Why I stopped dieting

I told myself I wasn't dieting.

After all, I wasn't doing Weight Watchers, Atkins or the 80/20 diet.

I told myself I was just eating healthily.

But I was spending hours out of my day thinking about food and what I couldn't eat. I was hungry a lot of the time.

I’d input what I'd eaten in MyFitnessPal, trying to figure if I'd had quarter of a pound of salmon or half a pound, and if I'd eaten two or three cups or salad.

Then when I’d finished at the end of the day, it would cheerfully announce: ”If every day was like today you would weigh..."

The funny thing is I'm not overweight or even close. I weigh 10 stone. But I wanted to weigh 9 stone.

When I was a teenager I was very skinny. My parents even thought I might have been anorexic but I wasn't, I just didn't have a big appetite.

I could eat what I wanted and I never seemed to gain a pound. I never stressed about eating in McDonalds or polishing off a tube of Pringles in one go.

That changed when I turned 21.

All of a sudden my stomach started to expand over the top of my jeans. I never could figure out why I gained the weight. Maybe it was my bad eating habits finally catching up with me. Maybe it was the fact that I was midway through my college degree and therefore drinking quite a lot.

But all of a sudden I felt this kind of self-consciousness I hadn't experienced before. I'd never been completely happy with my body but I knew I was much happier than the majority of women my age.

I kept thinking people were staring at my tummy. I eschewed bikinis and tight fitting dresses and began wearing high-waisted jeans and anything which distracted from what felt like this enormous thing sitting in front of me.

I stressed about it a lot of the time. If I told people about my worries they would immediately tell me I looked great, but I never felt that way.

Little by little I started to slip into the dieting mentality. At first I tried to take up jogging and just cut out snacking.

Then I would try to go to the gym three times a week. I cut out chocolate, crisps, sweets, fizzy drinks, pastries, biscuits and any other food classified as treat.

The next to go was take-out, followed by a conscious effort to cut down on carbs.

I tried all of the so-called health food from rice cakes to dried fruit and nuts, Greek yoghurt and the one treat I was allowed - 85% dark chocolate and tasted so bitter I would avoid it anyway.

By the end I had restricted myself to three meals a day plus one snack in the middle of the day, and I had added circuit training into my gym routine.

Two things happened. The first was I was so hungry that I felt physically run down and I was constantly sick with one thing or another.

The second was that I would binge when I got the chance. Instead of what I would do before, have a slice of cake when offered, if there was a birthday in the office or a cake sale I would have multiple slices of cake, brownies and cupcakes and feel awful afterwards.

When I felt sad it was used as an excuse for a cheeky Chinese take-away.

It turns out it's not so easy to just cut things out of your diet.

The one thing that didn't happen was weight loss. If anything I felt like I'd gained weight. At the very least I'd gained this sense of guilt and shame which was weighing me down all the time.

I think I would have continued like this in the vague hope that someday the dieting would work if I had not read The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

She pointed out a few things which woke me up to how pointless dieting is.

The first was that approximately 1 per cent of people who lose weight manage to keep it off. We have a natural weight and our body will fight to keep us from going below it.

The second was that dieting is often self-defeating. You crave the things you can't have and are more likely to binge as a result.

Plus, it doesn't help that stress releases cortisol which, apparently, makes you more likely to gain weight.

So, I thought, what was the point of putting so much time and energy into something which was doomed to fail?

I deleted all the weight loss apps off my phone. I told myself to eat whatever I wanted. I stopped going to the gym - which I hated - and couldn't afford anyway.

I didn't know the true meaning of irony until I realised that after I stopped dieting I lost weight.

I am so much happier now. It's been hard, but once I realised I was never going to lose that stone, I just stopped worrying so much about how I look.

I have extra money now that I'm not going to the gym.
I have more energy. I have hours and hours of extra time to do whatever the hell I want. I can read a book. I can hang out with friends. I can waste my time watching Netflix.

Anything that isn't logging calories or worrying about my weight.

I no longer say things like "I will fit into that old dress eventually" or "do you know how many calories that has?" or "I'm not allowed to have pasta more than once every two days".

Dieting, I now realise, made me boring.

I still try to make the healthy choice when I'm ordering in a restaurant or decide what to get in a shop. But knowing I could have the unhealthy choice if I wanted to gives me immense satisfaction.

Wouldn't it be nice if society preferred that we were just happy instead of skinny?

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