never diet again

Dieting never works for long, and I have completely quit now for about 6 months. This was the best thing I have ever done!!!

By eating naturally now, my body has adjusted and I have lost weight without any dieting! Surprise surprise, my body went back down to the weight it always was before dieting.

Your body has a weight it is happy with, and I’ve learned to be happy with it!

DIETS DON’T WORK!!! I’ve ruined my body by all the diets I’ve gone on! It is estimated that 90-98% of people gain the weight back and more! Diets don’t work for me! I’m learning to love my body and eat only on demand from stomach hunger for whatever I want. Usually you lose weight and it stabilizes as a by-product…but it doesn’t matter anymore! I don’t care what I weigh anymore!

I haven’t dieted in a few years. I gave dieting up for good and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.

It was difficult at first. I struggled with body image. Small weight gains bothered me. I had guilt for eating “too much” or the “wrong” foods.

It got easier, although I still sometimes felt a pull toward trying to lose weight via eating little or only eating certain kinds of food.

I started exercising more and more, for weight maintenance at first, but no longer do it for that reason: now I do it to meet certain goals. (Like running to train for a marathon, for example.)

I don’t feel at all like dieting these days. I try to eat when I’m hungry and stop when I’m not hungry. I’m not perfect at this and expect I will never be. Sometimes I continue to eat. Sometimes I start eating when I’m not hungry at all. The one thing I don’t do: I don’t go hungry so I can lose some weight. I remember when I used to go to bed hungry pretty much every night and wake up hungry almost every morning . . . geez did that stink! I was hungry almost every day for several YEARS. All in the name of being a few pounds lighter.

The thing is, with no dieting at all (although I’m not eating a buffet for breakfast and sheet cake for lunch; as I said, I try to listen to my body’s messages) and a moderate exercise program, I weigh just a few pounds over the “ideal weight” I was always starving to get to.

I’m so much happier not having food (or lack of it) on my mind all the time. When I was dieting, calories and grams of fat and my gnawing hunger were on my mind all the time, distracting my brain from other things. I was run-down and weak, physically and mentally, constantly. I wasn’t eating enough, but when I was eating, it wasn’t necessarily good stuff. Sometimes, I’d have a single cupcake for lunch or something like that. When I “fell off the wagon,” I’d eat sweets and pizza and whatever else I didn’t let myself eat on the diet.

It’s depressing how much time, thought, and health I devoted to being some arbitrary number of pounds I’d deemed “just right.”

DIETING DOESN’T WORK. DOESN’T WORK. DOESN’T WORK. DOESN’T WORK. NEVER WILL. I had a relapse and tried to do WW No Count for a while. DIDN’T WORK. It just brings back the restrain-pig-out-restrain-pig-out-cycle. And an extra kilo.

Some days I still struggle with this one. For one thing, I want to use dieting as an excuse to pig out. “I’ll eat my own bodyweight in chocolate today, but then tomorrow I’ll get back on the weightwatchers plan…” But I have to take responsibility for what I do to my body without any “get out of jail free” cards. I think I weigh too much, that I have too much abdominal fat. My BMI, height-weight chart, and other people all concur I’m fine. I need to relax about it all. It’s so tempting to just plan a little three week stint of food restrictions. Just to ditch a few kilos. And it would be so dumb. I wouldn’t stick to it, the cycle would continue…
So, it’s not going to happen. Dieting doesn’t work. http://www.ifnotdieting.com.au/cpa/htm/htm_home.asp

I can’t believe no one else is doing this! All through my 20s I was on-again off-again dieting. I feel like I lost a part of my life to it. I was always slim but when I hit about 17 I grew a bit of a belly and didn’t know how to deal with it. I started working in the fitness industry and of course that made things even worse. I starved myself, binge ate etc etc and my weight fluctuated in a 10kg range. Never really big or small.

The scary thing is, so many women share this experience – almost so it’s weird if you haven’t been through it. And I would wish it on no-one – I was really fucked in the head about food (please excuse the language, I just can’t think of a better description).

When I was 30 I did weightwatchers for about the 6th time and finally succeeded. Now I’m about 5kg (10lbs) more than that and can’t diet anymore. Because I’m sick of it. Even though it always tempts me, I know I wouldn’t be able to stick it out.

Now I’m doing what is called “The Eventual Non-Diet” (The END). Where you eat what you want but you try to stay healthy and exercise. Apparently you do lose about 5kg in 5 years! My weight doesn’t change much now, and even though I’d like it to be a little less, I never want to go back to those horrible swinging days. EVER. Often, I suggest a diet to myself, but thankfully I’m strong enough to resist. What’s the point when it doesn’t work?

The “END” is a scary prospect, and you need to be self-accepting, but this is the thing I want to stick with for good.