It’s no secret that diets are demonized in the eyes of many women. Healthy Weight
Journal delineates dieting myths as follows:
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1. Diets make you happier and healthier.
2. Diets give you energy.
3. Diets make eating fun.
4. Diets never become eating disorders.
5. Diets are sexy.
6. Diets make you beautiful.
7. Diets improve your health.
8. Diets are exciting.
9. Diets are inexpensive.
10. Diets work.
Only one of these myths is actually a myth, and that’s number four. Diets, when used
incorrectly, may provoke an eating disorder. Yet again, this is a psychological issue
and not the diet’s fault. That is the fundamental reason women screw up diets; they
do not use sensible diets, nor do they adhere to sensible expectations.
Authors Jane Hirshchmann and Carol Munter preach that diets make women “fat, sick and compulsive eaters” in When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies. Susie Orbach joins this sermon as she declares that diets make “normal eaters” afraid of food.
Since dieting reportedly makes women fat and sick, various pseudo-anti-diets have surfaced to appease would-be dieters waiting in angst. Bob Schwartz, author of Diets Don’t Work, crafted one of the first anti-diet mantras that counsels:
1. Eat when you are hungry
2. Eat exactly what you want to eat.
3. Enjoy every bite of what you want to eat
4. Stop eating when you are no longer hungry.
Other pseudo-diets have presented themselves in assorted incarnations of this guideline.
Nevertheless, women writers have smacked diets with dogma so harsh that you’d think diets are the spawn of Satan. Author Debra Waterhouse found enough wrath with diets to write an anti-dieting motto: “If you want to gain weight, go on a diet” in Outsmarting the Female Fat Cell.
Most often, when women diet, they use fad diets and expect results in days. Women convince themselves that they can stick with the most hideous diet, even if it means eating only carrots and cheese for a week, and lose weight. The
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition points out that these are diets that force the body to make protective famine adaptations that hinder weight-loss endeavors.
Euphemisms such as “healthy eating,” a “healthy lifestyle,” and “a good diet” took over, and books were published while offering themselves as an alternative to dieting still marketed weight loss as their goal.Jane Ogden, The Psychology of Eating
Using fasting, or one-food diets in aspiration of quick weight loss is called self-delusion. This is not dieting. As I mentioned earlier, a diet educates a woman about her body. Fad diets frustrate and give real diets an undeservingly nefarious reputation.
When Susie Orbach wrote that, “Diets rarely help a woman lose weight or reeducate her eating habits. Under the guise of control they bring havoc in the food area and frequently increased poundage” in Fat Is a Feminist Issue, she was speaking of a carrots-and-cheese diet, or the lose-20-pounds-in-two-weeks diet.
In 1996, Good Housekeeping magazine revealed America’s top six fad diets:
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1. High-protein diet
2. Liquid diets
3. Grapefruit diet
4. Juice or broth fasts
5. Food-combining diet
6. Cabbage soup diet
The reasons women liked these diets were that the weight-lose came quickly and easily, even if it was just water weight, and the diets required little or no nutrition education.
These are the get-skinny-quick diets that offer more than they can deliver. The woman’s role in this dieting failure is actually wanting to believe that such diets will work, or that she will have the will power to starve herself slim.
Despite all the controversy about how to go about it and [how] terribly tough it is, dieting really is moral, sexy and healthy.Helen Gurley Brown, Having It All