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Body Liberation

Why ALL Diets Are Bad – 5 Facts Backed By Science

If you’ve spent any time here at CMooMuses, you’ll know I am extremely anti-diet, and today I’m going to explain in detail why ALL diets are bad. Period.

You may think that I’m just a diet skeptic. A fatty who is too lazy, greedy, and undisciplined to diet and feels bad when I see others trying to make positive changes in their lives. Nope! Not even close.

I have done Weight Watchers, Slimming World, the Cabbage Soup Diet, the Venus Index, Body FX, and many more. Since I was fifteen, I’ve spent a substantial chunk of my life dieting and spending (wasting) money on plans and diet products. When I say all diets are bad believe me I know what I’m talking about.

The Result

I am still fat! In fact, I am considerably fatter now than I was I started. I still struggle with emotional eating, and I feel obsessed with food. I have never developed an eating disorder, but my eating definitely comes under the heading disordered.

I suspect that I have wasted crazy amounts of time and money miserably starving myself in the quest for thinness. What’s worse is I also fear I’ve actually made my health a lot worse by the constant stress caused by the up-down yo-yos in weight the dieting caused.

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Bye Bye Diets

I have tried to embrace intuitive eating in recent months, but I still have a long way to go. I still exercise, but I do it because it’s good for me rather than obsessively counting calories burned.

Sometimes it’s a full session at the gym; on other days, it’s a gentle evening stroll with my sister Jayne talking tattoos, skincare, and RuPaul’s Drag Race 😃

I try to be kind to my body and only say nice things when talking to it or about it. I am trying to restore some small shred of sanity after decades on the diet treadmill.

How I Realised All Diets Are Bad

I’ve written lots about discovering body positivity and how it set me on this track. How it allowed me to make peace with my body and learn to love myself as I am.

I won’t rehash it here as it’s not the point of this post, but my body positivity journey is available for you to check out at your leisure.

How does that lead me to realising all diets are bad, though? That’s easy – research!

I always research anything I’m interested in to death. That includes diets (back in the day, obviously!), tattoos, how to start a blog, how to be a freelance writer, the list goes on! So when I read books about how ineffective diets are, I had to look into it further.

Where Did I Get My Data?

There is actually a ton of data out there, but as many studies into the effectiveness of dieting are paid for by diet companies and pharmaceutical companies who sell diet products, you need to take them with a whole barrel of salt.

That’s why the facts in this post come from the work of Dr. Traci Mann of UCLA. Dr. Mann is an Associate Professor of Psychology, and rather than run yet another study herself, she compiled the data from 31 long-term studies into dieting and analysed it impartially. Her findings were startling.

The Facts

People who diet typically lose from 5-10% of their starting weight in the first few months of dieting. However, 1 third to 2 thirds will gain it back and often even more over the following 4-5 years.
Dr. Mann found that the data was inherently biased to make diets seem more effective. Many participants across the study reported their weight by phone. No verification of their weight was done by the people running the study.
Follow-up rates are low. In eight of the 31 studies (25%), the number of participants who stayed in touch and followed up was less than 50%! Half of the data was incomplete in a quarter of these studies. I think that’s pretty significant. It also stands to reason that the participants who had been more successful would be more inclined to follow up, so there are potentially many more participants who gained a lot of weight and never reported back.
What’s more scary is that they discovered that the great predictor of future weight gain for a group of people was, you guessed it, dieting! They found in one study that the control group who did not diet were not only a similar weight at the end as when they started, but their health markers tended to be better than the dieters’ too.
Almost all long-term studies show that dieters will regain all the weight they’ve lost, and a large number will weigh more. One study followed participants over varying amounts of time. Here’s what they reported.

Of the participants that they followed for less than two years, 23% gained back more weight than they lost.
When followed for more than two years, 83% gained back more than they lost. Let me repeat that. According to this study, if you go on a diet, then within two years, you have an eighty-three percent chance of regaining more weight than you had to begin with! Think about that for a second. If you went to your doctor with a health issue and they offered you a treatment that would work initially but would have an 83% of making you worse long-term, would you take it? Hell no!
Another study found 50% of dieters weighed 11 pounds more after five years. That’s almost a stone more in weight. Multiply that by the number of diets we go on and is it any wonder we’re getting fatter?