Diet Addiction

“Dieting has become normalized behavior, with approximately 116 million Americans dieting to lose weight,” Judith and Ellen said. “But, dieting to lose weight is anything but normal. Depriving your body of food it craves, ignoring physical signals of hunger, and defining yourself as good or bad depending on whether you’ve stayed on your diet or broken your diet are all unhealthy behaviors.”

Dieting Doesn’t Work

According to Judith and Ellen’s research, the most logical reason to avoid diet addiction is that dieting doesn’t work.

“Dieting has a dismal failure rate unthinkable in any other area,” Judith and Ellen said. “While all diets can produce short-term weight loss, 95 to 98 percent of all dieters will gain the weight back within one to five years, some adding extra pounds in the process. People don’t fail diets; diets fail people. The body is physiologically programmed to defend against caloric restrictions in an effort to preserve the body. Every diet failure is actually a success in terms of species survival.”

In The Diet Survior’s Handbook, you’ll learn that dieting increases your risk for weight gain, weight cycling and disease, depression, and eating disorders.

Attuned Eating is the Key

Both Judith and Ellen believe that the key to overcoming diet addiction is to master the practice of “attuned eating.” Their research has shown that when dieters learn to recognize the physical signs of hunger, stop denying forbidden foods, and start separating food from emotional comfort, their weight will eventually stabilize.

“It is important to work toward changing the cultural belief that there is a normal way to diet to lose weight, to accepting that dieting itself is an unhealthy behavior,” Judith and Ellen said.

In The Diet Survivor’s Handbook, readers learn 60 lessons to help develop healthy eating patterns, improve their body image, and promote a stronger sense of self. Most of the advice could be called common sense. However, many tips can be tough for someone struggling with diet addiction. For example:

• Lesson #2 tells readers to “Honor your hunger.” According to Judith and Ellen, “Hunger is your body’s natural way of telling you that it’s time to eat.”
• Lesson #26 instructs us to “Challenge the notion that thinness equals health.” After all, even very thin people can suffer from diabetes, hypertension, or other serious medical conditions.
• Lesson #57 asks us to “Avoid diet conversations.” As any former dieter knows, women can become intensely competitive when the subject of weight loss is discussed. This behavior must be stopped if you are to overcome destructive dieting.

To help readers implement their advice, Judith and Ellen have prepared activities and discussion questions to accompany each lesson. Throughout the book, you’ll learn how to prepare a food bag to ward off the signs of hunger, how to celebrate your body for what it can do instead of what it looks like, and how to analyze negative body thoughts as an expression of your feelings on other issues in your life.

Additional Resources

• Buy The Diet Survivor’s Handbook.
• Visit Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel’s website.
• Learn how to form a support group for stopping diet addiction.

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