Strategies to Resist Yo-Yo Dieting Culture

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As products of U.S diet culture, we grow up learning that we need to conform to America’s thin and muscular ideals or risk being looked down upon and discriminated against. After all, despite body acceptance, positivity, intuitive eating, and health-at-any-size movements, weight stigma has never been higher. Consequentially, most Americans (even people not classified as having overweight or obesity) have sought to lose weight over the course of their lifetimes. The vast majority of dieters have no medical reason to lose weight. Instead, they want to look socially desirable and to avoid stigma or get ahead personally and professionally.

So people lose weight. The weight stays off, for a while. Until it doesn’t. The fact is that while diets may work in the short term, most people don’t maintain weight loss over time, and many end up regaining more than they lost.

Part of the regain comes from people seeking to lose weight fast; indeed, a quick Google search for “lose weight fast” results in nearly 3 million hits—mostly touting fad diets, weight loss injections, and extreme calorie reduction.

Yo-Yo Dieting

The problem is that fast weight loss is not sustainable and perpetuates yo-yo dieting. Yo-yo dieting (or weight cycling, as it’s technically termed) is a process of losing and unintentionally regaining anywhere from 10 to 50 or more pounds repeatedly. Yo-yo dieting is super-common among both women and men and culturally encouraged: think losing weight for your “hot girl summer,” wedding, or high school or college reunion.

Although weight cycling is normalized in society, it can cause real physical and psychological problems. For example, yo-yo dieting is associated with increased cardiovascular and heart disease, higher depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and drive for thinness, as well as lower body esteem and satisfaction.

New Study

My research team and I were fascinated by this dangerous yet mainstream phenomenon. How does it start, how is it perpetuated, and how can people get out of it? So we conducted a study to learn about yo-yo dieters’ experiences—men and women—entering into, during, and potentially resisting the cycle.

We found that people are triggered to go on that initial diet and enter the cycle because they’ve experienced comments or teasing about their weight and/or negatively compared their bodies to beauty standards and felt bad about their size.

Once within the cycle, people struggle with feeling shame and disappointment about their weight—especially when they inevitably gain it back. So they engage in disordered weight management behaviors, like binge or emotional eating, restricting food, memorizing calorie counts, over-exercising, and falling back on quick fixes for weight loss. This tends to result in weight loss, but only for so long, before they gain the weight (or even more) back and the cycle continues, perpetuating stress, stigma, and shame. This quest for weight loss controlled many people’s lives, consuming their thoughts and emotions.

While difficult, we found it is possible to resist yo-yo dieting and potentially break the cycle.

Strategies to Break the Cycle of Yo-Yo Dieting

Become more self-aware. This involves recognizing and stopping dieting triggers. Becoming self-aware involves the following:

• Follow hunger cues.
• Avoid people in real life and on social media who could prompt stigma or shame about your body.
• Surround yourself with people who are healthy and body-positive.
• Reframe thoughts around weight: Instead of thin is everything, body size is superficial as long as you are healthy.
• Stop weighing yourself. You are not a number! Opt out of being weighed at the doctor’s office or request that your number is not shared with you.

Mitigate toxic dieting behaviors.

• Actively resist diet culture by naming it and realizing how harmful it is.
• Eat intuitively, not restricting food, counting calories, or following fad diets.
• Work on building strength and viewing eating as fuel.
• Turn to therapy to find support and learn to be happy at any size.

Although weight cycling is culturally normalized and not clinically considered an eating disorder, it shares many similarities. Indeed, most weight cyclers we interviewed wished they had never begun dieting, never compared themselves to others, never let themselves get so affected by weight-related comments, and never restricted their food or overexercised or undergone so many stressful loss-gain cycles.

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It is difficult, in U.S. culture, to not be affected by popular narratives about weight, especially comments from friends, family, social influencers, and the media. Our study recommends that, unless medically necessary, people avoid dieting altogether, and if they need to lose weight for health reasons, that they approach it as a long-term lifestyle change, not a quick fix.

Instead of losing weight, most people should focus on eating a variety of foods; moving their bodies for fun, not for calorie burn or punishment; and not starting the process of restricting calories or over-exercising to begin with. Not worrying about weight or thinking about food all the time will lighten people’s minds and bodies, even if no weight is lost.