Does Your Diet Keep You Stuck at Home?

When I ask my clients how dieting negatively impacts them, they almost always talk about how it adversely affects their social life.

It sounds something like this:

• I stay home a lot on the weekends because I’m afraid if I go to a party I’ll break down and eat a bunch of food I shouldn’t be eating.
  

• Even though I’d like to, I don’t go out to lunch with my coworkers since the places they like don’t serve anything I can eat. Instead, I eat my packed lunch at my desk while scrolling through Instagram.
  

• I skip a lot of family gatherings because there’s always so much food, including many of my childhood favorites. I don’t want to be tempted and fall off the wagon.
  

• Rather than hang out with my friends on the weekends, I spend hours alone in my kitchen preparing my allowed foods for the upcoming week.
  

• I’d really like to meet someone, but dating is hard since I don’t eat after 6:00 p.m.
  

• I get anxious about consuming too many calories/points/carbs when eating out with my friends so I often make excuses about why I can’t join them.
  

• I avoid taking trips if I won’t be able to control what food I’ll have access to. It’s just too stressful.
  

• I skip my company’s happy hours because I don’t need all those cocktail calories.
  

• I bring my own diet-friendly meal to dinner parties, but end up feeling left out when my friends rave about how good the food is they're sharing.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Social Life Suffers
When you place a lot of rules and restrictions on your eating, your social life can suffer tremendously.

Following a diet and/or living with a diet mentality makes it really hard to engage fully in your life. 

It's difficult to be flexible in different food situations and eating environments, to go with the flow and be open to new experiences.

Your life becomes very restricted, contracted and small.

If you’re afraid of eating the “wrong” things, losing control with food and blowing your diet, it’s completely understandable why you would want to isolate yourself. You’re simply trying to be good, to protect yourself, to keep yourself safe.

Harmful to Your Health
Yet, the social isolation dieting can cause not only sucks all the fun and joy out of your life, it can also be harmful to your health.

Research shows that a lack of social connections is a greater detriment to health than smoking and high blood pressure and contributes to loneliness, depression and anxiety.

Whereas, strong social connections lead to a 50 percent increased chance of longevity.

Drives Emotional Eating
Many of my clients share that the social isolation they experience when dieting leaves them feeling bored, lonely, anxious and sad.

As a result, they understandably turn to their forbidden foods, especially when alone, in an attempt to fulfill the innate human need for connection, companionship, comfort and pleasure.

Unfortunately, this often provides them with false evidence that they can’t be trusted with food and need to pull the restriction reins in tighter.

Not Inherently Dieters
Human beings are inherently social creatures. We are not inherently restrictive eaters.

We thrive when we regularly nourish ourselves with a wide variety of satisfying, pleasurable foods—as well as deep, fulfilling social connections.

If your diet keeps you stuck at home, afraid of socializing and losing control with food, I encourage you to truly consider if it's worth restricting your life for.

I Felt So Ashamed of My Weight Regain

I wiggled into my only pair of jeans that still fit, draped a shawl over my upper body, and anxiously headed out the door.

It was the best I could do to hide my larger size—besides not leaving my house at all, which was what I had been doing.

As I rode the train downtown to meet a few past coworkers for tea—friends I hadn’t seen in a year since I was laid off from the company we all worked for—I thought about all the ways I could justify my weight gain.

It felt important that I acknowledge it first before they had a chance to jump to any conclusions.

My life had changed drastically over the last year. There were so many things I could point to that would possibly explain my fuller face, bigger belly, heavier hips and thicker thighs.

Afraid of What They Might Think
Despite what may have sounded like valid reasons for my body changes, more than anything, I was afraid my friends would think what I was thinking about myself: That I was a failure. That I was weak. That I had lost control and let myself go.

I feared my reputation as a super-disciplined healthy eater and exerciser—who was applauded for losing a lot of weight a few years prior—was now tarnished.

I feared I would now be the topic of water-cooler gossip.

I felt so embarrassed and ashamed.

No Longer a Success Story
When I had shed all those pounds, I truly thought I had finally cracked the weight-loss code.

With arrogance that I now mightily cringe at and regret, I strutted around believing I had conquered the one thing so many people struggle with.

I had successfully lost weight.

And now I had regained it.

I was no longer a success story.

The Body Fights Back
Sadly, if I had known on that train what I know now, I could have saved myself from a lot of unnecessary pain, isolation and suffering.

Unlike what’s so commonly believed, rebound weight gain is not due to a lack of willpower or self-discipline. Nor is it from following the wrong plan or program.

When you deprive your body of food, it thinks it’s being subjected to a famine and will do everything it can to survive.

This means triggering numerous physiological and psychological changes, like increasing food thoughts, intensifying cravings, boosting appetite and decreasing metabolism.

When you understand the compensatory measures a body makes when it’s restricted of food, you can understand why an estimated 95 percent of dieters regain the weight they lose, and up to two-thirds gain more than they lost.

It's not because they fell off the wagon!

If I Only Knew Then
If I had understood that my body was simply trying to keep me alive, I might not have felt ashamed for not being able to maintain my weight loss.

I wouldn’t have blamed myself and viewed my weight gain as a personal failure and character flaw.

Nor would I have wasted so much time and energy strategizing about how I was going to fix my body and being stuck in a vicious restrict-binge cycle for the next few years.

I wouldn’t have avoided events, activities or friends who love me regardless of my size.

Instead of being mad at and mean to my body, I would have been grateful for how smart it is! 

Ideally, if I knew everything I know now about how damaging dieting and diet culture are on both an individual and collective level, I would have never attempted to achieve the impossible thin ideal in the first place.

I would have better understood my internalized fatphobia and respected my genetic blueprint instead of trying to force my body to be something it was never meant to be.

A New Success Story
Thanks to everything I’ve experienced and learned, I’ve redefined what a success story is when it comes to food and my body.

For me, it means having a peaceful, trusting, nourishing and intuitive relationship with both—one that’s completely shame-free.

What I'm Consuming [Top Reads]

As I’ve shared before, I constantly have my nose in a book or my ears plugged into a podcast.

I especially have a big appetite for content regarding food and body liberation, like Intuitive Eating and Health at Every Size.

Here are a few recent articles that really resonated with me (and many others!). Perhaps they will with you, too.

Smash the Wellness Industry
“The diet industry is a virus, and viruses are smart. It has survived all these decades by adapting, but it’s as dangerous as ever. In 2019, dieting presents itself as wellness and clean eating, duping modern feminists to participate under the guise of health.”

What Does Intuitive Eating Even Mean?
“If you find that you’re counting things, that’s not intuitive eating,” says [Evelyn Tribole, co-author of Intuitive Eating]. If there’s something called a cheat day, that’s not intuitive eating. If someone’s promising weight loss, that’s not intuitive eating.”

(To learn more about the basics of Intuitive Eating, head on over to here.)

What Happens When You Put a Kid on a Diet
This heartbreaking story is sadly one I’ve heard hundreds of times.

“If you are an adult putting kids on weight loss diets, restricting their eating, or telling them they can’t trust their body, you are an adult who is saying that the risk of a lifetime of struggle—a lifetime of self-hatred, a lifetime of disordered eating, a lifetime of not trusting oneself—is worth the possibility of a brief moment of thinness."

When Did "Fat" Become an Insult?
"For much of history...'excess body fat [was] a symbol of wealth and prosperity as the general population struggled with food shortages and famine, as we can see in Renaissance portraits celebrating full-figured women.”

I’ll be sharing more of my favorite content in the future, so stay tuned…