Perpetual Dieting as a form of Self-Improvement

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I have a friend who is always dieting. It’s a perpetual cycle she goes through. Every few months she comes to an epiphany that she’s unhappy with the way she looks and needs to do something about it. How could she let herself look like this?! No way she can be this size, she has to lose weight! So she finds a new diet and she starts going to the gym a lot more, working out more strenuously. She watches what she eats all the time and our weekly lunches consist of her talking all about how her new diet is working, because her pants are fitting better and the scale is going down. And then, a few months later, she falls off the dieting wagon and gains the ten pounds back. And then the cycle starts all over again.

January is that blessed time of year when people make New Year’s Resolutions. And of course one of the number one resolutions people have on their list is weight loss. Maybe it’s ten pounds, maybe it’s 50, or it’s the “holiday weight” that was gained in the month of December. Whatever the number might be, the sentiment remains the same–”I want to be thinner! I have got to lose weight!”

As I thought about my friend and annual New Year’s weight resolutions I thought about why weight loss resolutions and dieting are so popular. I know that this is a topic that comes up a lot in the Fatosphere, probably because it never ceases to baffle us as to why people are so obsessed with dieting. Because of what Gina Kolata, Paul Campos and all the others have taught us about how diets don’t work in the long run, it seems silly that people keep these weight loss resolutions up year after year.

I think Kate Harding said it best in her letter to Oprah last month:

Some days, you feel like it would be so much easier to take on that old part-time job again — especially when you’ve done it so many times, for so many years, you could do it in your sleep. All you have to do is carve out three or four hours a day to exercise more vigorously, obsess about what you’re going to eat next, and prepare it; stop listening to your body and only pay attention to your food plan and workout schedule; cut out some hobbies and social time to make room for the job; recall all the tips and tricks for not eating at holiday gatherings, at restaurants, at your dear friends’ houses, at your own birthday party; retrain yourself to believe that salad dressing — let alone artisanal bacon, creme brulee, whatever — doesn’t taste good enough to warrant its negative effects on your job performance; talk constantly about what you’re not eating and how great it makes you feel, in hopes that some of your friends will join you at this lonely little workplace; and — most importantly — continue to believe with a religious fervor that your body is an ugly, hateful thing that must be punished and diminished. As long as you really believe that, the rest isn’t so hard to keep up, once you get used to it (again).

I think the reason people become obsessed with dieting and weight loss is because they see it as a form of self-improvement. And in a society that tells us we are not good enough no matter what we’ve accomplished or what we’ve done, it only makes sense that we are in a constant state of self-improvement. And our bodies seem like the perfect way to manifest that self-improvement. Like Kate said in the above quote, it’s all about job performance. If we work at something and get the acknowledgment we are looking for, it is like a confirmation for our egos.

At the end of the day, I feel sorry for my perpetual dieting friend. The sorrow mostly stemming from the fact that she never seems happy with herself, which is a very sad way to live. I’m not saying that I’ve arrived and I am the poster child for self-acceptance and body love, but I have given up the idea that dieting and over-exercising is the perfect way to make me into the ideal tiffabee that I want to be. And that, if nothing else, is a good step in the right direction.