually happens when you go on a diet? What is the likelihood you’ll lose weight? And keep it off? And what are some of the side-effects that your GP conveniently forgets to mention when casually handing out that prescription for Slimming World?

The reasons people want to attempt weight loss are plentiful and complex. For safety, vanity, under doctors orders, to cope, to be affirmed, to feel valued, to feel seen. And paradoxically, to feel as though they have the right to take up space.

We live in a culture that values and rewards thinness and instills shame in bodies which can’t ‘conform’ - bodies that are too unruly to be disciplined. The weight-loss-industrial-complex, projected to be worth $3.8bn in the US alone, sells us the false promise of shedding our layers of shame right along with dropping the lbs.

The imperative to lose weight is ubiquitous. It’s an essential part of our education. It’s baked into public health policy. It’s dangled in front of pregnant folks as an incentive to breast or chest feed. It’s a prerequisite for humane health care.

And, we are told, it is simply a function of calories in vs. calories out. All we have to do is eat less and move more. Right?

Well. Not so much.

The best way I have found to describe what happens when we go on a diet is using the diet cycle. Many versions of this exist - but this is the one adapted from my book. For the purpose of this discussion, a diet is any attempt to restrict what, when, or how much you eat, with the intention of weight loss. It doesn’t matter what we call it - a diet is a diet is a diet. Yes, even ‘sensible’ ones. Here’s what it looks like.

The diet cycle