Confessions of a dieter

Published On: July 15, 2016 03:00 AM NPT By: Isha Bista


Last summer I reached my goal weight and celebrated by treating myself to a vacation. During the vacation, I ate and drank without restraint, and went everywhere in tubes and taxis. Ten days later, I was back home, looking like my old self, and ready to go on a diet to lose all the kilos I had put on in Bangkok. I had lost four kilos and put on six.


Since this January, I have started and restarted dieting at least eight times. The longest I have been on a diet is a month and the shortest is a week. And it’s not just this year. Last year was a similar story and so was the year before that. I have, since as long as I can remember, been trying to lose weight and failing miserably at it because I always end up putting on more than I lose.


Most of us know how it feels to be struggling with weight loss as many of us are on a perpetual weight loss mission. I’ve realized that the reason we never succeed at actually losing weight is because of our yo-yo dieting habits. Instead of focusing on a healthy lifestyle and exercising, we opt for quick fixes because of our habit of wanting instant results. But this rarely ever works.


However, it’s not just your waistline that suffers from all the yo-yoing. According to research, repeated crash dieting increases metabolic hormones, such as insulin, and elevates levels of sex hormones, including estrogen. These changes cause you to start putting on weight around your middle, which has been linked to insulin resistance, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart diseases.


Despite knowing about the downsides of yo-yo dieting, many of us continue to do it. Talking to some chronic dieters, I realized that a poor sense of self and body image is what propels many to go on crash diets. For most, it’s not about being healthy and fit but about looking great and feeling good. Here are what some dieters had to say.

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I currently weigh 79 kilos and I know I need to lose weight. My cholesterol levels are high, and my BMI puts me in the obese category. The doctor has told me to lose weight immediately, repeatedly. But the truth is that it’s not easy to lose weight. I have been trying to lose 10 kilos since 2013 and while I have occasionally lost three to four kilos every now and then, I’ve always put on more than what I’ve lost every single time and ended up bigger and fatter.


There are times when I feel so guilty that I just drink water and eat only fruits for a couple of days. I lose a kilo or two that way. And then I feel so weak and lethargic that I’m back to eating rice and chicken twice a day and momos and sandwiches for snacks. The kilo or two that I lost comes back with interest. This yo-yo dieting is doing me more harm than good. I don’t know how to lose weight. I look at myself in the mirror and cringe. If this is how I feel about myself, I can only imagine how others view me. I want to feel good about myself but with this weight loss struggle I feel like I’m on the verge of depression. I feel like everything is spinning out of control.

 

One who is desperate to lose weight

How I feel about my body depends on the people around me. I look at people who are slim and thin and envy them. Whenever I meet someone new, I’m always checking that person out. If s/he seems to be on the fat side, then I feel all slim and toned and good about myself but if someone is thinner than I am, then I get all anxious and start looking for some flaws in that person. I don’t want to do this but I can’t seem to help myself either.

I’m always on one diet or another. Right before my best friend’s wedding I tried the GM diet. Then after the wedding, I went on the Atkins diet. I find that these diets do nothing for me except fuel my sense of inadequacy because I imagine shedding all this weight but rarely do so. A friend told me she lost seven kilos following the Atkins diet but it didn’t work for me. I wonder if I’ll forever just be the envious one or I’ll get to be envied too.


The jealous one
I’m so ashamed of how fat I look that I’ve stopped meeting friends and going to parties. But it isn’t only my social life that has suffered because of my weight issue. My tummy feels constantly bloated, and I’m always low on energy. Even on days when I start with fresh fruits and good intentions, by late afternoon I’m back to dumping two teaspoonful of sugar in my coffee and munching on Cadbury Dairy Milk and having pizza for dinner.


I have made diet plans that I believed would change the way I look. It did. But for the worse. While some diet plans made me look haggard and sleep deprived and took the glow away from my face, others I just couldn’t stick to after a couple of days and had to restart over and over again. All this has wrecked havoc not only on the way I look but also on how I feel about myself. My confidence level has plummeted and I don’t see any way out of this whirlpool.


A girl who is sad and lonely

I was someone who would eat with abandon and didn’t give two hoots about my weight till the time I was in college. Then a couple of harmless comments recently changed things. My brother’s friend remarked that I look very mom-like and then this 20 year old called me aunty. These comments hurt so much that I plunged headlong into crash diets, swapping my hearty meals for diet books instead.


Within a year, I had lost 10 kilos and my waist size has gone from 30 inches to 26. Now, I’m struggling to stay there. I had no issues with weight until someone made me feel really bad about myself. Come to think of it, these people weren’t all that important either but it just goes to show how insecure we feel about our bodies and the lengths we will go to just to achieve some sense of self. I wasn’t unhealthy before and wasn’t unhappy with my body either but I still chose to go on a diet and lose some weight. The thing is I’m pretty sure if somebody comments on it again, I’ll once again go on a diet and that’s not a good feeling.


The insecure one

ip_bista@hotmail.com


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