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The dark side of dieting.
It may surprise you to hear, but I am not a fan of diets. Despite the word “diet” being part of my job title as a dietitian, the science points to diets being far more harmful to our health and wellbeing than they are helpful. And while the word “diet” used to mean simply a pattern of eating, it’s now become virtually synonymous with “weight loss diet” – and that’s the type of diet that can have some serious downsides.
There are a number of reasons for this:
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Why Weight is not a great predictor of health.
It is well known that dieting for weight loss is both ineffective and potentially dangerous. Yet, the diet industry is alive and well, globally worth almost $250 billion (CAD). We are definitely hung up on the notion of shrinking our bodies. Part of the reason for that is cultural standards of beauty (that are often unrealistic), but also that weight is generally accepted to be a good predictor of a person’s health risk and health status. We assume thin people are at a low risk for health issues, and larger people are higher risk – even if we don’t know much (or anything) about their life and lifestyle behaviours.