I am the 95% of dieters who regain the weight.
I didn’t try to be part of the 95%. When I gained weight in college, I was struggling with accepting my changing body but also knew that dieting wasn’t an answer. But then one summer I got very ill with a drug-resistant Strep infection and was basically on an extreme diet for 4-6 weeks when I could barely keep down food. After putting on about 50 lbs over a year, I lost it all in a month. When I recovered, though, the weight came right back on and then some. My weight stabilized after about a year and remained fairly stable for the next decade with a natural fluctuation of about 15 lbs up and down.
There is an old saying in Fat Acceptance that losing weight is as easy as holding your breath. Keeping it off is as easy as continuing to hold your breath. Dieting has breed a myth of its success off the fact that its not hard to induce weight loss. This period of “success” is what convinces dieters that its their fault when the diet fails. The truth is that the diet failed and was always going to fail. When I did might sound extreme, but its actually tame compared to some commercial diet plans. Even the most pseudo-reasonable “lifestyle change” relies on a fundamentally unsustainable formula. Sooner or later, we need to breathe. The diet industry, though, thrives on sustainability. Every time a diet fails, that’s just a new customer. More billions to make off of peddling fat stigmatization.
I am the 95%. I did not fail. A culture of fat shame and fat hate has failed me.
I put this on Pinterest, and people there are repinning it for self-hate and thinspiration. I usually don’t stgart discussions with people, but in this case, I’m commenting with the advice to click through to the original article, as they have it all backwards. Seems there is only one way most people can understand the words ‘diet’ and ‘weight’ — diet more, and lose weight regardless. It’s as if the original 99% of Occupy Wall Street were really only aiming to become rich exploiters themselves and join the 1%, instead of more social justice.-
