Diets That Aren’t ‘Medically Necessary’ Risk Lifelong Weight Effects: Study

Could dieting actually be bad for your health? It depends on what diet you’re on, but traditional “yo-yo dieting”—continuously losing weight through restrictive dieting only to gain it back months later—can have significant negative impacts on physical and psychological health.

In a new study published in the journal Qualitative Health Research, researchers from North Carolina State University conducted in-depth interviews to learn about why people enter the yo-yo dieting cycle and how if at all, they were able to escape it.

“Yo-yo dieting is a prevalent part of American culture, with fad diets and lose-weight-quick plans or drugs normalized as people pursue beauty ideals,” Lynsey Romo, an associate professor of communication at North Carolina State University and the study’s co-author, said in a statement.

“Based on what we learned through this study, as well as the existing research, we recommend that most people avoid dieting, unless it is medically necessary. Our study also offers insights into how people can combat insidious aspects of weight cycling and challenge the cycle.”

The study explored 36 adult participants—13 men and 23 women—who had experienced weight cycling, where they lost and regained more than 11 pounds. The participants reported engaging in a variety of weight loss strategies with short-term results. All participants reported wanting to lose weight due to social stigma or comparisons with celebrities and their peers.

“Overwhelmingly, participants did not start dieting for health reasons, but because they felt social pressure to lose weight,” Romo said.

Regaining weight led people to feel shame and further internalize social stigma, leaving participants feeling worse about themselves than they did before they lost the weight in the first place. This, in turn, encouraged participants to engage in even more extreme dieting, and thus, the cycle continued.

“For instance, many participants engaged in disordered weight management behaviors, such as binge or emotional eating, restricting food and calories, memorizing calorie counts, being stressed about what they were eating and the number on the scale, falling back on quick fixes (such as low-carb diets or diet drugs), overexercising, and avoiding social events with food to drop pounds fast,” Romo said.

“Inevitably, these diet behaviors became unsustainable, and participants regained weight, often more than they had initially lost.

“Participants referred to the experience as an addiction or a vicious cycle.”

The participants who were the most successful at breaking the cycle were those who were able to embrace healthy eating behaviors, such as eating a varied diet and eating when they were hungry, rather than treating food as something that needs to be monitored, controlled and punished.

However, the researchers found that the majority of the participants had been unable to escape the cycle completely.

“The combination of ingrained thought patterns, societal expectations, toxic diet culture, and pervasive weight stigma make it difficult for people to completely exit the cycle, even when they really want to,” Romo said.

“Ultimately, this study tells us that weight cycling is a negative practice that can cause people real harm. Our findings suggest that it can be damaging for people to begin dieting unless it is medically necessary. Dieting to meet some perceived societal standard inadvertently set participants up for years of shame, body dissatisfaction, unhappiness, stress, social comparisons, and weight-related preoccupation.

“Once a diet has begun, it is very difficult for many people to avoid a lifelong struggle with their weight.”

If you need support with an eating disorder, you can call the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders’s Eating Disorder helpline via phone (1 (888) 375-7767), available Monday through Friday from 9 am to 9 pm CT.