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There’s never a time of year when people aren’t neurotic and conscious about what they’re eating, but after the binge-eating of Christmas and the binge-drinking of New Year’s Eve, in a month from now most of us are going to make the resolution to lose weight. Some of us may say as much; some may dress it up in such niceties as “eating better” or “exercising more” or what have you. Which, in and of itself of course is not necessarily a bad thing.
After all, at the rate our modern lives (sedentary) and diet (calorific) are going, it would probably do most of us a world of good to move more and eat less. But before you sign up for that gym membership or those Jenny Craig pre-cooked meals, there are all kinds of horrors and frustrations out there you should know about. Horrors and frustrations that go largely ignored or understated.
So, allow me to be your calorific Agony Aunt, as it were, to give balance to the chipperSparkPeople Pollyannas.
After all, forewarned is forearmed.
10. You Will Have Nuclear, Room-Clearing Farts
One of the weirder side effects of burning up that excess fat is stinky farts. Not all the time, fortunately, but once your body starts kicking things into gear and mining your fat reserves for energy, the result is often near-deadly flatulence. (This has been my experience, and that of others, including John Walker of The Hacker’s Diet.)
Even if you manage to survive that initial transition from burning carbs to burning fat without becoming a walking biohazard, any kind of diet (in the “what you eat, no matter what it is” sense, not the “eating to lose weight” sense) that’s going to support long-term, sustainable weight loss is going to be high in fiber: fruits, vegetables, whole grain wheat products, and beans. In other words, exactly the kind of foods that make you gassy (and more regular in your bowel movements, to boot).
UC Professor Dr. Robert H. Lustig has summed up the contemporary Western diet problem this way: fart or be fat. Dieting for, and then maintaining, a trim body can (depending on how your body in particular reacts to food) mean a lifetime of cutting the cheese. So supermodels and Hollywood stars might be beautiful, but they probably stink.
9. Diet Pills Have Terrible Side Effects. Also, They Suck.
Those of you who have turned to modern medicine to support your weight loss efforts, on top of becoming the King, or Queen, of Farts, are opening yourselves up to a whole host of other unpleasant side effects.
Many drugs prescribed for weight loss over the years claim, very vaguely, to “boost your metabolism,” while others claim to suppress your appetite. In reality they are stimulants that speed up your spinal cord, brain, and heart rate. In other words, they force your body to work harder (for no good reason) just to raise your basal metabolic rate and thus burn more calories a day. You know what else does that? Methamphetamines.
Now, there is a whole class of difference (usually) between the meth you buy from Walter White and the diet pills advertised on late-night infomercials, but medically-condoned uppers have still led to multiple incidents of cardiac arrest and, albeit rarely, death (49 cases in the US between 1988 and 2003). Assuming you’re one of the many people who take them and don’t keel over from a heart attack, you’re still opening yourself up to insomnia, killer headaches, and constipation.
There are also diet pills that, instead of “boosting your metabolism” or suppressing your appetite, work to block the fat in the food you eat, like a magical food armor that keeps the calories in that chocolate cake from sticking to your already gelatinous thighs. The most famous of these is Alli, and it also famously makes you mess yourself if you inadvertently eat more than 15 grams of fat in a meal. The dieting community has given this unfortunate side effect the cute little name of “the Alli oops,” which is very obviously an overly-twee way of describing young, healthy adults pooping themselves.
Even with all of that, most diet pills are only marginally helpful at best. The pills that have the most evidence backing their effectiveness also have the most moderate results, something like an extra pound per month, and at the end of the day, you have to weight up whether that’s that really worth the indignity.
8. Everyone Has An Opinion About Weight Loss. And They Want To Share It.
It’s weird: people will readily admit their ignorance on things like rocket science, quantum mechanics, or piloting large aircraft, but when it comes to other topics on which they’re equally ignorant, that ignorance no longer matters.
Much like politics and sports, weight loss is also a topic on which every jerk on the street has a nuanced opinion that they feel they MUST share with you (and, as often as not, has little to no basis in reality). If anyone you know gets wind of your weight loss effort, sooner or later they’re going to bend your ear about the topic: Atkins is out; low sugar is in; you have to go vegan; you can’t go vegan; you should focus on strength training; you should focus on cardio. On and on it goes, whether it’s your mother or Sherri from accounting.
Sometimes it’s helpful, but most often it comes across as a weird concern troll power play.
Even if you try to do the sensible thing and keep your diet more or less under wraps, weight loss is a veritable Hydra of a conversation topic, with heads cropping up with sad regularity on magazine covers, newspaper articles, TV shows, and all over the Internet. It’s difficult to cut yourself away from unwanted, unsolicited dieting opinions, and such a contradictory collection of messages can be enough to make you want to give the whole thing up because apparently nothing is true and everything is permitted. At the least, it will at least keep your heart rate up out of rage – but then again, if you’re trying to lose weight, maybe that’s a good thing.
7. Your Brain Starts Playing Tricks On You
Once you resolve to avoid X or not do Y, it’s like you start seeing nothing but X and Y all over. If you’ve sworn off chocolate, all of a sudden it seems like your office mates are bringing in bowls of Lindt bars and Cadbury eggs every other day adn just casually leaving them around. The week you decide to stop drinking is the week an old university buddy gets in touch with you and wants to meet for a few beers.
Before too long, a sick version of Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon starts to play out and what was just another day at the office or another walk past the convenience store is suddenly full of traps and “bad foods” and ways to fail. Except nothing’s really changed, of course: our brains are just wired to notice patterns and that makes it only seem like there are Kinder Eggs everywhere, with nefarious plans to sabotage your attempt at self-improvement with delicious chocolates and fun little toys. It’s enough to make a man crack and toss the whole diet thing out the window.
Then, we all have weirdo little beliefs about food we would never admit to out loud, but we still act on them as if they’re true. Everyone has different ones, but stop me if some of these sound familiar: food eaten alone or standing up “doesn’t count,” eating less than a full serving of something is like eating nothing at all, etc. I knew a girl who would tap a carton of cookies before she opened it to “shake out the calories.” Of course she knew that wasn’t how it worked, but still she did it. Little tricks like that seem harmless, and they would be if they were isolated, rare incidents. More often than not, though, they’re daily occurrences and have a cumulative effect on your effort to lose weight.
And still more, if you inadvertently go 100 calories over your limit for the day, or miss a workout because you had a cold and were just too goddamn tired, all your scumbag brain is going to do is focus on that, and not all the times you stuck to your meal plans or went to the gym when you didn’t feel like it. If your brain is feeling extra scummy, it’ll go into full-on breakdown mode. This one failure now means you will always fail forever! And if that’s not enough to make you quit, it’s still enough to really affect your quality of mental life.
6. Your Body Will Not Support You In Your Efforts
Related to the above point: no matter how overweight you are, your body does not want you to lose weight.
We don’t understand a whole lot about how the human body works, but we do know this much. Your body, your hormones, and most certainly your metabolism, have no conception of the word “fat.” Your body doesn’t really recognize obesity as a thing it has to fight, like a cold. Your immune system doesn’t suddenly kick in to suppress your appetite or up your metabolism once your BMI hits a certain threshold.
As far as your body is concerned, a diet is a slow starving death. Losing weight is something that your body is primed to minimize and avoid, not to embrace wholeheartedly. This is why everyone who tries to lose any significant amount of weight will plateau, even if they’re doing everything right.
Which is a mind-boggling thing. Every day we’re bombarded with messages from the media about how obesity is this fatty ninja of doom, killing thousands of people in their sleep every year. If losing weight is the healthy thing to do for our bodies, then why are they trying to sabotage our efforts? Because our bodies are evil.
5. Weight Loss Doesn’t Look Like It Does In Photos
Even if approached sensibly and accomplished gradually, the results of weight loss aren’t always going to be pretty. You don’t deflate like a balloon, maintaining a more or less regular and consistent form. Some places lose more weight (fat and muscle alike) than others; still other bits start to droop, wrinkle, or sag. The most dramatic cases even result in painful sacks of loose skin that need surgical attention. Yes, even if you’ve made sure to build muscle under all that flab.
But of course skin flab and sagging breasts aren’t the “after” pictures celebrity magazines and fitness websites constantly inundate us with. After a year of watching what you eat, exercising regularly, and cutting back on soda and booze only to be “rewarded” with a body somewhat lacking in tone and proportion is horrible.
We all know those pictures are edited, but it can be difficult to see just how edited they are. (The answer to that is: more than you can possibly imagine.) If the vast majority of successful dieters you see aren’t in real life, but in magazines or TV shows, all of a sudden you have no accurate gauge for what weight loss normally looks like. It’s like trying to paint a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, but the only thing you have to go by is an interpretation of the original picture by Pablo Picasso.
4. It’s Expensive (In More Ways Than One)
Gym memberships, cookbooks, workout clothes, DVDs, or “support group” enrolment, fees all add up. Never mind that if you lose enough weight, you’re going to have to replace your wardrobe. Or maybe not: since only about 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 dieters succeed in the long term, you might want to hang on to those fat pants.
And even if you decide to get your workouts from the Internet, your cookbooks from the library, and your new threads from the thrift shop, there’s still the cost of time. Time is probably the most precious commodity you’ll ever be afforded in your life. You should think carefully about how you allocate it.
The time you spend on dieting isn’t just the time you spend on the treadmill, or cooking a decent meal from scratch. The quality of the rest of your time starts to deteriorate, thanks to decision fatigue. The more decisions we have to make, the poorer (and more stressful) they inevitably become, whether it’s about whether to dump a girlfriend or which pair of slacks to wear to the family Christmas party. When you’re dieting, you’re faced with a whole host of decisions that didn’t need to be made before. Should I go running now or after work? Which of these salad dressings has the least amount of fat? Should I have that glass of wine or that piece of cake?
They all seem like such little, inconsequential things, but over the course of a day they add up. This wouldn’t be a big deal if you were, say, independently wealthy and didn’t have to bother with pesky little things like jobs, bills, child-rearing, and so forth, but odds are you do. Odds are also that you are not the superwoman badass that Maria Kang apparently is, and that you might find juggling the mental and financial resources necessary for basic survival, self-fulfillment, and a trim body rather trying, especially for an extended period of time.
3. It’s Even More Expensive If You Started Out Fat
The body of a 120 pound woman who was always 120 pounds does not metabolize food or allocate energy the same way the body of a 120-pound woman who started off at 180 pounds. It’s going to take the woman who lost a lot of weight much more exercise and more attention to maintain 120 pounds than the other one. And you don’t have to lose a lot of weight for these kinds of hormonal changes to take place, either. A weight loss of just 10% of your body weight will trigger it, no matter if you started off as obese, underweight, or anywhere in between.
Obviously for a slim-to-healthy-weight person, a weight loss of 10% would put them closer to underweight than is good, and those hormonal changes are incredibly beneficial, but if a 250 pound man loses 25 pounds, he is hardly in danger of being underweight. Too bad his body doesn’t realize that. (See point #6 again.)
What’s worse is that this change is impossible to mitigate or reverse. Biopsies done on muscle tissue of people who had successfully lost weight revealed that even a year later, their muscle tissue was different than that of people at the same weight who had never dieted: in particular, the once-overweight people had more slow twitch muscle fibers, meaning that they burned fewer calories during the same workout. This is no small difference either: anywhere from 20% to 25%. Never mind that your BMR will reflect this change as well. In other words: you need fewer calories a day and burn fewer when you exert yourself. A really handy ability when your food sources run temporarily low out there on the savanna, but really freaking annoying when you’re trying to drop those last 15 pounds.
This effect has been observed in subjects who lost weight even six years after they had reached their goal weight. Six years! And there’s no indication that even after six years your muscles and metabolism will suddenly get a clue and flip to what they would be on someone who had never lost that weight. So even if you and your brother are now the same weight and even have (somehow) more or less identical body compositions, you will still need to eat less and exercise more than him to stay the same weight. More time at the gym, more mental energy devoted to counting calories, still more decision fatigue, all for the same body your brother can maintain without a second thought.
2. Keeping The Weight Off Means You Probably Have To Become Neurotic
It’s no surprise, then, that to maintain any kind of permanent weight loss (at least over a certain amount), you have to become totally neurotic. It isn’t like a race, where you run until the finish line and then it’s over, back to normal. Because our bodies are evil, the price of thinness is eternal vigilance.
One NYT article on weight-loss – which makes for intriguing but morbid reading – offers the example of one woman who lost 135 pounds, and maintained her weight loss for five years. Good going, but the cost to her makes almost tragic reading: she weighs not only herself every day, but also everything in her kitchen, and religiously knows or calculates the exact calorific content of everything she eats, avoiding her gateway drugs of sugar and white flour.
Hers reads like a rigorously policed half-life.
If that kind of attention to something as daily, as instinctive as eating isn’t neurotic, I don’t know what is. Do you measure exactly how much water you use when you shower? How much soap? Do you weigh your bowel movements every morning?
1. Your Other Problems Don’t Vanish With Your Weight, And New Ones Will Crop Up
No one starting their “lose weight” resolution in the coming year is going to be dumb enough to tell people, “I want to lose weight because that will solve all my problems!” When you say it out loud, it sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it? Losing weight won’t make you funnier, kinder, smarter, or more accomplished. We know this.
Or do we?
Some of us (yours truly) expect to feel better about ourselves, to like our bodies and ourselves more. Maybe some of us expect to find the girl or guy of our dreams once we’re thin enough to attract them. It goes on.
But when I lost weight, I learned that there was always something else to hate. My nose is too big, my hair is limp and dull, I still had the curve-less figure of a chubby 12-year-old boy. On and on the list went, even though I had lost something to the order of 40 or 50 pounds. I was also shocked to learn that I hadn’t become any funnier, kinder, or more interesting, either. Hate and negativity are powerful forces, and don’t think that losing a bit of weight is going to be enough to stop them. You’ve just managed to divert those feelings towards other aspects of yourself. That rage you feel about those stubborn last 5 pounds won’t vanish when you’ve finally shed them; you’ll just be angry at your tone-less abdomen or still-flabby arms.
Fortunately, I was in a relationship at the time, so at least I didn’t have to face the sobering reality that no, my dream boyfriend would not fall from the sky now that I was thinner. Fortunately for me the relationship did not deteriorate, either, as apparently sometimes happens. One study suggests that one partner’s success at a diet (the average weight loss in the study was 30 pounds, achieved over a two-year period) can trigger feelings of resentment and inadequacy in the other. You know what bitter, inadequate-feeling partners don’t want to do? Bump uglies. You lost those 30 pounds, but you also lost your sex life.
Don’t think this affects only your sex life, either. People, unless they’ve ascended to godlike levels of either Buddhist loving-kindness or douchebag arrogance, tend to get jealous and petty about other people’s success, or at least attempts at success, most of which comes back to those feelings of inadequacy mentioned in the above study. You can negate some of the effects of that (for example, by not being a raging douchecanoe), but some of it’s inevitable because we’re not all always mature, well-adjusted adults.
So losing weight won’t make you awesome, but it might very well kill your sex life and make your coworkers and loved ones resentful of you.
Pass me another slice of cake, thanks.
Have you had any unexpected, (un)welcome side effects of dieting? Share in the comments below.
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