The last time my diet died

Guest Post by David Lin
I remember the last time my diet died. It was a surprise to me at first because things seemed to be going so well. I was several months into my diet, past the periods of strong cravings, past the midnight dreams of skydiving through an eleven layer rainbow cake with my mouth open. My weight loss was regular - I had just slipped into some jeans I hadn’t worn since high school. My groceries were stocked and I was on a regular cadence and I felt good. I’d been feeling good for several weeks in fact.

And then, all of a sudden, my diet died.

It was like I knocked on its door and realized that my diet was no longer with us. I checked. It started with an enormous bowl of spaghetti and meatballs which was definitely not supposed to be on my diet. Then a slice of sheet birthday cake - not even the good stuff and not even a small slice. Before I knew it, I was a full week into eating whatever I felt like eating, and what I felt like eating I shouldn’t mention to a crowd that might be trying to change how they eat!

The first thing to stop was my consistent weight loss. The second thing to stop was feeling good most of the time. After that, it was my carefully developed ability to manage my intake, my altered feelings about food de-altered, and my entire relationship with my body returned to the state it had been in months ago, before this all started. My inner child, my younger self just glared at me, blinking in frustration - ever the third party observer that judges me.

“What the heck, man?”

What the heck, indeed. I was really curious as to how my diet died. I didn’t notice any symptoms of my diet dying beforehand and it all fell apart really quick. Two weeks after my diet died, I tossed out the groceries I had bought before that I would have used on my diet, just because it was no longer fresh. I thought I had habits. I felt like I still had willpower. I didn’t feel betrayed by my discipline. The only thing I knew is that clearly something happened. I suspected foul play.

Not being a detective myself, I told my friend about how my diet died suddenly. When she started with some basic questions about how I was feeling, one question stood out to me immediately:

“Have you been feeling anxious or have had any anxiety?”

I’ve always reflexively thought of anxiety in terms of disordered anxiety, like an anxiety attack. Sweating, nausea, feeling on edge, shortness of breath, believing the worst, all-or-nothing thinking, fear based avoidance, compulsive actions, etc. But my friend’s question forced me to think about the nature of anxiety. The American Psychological Association describes anxiety as an emotion, defined by persistent, excessive worries that don’t go away even in the absence of a problem.

I don’t start a diet unless I feel like I have to. While my oversimplified reason for starting any diet is to get healthier, I’ve always had a concern that made me feel like I needed to get healthier. I was worried about something - that’s why I started dieting. Thinking about it, I came to realize that I was worried about the same thing the entire time I was dieting.

There is such a thing as healthy anxiety. Harvard Health Blog explains that “a dollop of healthy anxiety can persuade you to get to work on time, push you to study hard for an exam, or discourage you from wandering dark streets alone.” [3] Healthy anxiety pushed me into taking action about my diet and kept me on it for months. If anything, I owed my progress while my diet lived to healthy anxiety. So why did my diet die?

Disordered or unhealthy anxiety is the anxiety that works against you. The same emotion that can push you to get to work on time can also overwhelm you into staying in bed and calling out sick. The same persistent worries that propelled me into taking action on my diet after several months became disordered, overwhelming my ability to make the right choices. I had already established habits and patterns of behaviors that instantly broke. I hadn’t run out of willpower or discipline - I stepped up my exercise to offset my increased caloric intake, and I didn’t binge food in unreasonable amounts. My diet was just over because I was overwhelmed in a way I did not understand, in a way that I didn’t pay attention to or knew to keep an eye on.

I think that my diet died because I no longer wanted to deal with the anxiety that prompted me to start the diet in the first place. My disordered response was irrational, peppered with the classic signs: all-or-nothing thinking (if I stray from my diet, then my entire diet is useless), avoidance behavior (abandoning all of my new dietary habits), and I started viewing this as an acknowledgement of what must have been my belief that the worst would happen - that all of my effort and suffering would be for nothing and I would find myself in the same place with the same problems eventually.

The first step to addressing disordered anxiety is to acknowledge it.

I thought about my situation: my feelings, my emotional responses, etc. I was indeed overwhelmed and I showed the classic signs of anxious thoughts and behaviors. [4] For me, personally, just expressing concern for myself, reaching out to my support network (talking to my friend that asked me if I was anxious), and validating my own irrational disordered anxiety responses allowed me enough psychological and emotional space to re-order my anxiety to start working for me again.

Knowing that I had been overwhelmed helped me understand how my diet died. The things that stressed me and the things I worried about are still here at the end of the day, but I was finally able to figure out which patterns of thoughts and feelings I had to look out for and find new behaviors to address. To date, my good habits have persisted and should I find that I’ve become overwhelmed again, I have a resource lined up for professional assistance. My sincere hope is that this really will be the last time my diet died.

David
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