14 DAY TRIAL // As much as we’d like to believe it, or be pushed into believing, on the overall, diets don’t work. While they might be effective in the short run, which they are and there’s no doubt about it, they do not represent an important enough life change to warrant the weight stays off. This is why chronic dieters will never lose weight on fad diets alone, psychologists say for the April issue of Shape magazine.
Chronic dieters are those people for whom, as Shape says, “every dawn means a new diet.” For one reason or another, they always fail to lose the weight, hold themselves guilty for it, give up for a short while and then try something else.
This almost unbreakable circle is called the False Hope Syndrome, and is something on which all diets are based. It is also the very thing that makes regimens practically useless for more than a year, because it does not operate an intimate change in the dieter’s lifestyle or their approach to food.
“Every diet works for a little while, and the dieter goes into a honeymoon phase where weight loss is easy and rapid, and she feels euphoric. But we’ve found that the good feelings start even sooner. Simply making the commitment to go on a diet produces positive sensations. They feel thinner already just planning it, and they feel a sense of empowerment, that they’re taking charge. They’re full of hope.” University of Toronto psychologist C. Peter Herman, Ph.D, says of the False Hope Syndrome.
All dieters, and especially the chronic ones, like to believe that dieting will eventually work, Herman further explains. Moreover, every time they fail, they learn nothing about how wrong they can be in their assertions. They will do so only when they have failed at least a couple of times, which is also when they will come to realize that dieting is not the answer to their problem. A healthier lifestyle and exercise are tough, but they require much more effort on the slimmer’s part, as well as commitment and accepting that they will not return results in two weeks (or even less), as diets claim they would.
“The level of desperation about weight loss is so high that people suspend good judgment, logic and insight despite information that diets don’t work. The prejudice against large people in our society is striking, and it’s a powerful incentive to try to change.” David Garner, director of the River Centre Clinic Eating Disorders Program in Sylvania, Ohio, and professor of psychology at Bowling Green University pinpoints for the same publication in relation to how society is making women see and feel like being thin is the only acceptable way.