How I finally stopped Yo-Yo Dieting: The lead up
My history with yo-yo dieting up until the past year and a half of being diet free
In a story that is all to common, I remember first knowing I needed to diet when I was 6 years old. I noticed that there was a girl in my 1st grade class who had a lot of friends, and she also was a lot skinnier than I was. I wondered how I could become that skinny and then have all those friends.
What followed for the next 20 years were periods of intense food restriction followed by periods of stopping the diet and gaining back all the weight (and, of course, even more). This was also an interesting time because my most intense food restriction happened around middle school, when my body was very much still growing. My track coach told me that I needed to make sure not to gain weight during puberty because what she had seen happen to a lot of girls was that they went through puberty, and then they came back the next track season and were much slower from all of the weight gain. I have been incredibly active my whole life, but that did not free me from weight stigma. Back in elementary school, I remember a friend’s parents speculating in front of me, asking about how I could be so active and still so big.
My recent diet history is as follows. In 2019, I lost the ~30 pounds that I had gained over the previous two years all in the course of a few months because I decided I would end college at the same weight that I started it. I then came to grad school and within the first year had gained around 50 pounds. (None of these numbers are exact, and I include them only to give a benchmark for what scale of weight loss I am talking about here: I am acknowledging that in the grand scheme of weight loss and gain, I am still working with relatively small numbers compared to what some people go through.) Over the next 3 years I had a few attempts of downloading MyFitnessPal, doing calorie counting and restriction paired with over-exercising and then losing some and gaining more back. The most sustained period was kicked off in 2022, and I really told myself that this time would be the last time that I would gain and lose these same 30 pounds.
By this time I had been reading and listening to content on the real inefficacy of dieting, and the concepts of a body’s set point and how hard that is to change. The Biggest Loser Study was a significant piece of literature I read in this time pointing to what a vanishingly small fraction of people are able to actually lose weight and keep weight off. I came up with every reason why I would be the exception, and why my weight loss was different than all the statistics, and that it would be my discipline and work ethic that would set me apart. As if weight loss is just a discipline problem- something that I now know is untrue.
Towards the end of 2022, I was dating someone who dieting, and he was doing the same calorie restriction and dieting that I had been doing, and was similarly losing and gaining weight. Watching so closely when someone else was going through it, I was able to see how clear it was that this is a form of disordered eating, and that it was really limiting certain life functions for him to be spending all of this time and effort on restricting his calorie intake. I encouraged him to see a dietician, and then realized that for all the reasons I thought he should see someone, I should see someone, too.
I started seeing a dietician in January of 2023, and that first appointment was really rough. She asked me if I would keep a log for a week of what I ate, and at even the idea of tracking, after the years I had been through with MyFitnessPal sent me spiraling to tears. I refused to write down anything of what I ate, and I told her, “I am not going to do that again.” We ended the appointment with the agreement that even though the tracking wouldn’t be for portions, but just to know what kinds of foods, she still wouldn’t ask me to do that.
I met with the dietician once a month through that year, and by the end of the year we decided that I had made enough progress and was in a good enough place that we would reduce to seeing each other just once a quarter. Overall, meeting with a trained provider, and this particular provider who was so knowledgeable and understanding, completely changed the direction of my relationship with food, and I really hope it sticks. I’ve been “diet free” for 18 months now, and really loving it, so here are the tips I have and lessons learned to encourage others to try the same!
These are things I learned from reading books, listening to podcasts, or in conversation with my dietician. They all work for me, but your personal experience may differ, and I hope you are able to read this as just one of many resources on your diet free journey. Each lesson is listed as its own blog post in this series.
