7 Reasons Not to Start a New Year’s Diet

You are on this earth to do more than diet, restrict calories, and burn them off. I believe in you.

Who this blog article is for

Anyone who has been on the diet hamster wheel.
Anyone who routinely feels guilt about food and exercise.
Anyone who keeps trying to fix their relationship with food by restricting what they are allowed to eat.
Anyone who gained weight over the holidays or during the pandemic and is thinking about doing something extreme to lose it.
Anyone who feels like a failure when they let themself eat what they crave.
Anyone who thinks their problem is bingeing.
Anyone who thinks they lack willpower.
Anyone who struggles with their body image.
Anyone who believes they can only love themself if their body gets smaller.
Anyone who doesn’t believe it’s possible to truly heal their relationship with food.

If you have a serious eating disorder, you need more than this blog article. If you struggle with anorexia or bulimia, if you have severe body dysmorphia, if you are restricting or purging food in a way that threatens to compromise your physical health, please consult with a therapist or dietitian who specializes in eating disorders, or call the National Eating Disorders Helpline at 800-931-2237.

If you have a peaceful relationship with food – if you don’t fixate on food, don’t feel guilty when you eat, have never felt the need to go on a diet or make a “major lifestyle change” in regards to the way you eat and exercise – you’re probably doing okay. I still recommend you don’t go on a diet, but a lot of the following will feel intuitive to you.

For everyone else – here we go. This is a long one, but it’s worth it.

First, a story.

In August of 2013, when I was working on rebuilding my entire life from scratch, I went paleo. I had had brief dieting stints in the past – cutting out carbs here, using apps to count calories there – but they had always ended catastrophically. Most memorably, a month of careful food policing ended in a glorious 5-donut binge after a roommate brought home a dozen Krispy Kremes.

But paleo was different. It wasn’t a diet, it was a lifestyle. Sure, it was great that I lost some weight, but I was really doing it for my health.

I didn’t actually care that our paleolithic ancestors didn’t use coconut aminos to marinate their chicken before coating it in almond flour and pan-frying it in ghee. I just knew that a lot of people who sounded like they knew what they were talking about wrote very convincing articles telling me that sugar, bread, and dairy were POISON.

I just knew that REAL FOOD – which meant exclusively meat, eggs, vegetables (but not white potatoes!), fruit, nuts (but not peanuts!), and some oils – was what my body really needed, and everything else was lava. I mean poison. I mean… fattening? Er, no, not fattening. Unhealthy. Because dammit, this isn’t a diet. This is a lifestyle.

Anyway, I lost weight. So I guess it worked.

Until it didn’t.

Four months after embarking on this journey, I began to “fail”. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get back to paleo. I knew how I was “supposed” to be eating – real food only, remember? For my long-term health? But most days, I did some kind of “cheating”.

What a waste. What a screw-up. I must just not be one of those willpower-having types of people. Maybe it’s my ADHD that makes it too hard to stick with something? I don’t know, I just can’t do it. Something is wrong with me.

It didn’t occur to me that maybe the reason I couldn’t stick to this way of eating was that I was depriving my body of nutrients that it was craving for a reason.

My attitude about this fluctuated.

Some days, I was really hard on myself. Other days, I rallied against the very idea of weight loss, shouting to anyone who would listen that it was the patriarchy’s way of trying to make women take up as little space as possible.

One summer day in 2016, I was walking down the street, I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, pulled out my phone, and typed the following into my notepad app:

What if the goal wasn’t x pounds? What if the goal was just to love myself and love the body I’m in and treat it well and make it feel good? What if food existed as fuel, and a little bit for pleasure, and I only chose not to eat things that made me feel less than my healthiest? What if exercise were just to test the limits of my body, to see what it can do, to make it feel strong, to make it flexible and sustainable and something that I can stay in for the rest of my life?

How long can I maintain this perspective without society seeping in? Without the negative voices creeping up and telling me that I’m not good enough unless I lose enough weight, unless I look a certain way, unless I fit the media image of what beautiful is?

Two months.

That’s how long I was able to maintain the perspective.

It imploded in an instant during a mortifying bridal shop fitting, where the seamstress admonished me, in front of both my mother and mother-in-law-to-be, for not having the willpower to lose enough weight to make the dress look its best.

(Also, fuck her.)

And I continued on my perpetual battle with myself:

Do I want to lose weight?

Sure, because that’s the healthy thing to do. (Also, wouldn’t it be great to fit those old jeans I loved so much?)

But doesn’t it also perpetuate the patriarchy, and suck up a ton of energy I could be putting towards other, more valuable projects?

Yes, it does, screw this.

But I look so fat today, and I hate it.

Books that saved me.

And so on, and so forth, until, in January 2018, I googled “body positivity” on a whim and discovered a book by Instagram influencer Megan Jayne Crabbe with a candy cotton pink cover, and the title Body Positive Power. I started listening to the audiobook at a café, where the waiter kindly pretended not to notice the tears streaming down my cheeks.

Body Positive Power gave its reader permission to opt out of the pervasive diet culture messages we’re all barricaded with, and to find happiness at any size. It empowered me to get angry enough that those feelings overpowered the fear of getting fat. It was grounded in science, and sociopolitical context. It spoke to all kinds of bodies – thin bodies, fat bodies, bodies of color, trans bodies, disabled bodies – and, couched in Crabbe’s story of her own eating disorder recovery, it gave me permission to let my body be whatever the fuck it was going to be. It allowed me to let go.

But I didn’t understand why just “letting go” was so effective until a month ago, when I read the book The Fuck It Diet by Caroline Dooner. She gave greater context to my experience of this, and I’ll share some of her key takeaways in this blog post.

Why all of this matters

Until a few years ago, every time someone told me they “had a healthy relationship with food” or “didn’t give food power” or “didn’t really think about their body image too much”, here’s what I assumed:

They had good genes, which made them naturally slim and athletically inclined, so of course they didn’t have to think about it.
They had never dieted, had never gone through anything challenging to get to that point.
If they were not naturally movie star thin, they were either lying to themselves about being comfortable in their own skin, or else they were somehow immune to the media.

And so I want you to know, before I dive into a list of reasons that you should not diet, that I’m not being flip about this. I understand the pressure to cut out certain foods. I’ve stared at many menus, trying to decide between the food that sounded best, and the food that seemed “healthiest”. I’m not dismissing how challenging this is, because I’ve been in the trenches.

Your body is your body.

You can do anything you want with it – pierce or tattoo it, teach it parkour, shave or grow hair anywhere, engage in any consensual sex act you want. Feed it cookies. Feed it kale. I don’t care. You’re the expert on yourself.

But, based on everything I’ve read, my own experiences, and 15 years of seeing therapy clients, most of whom have at least a little bit of body image baggage, I really don’t think you should embark on a New Year’s Diet. Here are 7 reasons why.

1. Skinny is not the same as healthy.

We have this tendency to see someone who has a magazine cover-ready body, and think, “they are so healthy!” I used to do that too, but what I’ve learned in over a decade as a therapist is that people are thin for lots of reasons. Some of these reasons include:

They are genetically inclined towards being thinner.
They fear obsolescence.
They have a passion for athletics.
They are or have been sick.
They come by intuitive eating naturally, because weight has never been a problem for them.
They have learned to eat intuitively after a long battle with food.
Their entire life is dictated by an obsession over “calories in/ calories out”
They have had invasive weight loss surgery.
They have recently lost a lot of weight because of depression.
They have recently lost a lot of weight because of anxiety.
They have recently lost a lot of weight because of grief.
They just really love Crossfit.
They have been struggling with an eating disorder for years.
They have been yo-yo dieting for years.
They have a naturally low “set point”. (More on this below.)
They are naturally thin, but are trying to gain weight, because they think they would be more attractive if they had some curves.

And the list goes on. It blew my mind, when I was a new therapist, to learn that people I perceived as having incredible bodies were often steeped in insecurity. Some of them didn’t like their bodies – even if those bodies are what you might aspire to. Others did like their bodies, and had worked incredibly hard to “achieve” them, but lived in constant fear that they might gain five pounds if they weren’t constantly vigilant.

We have been sold a very profitable lie: Skinny is healthy, and overweight is not healthy. Even from a physical health perspective, the reality is a lot more nuanced than this.

So stop using your health as an excuse to diet. There may be certain health conditions that are exacerbated by bingeing – but as I’ll describe below, bingeing is exacerbated, not eliminated, by dieting.

And speaking of health…

2. Mental health is health.

If you’re constantly ruminating (pun intended) about food, if you’re anxious you might slip up on your diet or “lifestyle change”, if you deprive yourself of non-food things that give you joy because it would interfere with your meal-planning, if you look in the mirror and hate yourself, if your self-worth is tied to fluctuations of the number on the scale…

This is BAD for your mental health.

We tend to be dismissive of things that happen in our brains – depression, anxiety, PTSD, exhaustion, sadness, grief. But these things are real, and they matter. If you’re so focused on your “physical health” that you completely neglect your mental health, this is very, very unhealthy.

3. There’s a fine line between diets and eating disorders.

Speaking of mental health, let’s talk about eating disorders. You might think, “well I don’t have an eating disorder” and feel inclined to skip this section.

But eating disorders are more varied and far-reaching than most of us are aware. A lot of the things that we are societally encouraged to do, that we are congratulated and applauded for, are sneaky, insidious eating disorder behaviors.

Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of these things. I’ve been in the mental health field, including my student traineeships, for 15 years – and I’ve known about them for less than 3 years:

1. Orthorexia

Orthorexia means strict, doctrinal adherence to a rigid way of eating, and viewing foods that don’t fit the paradigm as poison. Think: strict paleo/ keto/ Atkins/ South Beach/ etc., some forms of veganism, gluten-free, etc. In other words, any way of restricting entire food groups that is unrelated to a specific medical diagnosis (diabetes, celiac, allergies) or set of values that don’t have anything to do with health or nutrition (such as religion, animal welfare, or the environment).

Learning this word was a gut punch, because it’s exactly what I was doing when I ate paleo. I would stand in the grocery line, feeling superior, and judge how much “food” versus “poison” the people in front of me were purchasing. I would ask servers at restaurants whether their food was prepared in olive oil or canola. If they weren’t sure, I would just have a salad to be on the safe side.

People who describe the way they eat as a “lifestyle change” rather than a “diet” are particularly susceptible to orthorexia. If you believe that you are making a permanent lifestyle change, you’ve probably been persuaded that some foods are off-limits forever and should be thought of as poison.

2. Atypical anorexia

Anorexia, as most people know, is the severe restriction of food and calories, with a distorted sense of one’s own body, and the hope of losing weight. What a lot of people don’t know is that anorexia is the mental health diagnosis with the highest mortality rate.

Until the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the bible of mental health diagnosis) was released in 2013, part of the definition of anorexia was that the person needed to weigh less than 80% of the average weight for their height. What this meant is that some people were not sick enough to qualify for an anorexia diagnosis.

Read that last sentence again. Until 8 years ago, if someone ate nothing but an apple once a day, but they were not severely, dangerously underweight, they could not be diagnosed with anorexia. Three months later, when their bodily organs started shutting down and they were being hospitalized, if they weighed little enough, they would meet criteria. If they didn’t weigh little enough, they would be diagnosed with “eating disorder, not otherwise specified”.

This – even though the behaviors were exactly the same.

The DSM-5 introduced “Anorexia, atypical type” to allow the diagnosis for people who didn’t meet the old “low weight” requirement.

But here’s the thing: Atypical anorexia is horrifically underdiagnosed, because until someone is dangerously skinny, these behaviors look a lot like what our society calls a diet. And we reward diets, because we believe they demonstrate willpower, responsibility, moral superiority, and a wholehearted commitment to staying thin. Sometimes atypical anorexia can look like using calorie counting apps, or logging Weight Watchers points or Noom color categories. Even many doctors applaud atypical anorexia when working with patients who live in larger bodies.

But atypical anorexia is so, so dangerous.

3. Bulimia, but without vomiting

As most people know, bulimia is a binge/purge cycle. But most people think purging means vomiting. After all, that’s how it’s been most frequently depicted in media.

But purging is more than that. It’s any activity that you use to try to “eliminate” calories you’ve eaten. And here’s the most surprising example:

Exercise.

Exercise can be a wonderful, amazing thing. When I go to my “gym for nerds”, I feel strong, I have a sense of community, and I have fun. When I do yoga videos, I get to push my limits, feel emotionally centered, gain strength and flexibility, and mitigate my back pain.

But exercise that you do with the intention of eliminating calories you’ve eaten is a bulimia behavior.

When I learned this at a talk given by Sam Giertych of Bamboo Nutrition, I was floored. How many exercise classes have you been to where someone says, “earn that Thanksgiving dinner!” or “burn off that big lunch you had today!” This is baked into the bread (yum bread) of our culture.

Yikes.

And speaking of bingeing…

4. Dieting is making you binge.

This one is directly from the book The Fuck It Diet, and it hits home. Remember my post-diet Krispy Kreme binge?

Imagine that you’re caught in a famine, where you don’t have access to enough food. The moment you have access to an ample supply of food, you are going to lose control and refeed yourself. Not only are you going to restore your body to its state of fullness; you’re going to take in extra calories, just in case there’s another famine lurking around the corner. This is not your body betraying you; it’s evolution’s way of ensuring your survival.

The lie we’ve been sold: You are bingeing because you are failing at dieting.

The actual, biological reality: You are bingeing because you are dieting.

If you want to break the diet/ binge cycle, the only way to do it is to allow yourself, unequivocally, to eat. You may gain weight if you do this, but the hard truth is that it’s impossible to improve your relationship with food until you improve your relationship with the possibility of gaining weight.

When you unequivocally allow yourself to eat, you will eat a lot of food for a period of time. More than you’ve ever believed you’re allowed to. But eventually, your body will believe that there’s no more famine in store, and it will chill out. If you need vegetables, your body will crave vegetables. (But it will also sometimes crave cake, and that’s okay too!) If you’re full, and someone offers you an Oreo, you may even find you’re able to say “no thank you”.

If this sounds radical, but I’ve piqued your curiosity, this is the entire premise of the book The Fuck It Diet by Caroline Dooner, and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Eventually, once you refeed yourself, your body will settle at the weight it’s supposed to be.

5. Also, dieting increases your set point.

“Set point” is the phrase that means “the weight your body is supposed to be”. This is unique to you – we are not all supposed to look like Megan Fox. (Frankly, it’s possible that even Megan Fox isn’t supposed to look like Megan Fox.)

So let’s say you read reason #4 and decided to take your body out of famine mode. You start eating… but because you’ve been dieting for so many years of your life, your body doesn’t trust it. Another famine is coming soon, right?

As a result of the months or years or decades you’ve spent on the diet rollercoaster, your body has learned it needs to cling to extra calories, so your natural set point is going to be higher than it would be if you had never dieted in the first place.

This can change over time. If you stop dieting, stop restricting food, stop using exercise to purge, stop giving yourself rules about what you can and can’t eat, and rid yourself of the good food/ bad food dichotomy, your body may stop freaking out, and your set point may go down a bit over time.

That being said, if you decide to try this “anti-diet” with the hope of lowering your set point – in other words, if your intention is still to lose weight – your body will still process this as a temporary reprieve from famine, and it will NOT work.

But seriously, you 100% cannot heal your relationship with food unless you allow yourself to be okay with the idea that you may gain weight.

Easier said than done, I know.

6. You can’t become happy by depriving or punishing yourself.

Here’s the myth: “When I am thin, I will be happy.” Or, “when I am thin, then I can have/ do/ be ___.”

It isn’t true. You can have, do, and be those things now. And when you reach your goal weight, you won’t be able to rest on your laurels; you’ll be terrified of backsliding.

When we diet, we are incredibly mean to ourselves. We bully ourselves, and convince ourselves that we don’t deserve the things we want right now. We haven’t earned it.

Happiness doesn’t come to greet you as a reward for hitting a certain number on the scale. It’s the result of hard, inner work, and learning how to practice self-compassion, which is at direct odds with the idea of a diet.

Diets are about “you don’t deserve this food” and “you don’t deserve rest”.

I want to acknowledge: fatphobia is very, very real. Thin people, and even average sized or “overweight” people who want to be thinner than they are, walk through the world with privilege. If you live in a small to medium sized body, no one judges you for your food choices. Strangers don’t approach you and wax poetic about the “cleanse” that “saved their lives” that they thought they would share with you because they’re “concerned about your health”.

But in the face of this oppression, lots of fat people still learn to love and accept themselves. Caroline Dooner describes the difference between “unavoidable pain” (someone being an asshole to you about your weight) and “avoidable pain” (you buying into it, agreeing with them, and feeling worthless and steeped in shame). If you’re a member of a marginalized group, you will inevitably encounter unavoidable pain, but you can learn not to jump on the bandwagon and amplify how those experiences impact you. Just like lots of BIPOC people, queer and trans people, disabled people, and other people who experience oppression every single day learn to love themselves, you can too.

Regardless of your body size, happiness does not live on the other side of deprivation, cruelty, and self-punishment. It lives on the other side of a decision to pursue radical self-acceptance.

7. Your body has already been through too much.

I was reluctant to include this last one, because this article is important and I want it to be evergreen. But right now, at the beginning of 2021, we are still very much in the throes of a global pandemic, and I’d be remiss not to address how that interplays with the idea of dieting.

When you diet, your body thinks you’re entering a famine, and activates cortisol and adrenaline, which are stress hormones.

In a pandemic, your body’s hypervigilance systems are piqued, and this activates… you guessed it… cortisol and adrenaline.

Maybe you’ve gained some weight in the pandemic, and you think it’s because you’re a lazy slob who’s just been sitting in your home for the last year. It’s not. It’s because the cortisol and adrenaline have made you gain weight. It’s because your body knows you’re in a state of crisis, and is hoarding resources.

I want to reiterate that your body is yours, and you’re allowed to do anything you want with it. I also believe that the healthiest thing you can do is to break up with dieting altogether.

That being said, right now, during a pandemic, you have more than enough cortisol and adrenaline. If you don’t buy into anything I’ve said in this blog article and you want to try to lose weight, you do you. I hope you find happiness, and a body that feels good to live in.

But I want to encourage you to really, really consider whether this moment in history, when your body has already been through so much stress (even if you haven’t had COVID!), is the right time to embark on a diet.