Tomorrow I'll Be Slim

The Psychology of Dieting

Sara Gilbert

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134667123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology

Why do so many people try dieting, only to fail? What distinguishes those who succeed from those who do not? Are fat people really any different from thin people? What makes us eat, and how do we stop eating? And how can dieting trigger problems with eating normally?

Originally published in 1989, Sara Gilbert discusses these questions in Tomorrow I'll Be Slim, and draws on what is known about the psychology of eating, overeating, and weight control to dispel a number of popular myths about dieting. She shows how unsuccessful dieting can lead to new problems with eating and weight control. She points out that long-term success in slimming has more to do with individual factors such as a dieter's expectations, self-confidence, or social and family circumstances than with 'will-power'; and as much to do with how a diet is managed as with the content of a diet sheet. She suggests ways in which people who want to be slimmer can make a realistic assessment of their need to diet. She explains how individuals who seriously need to lose weight or change the way they eat might draw up effective strategies for themselves and prepare for the inevitable difficulties we all face whenever we try to change old habits. Finally, she addresses the problems of taking the emphasis off dieting and examining our attitudes to a slim figure as the key to happiness itself.

Chapter One

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A BOOK WITHOUT
A PROMISE

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Most serious dieters have lost count of the new diets they have read about in magazines and newspapers. Many of these diets are a variation on a theme; nearly all promise immediate success. So popular is diet news that it is an easy matter to obtain media coverage on almost any novel idea, however trivial. Often on a Sunday, a quality newspaper devotes space to reporting the launch of a new diet such as the ‘Champagne diet’, claimed by its author to have fat-metabolizing properties which help to speed weight loss.¹

The sad truth is, however, that fat cannot be shed quickly: rapid weight loss means losing part of a temporary store and a great deal of water, and is rarely permanent. Anyone who needs to lose more than a few pounds in weight will have to think in terms of weeks, perhaps even months, rather than days.

How is it then that so many of us are beguiled, time and time again, into buying a new magazine, trying a new diet, or joining a new slimming club? The myth of the miracle diet has a magnetic pull, and if it is truly unworkable, how does it survive?

One answer to this question may lie in the nature of the group of people who diet and their reasons for doing so.

PEOPLE WHO DIET

Up to one-third of men and women in the western world are said to be overweight (see Chapter 2). However, the number of people who see themselves as overweight is twice that of people who actually do weigh more than they should. More normal-weight women than men believe themselves to be overweight. Moreover, not only do these normal-weight people believe they weigh too much: many also worry about their weight or have lives that are in some way restricted by it.²

In this context, dieting is extremely common, and it is not only the fatter people who try to lose weight. In 1980–1 Dr Jeffery and his colleagues from the Epidemiology department of the University of Minnesota carried out a survey of some 2,000 men and women living in the town of Minneapolis. According to the people they questioned in the survey, 72 per cent of women and 44 per cent of men had tried dieting. By no means all of these people were fat, however, and the figures included 63 per cent of women and 22 per cent of men who had never been overweight.³ The results of other surveys have also supported this finding: that many people, women in particular, mistakenly believe themselves to be overweight, and that at least every other woman who is not overweight has tried dieting. Indeed, only half of the women who went to slimming clubs in Minneapolis actually met objective criteria for being overweight (see Chapter 2).

Thus, the prevalence of dieting is very high. Large numbers of people diet, often with little objective need.

There are more than 230 books on the subject of diet and slimming for the general reader currently in print.⁴ The increase in the popularity of dieting over the past twenty years is reflected in a large increase in the circulation of magazines devoted to slimming. In 1966 there were no such magazines in Britain; in 1986 there were ten. The combined circulation of the seven magazines for which figures were available in the first half of 1986 was just under 777,000. In comparison, the joint circulation of the two magazines which have survived since 1976 was just under 377,000 in early 1976.⁵ What the figures do not tell us, of course, is how far the increase in the figures can be explained by individuals buying more than one magazine now rather than by more people in general buying slimming magazines. Either way, however, it is clear that diet news is increasingly marketable.

The question that arises is how far is dieting actually effective, and related to this, how do people learn what to do?

HOW DO PEOPLE LEARN HOW TO DIET?

The second part of the question is more easily answered than the first. Most people diet on their own without recourse to professional or formal help. By far the majority of people trying to diet use a low-calorie regime according to both Dr Jeffery’s survey in Minneapolis in 1981 and a Which? magazine survey in Britain in 1978.⁶ The next most popular method reported by the Which? survey was a combination of diet and increasing normal exercise, such as walking to work. Very many people also try fasting, or other very low-calorie diets. The majority of these people get their information about what to do from magazines and newspapers;⁷ and the next most common sources of information are friends and relatives.⁸ A very large number of people also enrol in formal weight loss programmes such as a commercial slimming club. Forty per cent of dieters in the British (Which? magazine) survey and one in five women in the American survey had tried this method.

DOES DIETING WORK?

As far as success is concerned, magazine and newspaper articles on the subject of dieting are largely optimistic. They may suggest that dieting is often difficult and that it can take a long time to achieve results, but they imply that it is rarely impossible, that anyone can do it if they try hard enough.⁹ In actual fact they have little evidence on which to base such an assumption, as no one really has a clear idea of how well people do when they try either dieting on their own or using a commercial club. It is not uncommon for the inventor of a new diet or the author of a book advertising a particular method to make extravagant claims for the diet’s efficacy. Anyone can report that hundreds of people have tried a certain method and lost weight permanently. They can also publish letters purportedly received from successful customers. They know that most people have no way of checking to see whether the claim is true or the ‘letters’ genuine.

It would be cynical to assume that most people extolling the virtues of their particular brand of diet are in the business of deceiving the public, and it is likely that many of the individual comments published in praise of some diets are entirely genuine. However, it is important to remember that for every person who enjoys a particular product there may be another, or perhaps tens of people, who found no use for it at all or were in some way harmed by it. For every three people who succeed with the pineapple diet, the apple diet, or the five chocolate bars a day diet, there may be another three hundred who find the diets entirely useless.

Asking the dieters

If we wanted to find out how successful people are when they try dieting on their own, we would have to launch an almost impossible survey. First, we would have to select a large enough group of people to be representative of the population at large, including people of all ages, both sexes, and all levels of financial, educational, and occupational status. Having done this, we would have to catch them just at the time they had decided to go on a diet. We would have to weigh them and judge how overweight they were in relation to their height, and we would then have to catch them again at the end of their diet, which as anyone who has tried dieting knows could be anywhere between one day and one year or more. We would then have to weigh them again, and follow them up at a later stage, say in six months, one year, or even five years’time in order to find out how successful they had been at both losing the weight in the first place and keeping it off in the long term.

An alternative to this fairly laborious task would be to find a group of people who have tried dieting in the past and ask them how they got on with it. This too has its problems, as most of us have a very poor memory for fine details such as exactly what we used to weigh, how long the diet took, and just how many times we tried. In practice, however, it is a method that has been tried by a few researchers.

Stanley Schachter, an American psychologist interested in the subject of obesity, carried out his own survey, interviewing a total of 161 people including eighty-three current members of the Psychology department at Columbia University in 1977, and seventy-eight people living in a small seaside town.¹⁰ In the interview, he asked people about their weight history from childhood onwards, and probed with more questions about any attempts to lose weight. Out of the 161 people interviewed forty-six had at some stage in their lives been overweight, and of these forty had tried dieting. Of these, twenty-five (just over two-thirds) reported that they had succeeded in losing weight and had managed to maintain weight losses of twenty-nine to thirty-nine pounds for several years. This sounds fairly optimistic; but the problem with the survey is that it was very small and may not be truly representative of the population at large. In Dr Jeffery’s much larger survey in which he reported on interviews with over 2,000 people only one-third of dieters reported having achieved success.¹¹ Of course, the major problem with surveys of this kind is that we have only people’s self-report to go on. In Dr Jeffery’s survey, men reported themselves as having been more successful at dieting than the women. However, very many of the women who dieted were not overweight in the first place, so that the word ‘success’ in this context presents problems as we do not know how many of the dieters actually needed to lose weight.

Commercial slimming clubs

Another way of examining how successful people are at dieting is to consider what happens to people who join commercial slimming clubs. Up to forty per cent of female dieters try going to a club at some stage, which represents a fairly high proportion of dieters. In Britain, nearly 100,000 people attend weekly meetings of slimming clubs run by organizations such as Weight Watchers, Slimming magazine, and Silhouette.¹² About 10,000 of these people, that is one in ten people, are said to reach their target weight. Unfortunately, it is difficult to interpret the meaning of these figures as the clubs do not keep records on a national scale. Many of the 100,000 recruits could be people who rejoin some weeks after leaving in order to give the diet another try. This would render the figure of one in ten fairly optimistic (it might really be one in ten tries rather than one in ten people).

Whether people manage to reach their target or goal weight is, of course, a matter which may be less important than whether they manage to lose weight at all. Surveys in Britain, Scandinavia, and the United States have estimated that people who do not drop out of programmes early achieve a net loss of between 9.5 and 26 pounds (4.3 and 11.8 kilograms) on average, attending their clubs for an average time of between four and thirty weeks. While these figures include both people who have gained and people who have lost weight, they are not entirely unsatisfactory as clearly there are some initially very overweight people who are able to lose a significant amount of weight.

There is a major question mark, however, over the fate of those people who do not either lose a large amount of weight or achieve the target set for them by their club. It may be that some of them would prefer to continue attending in the hope that they will make further progress at a later stage; but in the words of Audrey Eyton, founder of Weight Watchers in Britain, ‘Most commercial slimming groups, as they learn by experience, tend to toughen up their policy with strictures like “shed so much in a month or you’ll get expelled”’.¹³ If indeed clubs are putting pressure on their slow losers to leave the fold, this would have the effect of biasing the figures in the direction of greater success.

Many slimming club members drop out before they have reached goal weight. The numbers of people who do so are bound to vary from one club to another, but in one study in the United States half of the 108 women in one commercial programme had dropped out by six weeks, and 70 per cent by the twelfth week.¹⁴ Dropping out of a programme would not have any significance if we knew that once having been to a slimming club most people had learned how to diet and were able to continue following the programme on their own at home. Most dieters, however, are unfortunately not able to do this. In one study of an Australian organization, the authors managed to follow up 131 out of 172 people who enrolled in a twelve-week programme, six months after the end of the programme.¹⁵ Just over half the people who were prepared to fill in a questionnaire at this stage admitted to having gained weight again, and this of course casts doubt on the fate of those people who did not return their questionnaires.

What then of the people who do manage to lose a significant amount of weight? The authors of one survey in Britain sent questionnaires to 136 members of three slimming clubs who were known to have lost 14 pounds (6.3 kilograms) or more. Ninety-two people (just over two-thirds) replied. Twenty-two people (about a quarter) had regained all their lost weight and some of these had gained even more; fifty-eight people (nearly two-thirds) had regained some but not all of the lost weight; and only twenty-two people (13 per cent) had maintained their losses or managed to continue losing.¹⁶

There are some people then who manage, either on their own or with the help of a slimming club, to lose weight. A small proportion of these people lose a large amount of weight. Some people can sustain quite substantial losses for a considerable period of time; but these people are not in the majority. Many people are unable to stay in their club or on the diet long enough to lose a significant amount of weight. Others find that when they have left their club, or gone off the diet, the weight begins to creep back on again.

PROFESSIONAL HELP

If dieting on one’s own or with the help of a slimming club fails, what alternatives are there for the would-be slimmer? One person to whom many people go for advice is their doctor or general practitioner (GP). Over half of the slimmers in the Which? magazine survey had at some stage talked to their GPs about losing weight, and they were more likely to have done so if they were dieting for health reasons than if they were diet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Book without a Promise
• 2 Why Diet?
• 3 Causes of Obesity
• 4 What is Hunger? or ‘Why Can't I Just Stop Eating When I Want to?’
• 5 Successful Slimming
• 6 The Dark Side of Dieting
• 7 Eating to Live
• 8 Coping with a Diet 1: Defining the Problem
• 9 Coping with a Diet 2: Planning for Change
• 10 Alternatives to Will-Power
• Notes
• Index