Feature

Feeding off failure

The diet industry grows rich selling products which promise dreams but deliver failure, argues Mary Evans Young

To coincide with International No Diet Day on 6 May, Diet Breakers released the results of a survey of dieting women. The survey asked women where the pressure to diet comes from and how they felt about their bodies. 516 women of all ages responded to the survey, from a girl of 15 to a woman of 79.

Two-thirds of respondents said they diet because their mothers dieted; one-third blamed the fashion and advertising industries. One in four women said that their stomach was the part of their body they liked the least. Low self esteem was the main reason for women not accepting their bodies as they are.

Katy’s response was typical: ‘I am trying desperately hard to stop thinking about food — I hate my body and food is an enemy. I am trying to stop imagining that if I were thinner everything would be all right, that I would suddenly love my body and the self revulsion would cease. I think magazines and advertising have done a great deal to help me form the opinion that my body is ugly and that anyone who find it attractive must be perverse. I am coming to terms with this obsession with weight but what I am left with is anger... anger that the precious years between childhood and adulthood were robbed from me.’

I believe that dieting is to women what football is to men: a national preoccupation. I know, because I have been there myself. I was always thinking about food and I knew the calorie content of everything. When I was eating breakfast I was thinking about lunch. According to a recent women’s magazine article, 70 per cent of some women’s conversation is about dieting. When a women says she’s going on a diet, nobody will ask ‘why?’ It is automatically assumed to be a good thing.

Yet in reality, dieting causes enormous problems, pain and confusion. For many girls and women feelings of self-esteem are measured by our bodies, and our bodies are measured by the tape measure, the scales and the food we’ve eaten. Our feelings get jumbled and it comes out as ‘feeling fat’. Many women, like Katy, say they diet because they ‘feel fat’. Of course, ‘feeling fat’ is a state of mind unrelated to actual body size (Katy is 5ft 7in and size 12); a woman suffering from anorexia will tell you she feels fat.

Losing weight is a doddle but keeping it off is the difficult part. According to Professor France Berg editor of Healthy Weight Journal, 96 per cent of dieters regain all weight lost within 2 years. And failed diets lower self-esteem further, leading to yet more body dissatisfaction.

Diet products are a marketing director’s dream: the failed dieter almost always blames herself — and then looks for another product. Not surprisingly many companies produce a range of products: slimming clubs, low-cal meals, books, videos.

In the US the diet industry is worth $40bn — the fifth largest industry. In Britain it is worth about £2bn and rising. It’s a largely unregulated scam. Any jack-the-lad can set up in business with no limit to creativity. Take the latest whiz to hit my desk: a set of ‘sniff pens’. They look like ordinary felt-tip pens but smell of strawberry, banana or spearmint. The idea is you sniff them, and hey-presto... you’re slim, somehow. A snip at twenty quid.

As the dieting industry has grown, so has the nation. We now eat fewer calories than we did 40 years ago yet we are, on average, heavier. Low fat food sales have increased but the fat has not left the food chain — it has been hidden in ready made meals, Yorkshire puddings, custards.

The nation is racked by the diet mentality. A recent survey carried out by Swansea University revealed that children as young as five years old are thinking about dieting. It is well known that our eating patterns are laid down in childhood. Children do not wake up one morning wanting to diet — they learn it. Deborah, who responded to our survey, summed it up nicely: ‘In answer to your question “did your mother diet?” Is the Pope Catholic? My mother must be a major shareholder in Weight Watchers by now.’

I trained as a psychotherapist and have been working as a staff development consultant for the last 15 years. In 1991 I began running workshops called ‘Do you really need to diet?’ to help women improve their self esteem, and established Diet Breakers in 1992. I was prompted by a TV programme about women who have their stomach stapled. One women had the operation, split the staples and had it done again — three times. Then I read about a sixteen year old girl committing suicide because ‘she could not face life being size 14’. I saw the connection and decided to do something about it.

The non-diet movement is growing rapidly world-wide. This year International No Diet Day, which began in 1992, was celebrated with blue ribbons in America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Norway, Germany, Scotland, Ireland and England. Libraries, schools, women’s groups and health centres were among those who took part. In the UK our theme was ‘a healthy start for children’, and the day was supported by over 100 MPs.

Diet Breakers has been working with Alice Mahon, Labour MP for Halifax, on a bill to regulate the diet industry — as a result of which the government has taken steps to ban the sale of amphetamines as diet pills. We publish the magazine Db, and have produced a 16-page booklet (recently recommended by Marg Proops and others) on breaking the diet-binge cycle.

I am frequently invited to make presentation to health professionals who believe it is time to shift the focus from weight loss to good health. Linda Omichinski, a dietician from Canada, is a pioneer of this movement. Over the last 8 years she has been developing the You count, calories don’t programme which she says started when she really listened to what her clients were telling her. She would see people, sit and talk, design an eating plan for them and off they would go and lose weight. But sometime in the future back they would come, feeling a failure because the weight was regained. Linda realised that her clients didn’t fail — the diets did.

The aim of the You count, calories don’t programme is to teach participants self-worth and acceptance, to differentiate between physical and emotional hungers and to encourage active living rather than obsessive exercising. An evaluation of the programme has been very favourable and was recently published in the Canadian Dietetic Association’s journal. We have a team of facilitators offering the programme around the country and we hope that, sooner or later, it will be run by NHS professionals so that it is available to anyone who needs it.