With approximately two-thirds of all adults in the UK on a diet at any point, except for the usual annual spike in January, it’s a vastly popular thing - going on a diet. It’s the same across the globe, with approximately 70% of adults struggling with their weight or being defined as obese, and google hitting hundreds of thousands of searches every day for diet-related topics.

I started my first diet when I was 14 years old. I used to eat terribly. Every day my lunch consisted of something from either the local fish and chip shop or the bakers - at the shops just a few minutes outside of school because nobody stayed for school lunch in my day! Or, it was some convenient microwavable ready meal that could be quickly heated up in its box straight out of the freezer. Biscuits, cakes, fizzy pop, white bread and butter also featured high on my weekly menu.

I don’t recall what I understood about the word diet back then, but I remember that I thought it was something you went on when you were fat. It was also something you did to fit in at school and be normal. It would help you be accepted and find a boyfriend. It also meant you hardly ate, felt light-headed, and kept a secret from your parents, feigning an upset stomach at as many meal times as possible to avoid eating the huge, home-cooked dinners they served up.

Just to be clear, at 14 I was far from being fat, and also failed multiple times to lose weight from any of the radical diet solutions I tried out. However, it didn’t stop me from going on them.

I find the topic of diet fascinating, and it’s something I am hugely passionate about re-educating people on. After spending thirty-plus years obsessing over my diet, I’m finally in a place where I’ll never go on a diet again, ever.

Why? Because I already have a diet. I’m not ‘on’ a diet, but I ‘have’ a diet. Sounds the same, but in reality, it couldn’t be more different. This is why.

Every living creature, including all of us humans, have to eat and drink for survival. We need to do it every day, bearing the odd period of illness, to maintain good health. For our bodies to function as they should, we need a combination of fuel from foods and liquids. This is our diet - the food and drink we consume every single day of our lives.

So when I hear people saying like I did hundreds of times, “I’m going on a diet”, I want to shout out at them “No you’re not, because you already have one, and you’ll have it for the rest of your life!”

The diet culture we live with is huge, scary and toxic. It’s estimated that the global weight management industry will be worth $142bn to the global economy this year, and it’s something that generates constant content in our fast-paced world of technology. It continues as it did in the eighties when I first encountered it, to create the belief that there is a solution to your problems in the form of restricting and depriving yourself of food and drink. The diet culture we’ve struggled with for so many years instils in us that the size and shape you are matter for you to be happy and successful. It tells us, women in particular, that when you are a certain size and shape you’ll be attractive and worthy. It feeds us with so much noise about our worth being directly linked to the number we see when we step on the scales. And we believe it.

I believed this for most of my adult life. I was forever trying new diets and spent years turning up to my weekly weight loss group, surrounded by lots of other equally desperate and unhappy women, praying the number on the scale would show a loss, so I could celebrate at the pub afterwards.

Watch Susan Hyatt, author and business coach, share the risk of diet culture on women, girls and society in her 2020 TEDx Talk.

The thing with the many different diets people are putting themselves on every single day is that they don’t work. They don’t give the solution you’re striving and starving yourself for. Almost 80% of people who lose weight don’t keep it off. This is because the diet culture that exists has educated us to believe a diet is a temporary thing, something you do for a short while to hit your weight goal, and then you can go right back to normal, feeling everything you’ve been wishing to feel.

Of course, this isn’t how it works, and I could write a whole other blog on why, but in simple terms, it’s because of two things - the diet you’re putting yourself on isn’t how you as a human should be eating to allow your body to function at it’s best, and secondly because the industry that creates these diets has made sure you don’t get the long-lasting results you want so it can continue to grow and profit.

I believe now is the time to shift the language and understanding around diets. I want you to know that you have a diet, just like your dog or cat has a diet. To live you have to have a diet, so it’s not something you’re going to start from Monday or go on for a couple of months before your summer holiday, or just so you feel better at the Christmas party. I want you to know that your diet is constant and you can create a diet and way of eating that works for you and your health, to allow you to flourish and thrive. It might need some work to change and adjust from how it is now, but that’s still not you ‘going on a diet’. It needs you to understand what works for you, your body and your lifestyle goals. It’s also very much about you realising that the size and shape you are won’t instantly make you feel happy, attractive or successful. You’ll feel all of this when you build your self-belief and self-worth in other ways, including taking care of yourself and your wellbeing.

I want to help you to see that by building a diet for life, one that will change as you go through different seasons and events in your life, you can make so many improvements to your physical and mental health. Worldwide, about 11 million people died from the effects of a poor diet in 2017, mostly by contributing to the development of cardiovascular disease. Obesity is now the leading cause of early death.

Your diet is vital to your health and what I call your healthspan - living a long healthy life, as opposed to just trying to live as long as you can but not having a good quality of life to make it worth your while. So your diet isn’t going anywhere, it’s here to stay for the rest of your life. You need to understand and accept this, so you stop punishing yourself by constantly switching up what you eat and how you provide for your body, and telling yourself everything will be so much better once you’ve finished your diet.

Food is an opportunity to flourish and thrive. It provides our energy so we can move and think the way we want to. It gives our bodies what they need and deserve. When we feel these things we reap the benefits of more energy, motivation, strength, and self-belief. This all leads to the things that create strong wellbeing and bring us happiness. This is what will help you to feel confident, attractive, worthy, successful and happy. Not the number on the scale.

Sources:

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

The Lancet

Pharmacy Direct GB