I was chatting to someone yesterday and they asked me the first time I can remember dieting, I thought back and I think I was around twelve years old, I can remember it was a summer holiday and I was staying with my gran. My mum had found a diet that was doing the rounds at work which involved eating spinach on one day and steak on the next day for a week to supposedly drop half a stone.
I can remember seeing it as a prison sentence for a week and spent each day obsessing over when my next bowl of spinach or steak was coming. I would dive on the scales on an almost hourly basis to see whether I had lost an ounce or two.
And from that week I was hooked into the dieting lifestyle, I was either on a diet or not on a diet but both ways it was about dieting. When on a diet I would be struggling to hang in there and keep to the plan and when not on a diet I would be eating as much as I could because I was always a few days off starting the next diet, and everytime I dieted and ate again I was a few pounds heavier than I was the time before. I can remember doing a famous diet for 2 years and being two pounds heavier at the end of it than at the start.
Because dieting grabs you like that, it becomes a lifestyle, you start bonding with your friends talking about dieting, you start planning your meals hours and days in advance, you buy books on dieting, download fact sheets, join weight loss forums, go to gyms, cook special red day meals etc etc. You end up so in the dieting lifestyle that you actually gain out of being overweight because it is a hobby to diet and without needing to diet then what else would you do? I mean if you went to work and everyone was chatting about the latest diet and what foods were good/bad and you didn't need to diet then what would you talk about ?
So forget about your weight for a few minutes and just look at your lifestyle, just how many hours a week do you work on your dieting, how much time do you talk about food and weight, how much time you really invest in the dieting lifestyle and what could you do instead ?
