If I Stop Dieting, Will I Gain Weight?

If I Stop Dieting Will I Gain Weight body love wellnessOne of the most common questions I get from prospective clients is this:

“If I stop dieting and practice Health At Every Size (or intuitive eating) will I gain weight?”

Here’s the answer I pretty much always give:

“I don’t know if you’ll gain weight. Some of my clients gain weight. Some stay the same. Some lose weight. But I do know you will feel much happier and more at peace with your body.”

Maybe unsurprisingly, not everyone is too keen on my answer.

In fact, plenty of people decide not to work with me then and there.

I’ve learned over time that the folks who like that answer are often people who are already open to the idea of Health At Every Size. They’re so sick of dieting and hating their bodies that they’ve realized that feeling happier and at peace is really what they’re looking for.

But let’s talk about the weight thing.

It’s the 800-pound (or so) gorilla in the proverbial Internet room.

The Science Of Weight
Honestly, this is the stuff I’m not so good at. If you’re really interested in the science of weight, I urge you to read Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight.

The last time that I really studied general biology, I was in eighth grade.

And I remember sitting there and learning that your body does this amazing thing: When you restrict calories, it thinks that you’re experiencing a famine, so it slows your metabolism and makes you get more efficient at storing fat.

I remember learning this and feeling the cognitive dissonance. I thought, “Why did my doctor put me on a 1200 calorie diet if it’ll just make me more efficient at storing fat?”

That question never got answered.

But that really does happen. And the more you diet, the better you get at storing fat, the more attracted you get to higher fat/ higher calorie food, and the more your internal thermostat gets messed up. As this happens, your natural set point range (the range of weights that your body tries to maintain) gets higher and higher.

The only way out of this pattern is to stop dieting. This often involves relearning how to listen to your hunger and fullness signals and much more.

My Life In Fat 1981-2007

For most of my life, I was told and believed that I had to be hyper vigilant against weight gain.

According to doctors and pretty much everyone else in my life, if I didn’t diet constantly my weight would just go up and up.

This “reality” was reinforced by my own experience.

As a constant dieter, I was constantly in the process of losing and regaining weight.

And since I always began to regain weight even while sticking to whatever diet I was on at the moment, I saw that as proof that I had to restrict more and more.

Like at least 95% of dieters, I gained back whatever I’d lose within 5 years (often, it was much faster).

I would lose some weight on my doctor prescribed mix of calorie counting and shakes, or Overeaters’ Anonymous, or Weight Watchers, or Atkins. I would think that the diet that I was on at the moment was the answer and if I just stuck to it I would keep losing weight and become gloriously thin.

But then, the inevitable would happen. While faithfully sticking to the diet, the weight loss would stop and, soon after, the weight gain would begin.

Like at least 83% of dieters, I would often gain back more than I had initially lost. Disgusted, I would start a new diet.

I always took this weight gain as a sign that there was something wrong with me.

I always took it as a sign that I needed to diet more.

When I was diagnosed with PCOS in 2000, medical professionals further confirmed to me that PCOS would cause weight gain and I had to diet to stave it off.

So here’s something that all of those experts were wrong about:

The only thing that ever stabilized my weight was not dieting.

My Life In Fat 2007 to Present

In 2007 I made the decision to stop dieting once and for all.

It was one of the toughest – and yet easiest – decisions I had ever made in my life.

It was tough because of my internalized societal beliefs about how I should look and how I should eat. But it was easy because I was so fed up with dieting that I couldn’t conceive of going on another one.

At the time, I was a size 16 or so – still relatively thin for me. I still hadn’t gained back all of the weight from my last diet. Even though I understood that I’d probably gain more weight back and understood that this was not the death sentence I had been taught it was, I still secretly hoped I would magically stay at that size.

I remember being at the NAAFA convention in 2009 and being back at my starting weight for my last diet (around a size 18/20). I no longer hated my body and felt sort of silly that when I was last at that weight, I was so desperate to change my body.

My weight continued to rise until around the end of 2010.

The weird thing was that as I went up in dress sizes, I somehow stopped worrying about it.

I really trusted my body. I trusted that it was doing what it needed to do.

Toward the end of 2010, at a size 26 or so (and around 35 pounds higher than the starting weight of my last diet) the weight gain just stopped.

And it stayed the same until this Spring, when, totally inexplicably, my body changed again and I went down a size or two.

Now, mind you: during this whole process, I’ve just been doing the same thing. I’ve been practicing intuitive eating, eating what I want to. Sometimes exercising more, sometimes less.

I relinquished control to my body, and my body met me in the middle.

Being essentially the same size for about three years has been amazing. Being able to wear clothes that I wore three summers ago is an absolute revelation. It’s an experience that I had never had until now.

Of course, this is my experience. For over six years I’ve been doing this experiment called “not dieting” after twenty four years of an experiment called “dieting“.

I wanted to share my experience with you because, as you can see, it took years for my weight to stabilize post-dieting. As I mentioned at the top of this post, I don’t assume that my experience will be like yours. But I think it’s important for non-dieting folks to share the reality of their stories and experiences with not dieting.

I don’t know what size I’ll be next year or the year after. That may seem scary, but in truth, dieters don’t know what size they’ll be either.

So for now, I choose body peace, body love, and homeostasis. Because that, unlike weight, is something that I can actually control.

Has fear of weight gain affected your decisions around Health At Every Size and/or intuitive eating? Have you switched to HAES and noticed changes in your weight? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below!

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Golda is a certified holistic health counselor and founder of Body Love Wellness, a program designed for plus-sized women who are fed up with dieting and want support to stop obsessing about food and weight. To learn more about Golda and her work, click here.


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29 thoughts on “If I Stop Dieting, Will I Gain Weight?

  1. I’m a thin ally from an obese family and spent the first 25 years of my life being told that I’d have to battle my weight all my life, spent all that time fearing and loathing fat, blaming my family for their size, hating my genes and what would surely be my inevitable fate. I’m working hard at learning all that internalized fear and shame.

    My weight loss efforts had plateaued before I found HAES, and in the first months after I began the practice, I quickly lost 5 pounds to reach my goal at the time. It’s been a year since I started HAES, and I’m up 5 since I recently began exercising more. It’s a little scary, but it’s been constant for several months, so I’m just doing my best to trust my body and to give it plenty of fuel for my half-marathon training, and we’ll see where things go. And maybe someday I’ll be ready to give up the scale, too.

  2. Love this..here’s something I noticed this morning…I haven’t been exercising much lately…combination of blah and the kids being home for summer…but I went for a walk yesterday and this morning… I feel incredibly good (including feeling good about what my body looks like) regardless of what is going on with the number…and that is amazing to me…it’s been 2.5 yrs since I gave up dieting…and my favorite quote from your post is.

    “I don’t know what size I’ll be next year or the year after. That may seem scary, but in truth, dieters don’t know what size they’ll be either.”

    Exactly.

  3. It happened to me too. When I stopped yo-yo dieting, my weight stabilized. When I started exercising again, I lost about 25 pounds. However, the doctor also increased my thyroid medication at this point, so I don’t know how much that had to do with it. I had to be careful not to get into the old mindset of exercising for the sake of health, strength, and flexibility, not for weight loss. I really don’t get on the scale that often. It’s an obsession I can do without.

  4. Thank you so much for sharing your personal story. You have no idea how much it helps (plus all the commentors sharing their stories too).

    I gave up dieting more than 2 years ago but am still struggling with overeating and giving myself permission to eat bad foods AND foods that I considered “diet” foods but I actually like. It’s been tough, that “letting go” part. I’ve been one of those people who gained weight, probably 10-15 lbs. Thanks for your honesty…the weight gain has been so hard, but it’s likely that with continued dieting I would have gained it anyway!

  5. Yes and yes! Even when I stop dieting I’m dieting. I just feel guilty if I eat anything except salads.

    Ugh!

  6. I haven’t switched to HAES just yet (then again I’m also not dieting) but mostly because my OCD brain (literal diagnosis, not being facetious) has a hard time with it because I have yet to find a HAES How To, with specific instructions (then again, I haven’t yet been able to completely scour your blog LOL).

    But I do know that when I was dieting, I was always hungry, always miserable and I ALWAYS gained it back plus more. I always pushed myself too hard and ended up injuring myself when I exercised for the purpose of losing weight. And now, I’m not.

  7. Thanks for writing this post, Golda. I stopped dieting a year ago and I haven’t weighed myself for a year so I’m not sure exactly what I have gained or lost. I am embracining intuitive eating and HAES, though am still battling the “inner demons” of wanting to be smaller in size. I’m wrestling with is it okay to want to be smaller than I currently am?!? Even though I’m not planning on going on another diet?!?!

  8. I cannot tell you how much this post helped me. When I read, “I relinquished control to my body, and my body met me in the middle.” I was like, “Whaaaaaat?” And now that I have sat with it a whole five minutes, I want to try it. I want to write it down a hundred times, get up, move on, see what happens! Thanks, Golda.

  9. I love it. I can identify with much of it. When I stopped dieting, I didn’t gain much weight initially – I did gain some, but I stopped having hayfever, I stopped being allergic to cats, sinus problems cleared up – all this, even though I was eating a whole bunch of dairy! The stuff that was supposed to cause these problems, and they were steadily resolving themselves! When I started eating heaps of fat! After a while I started gaining some impressive weight – but I was lifting weights and after such a long time of being ashamed of the space I took up, I was all like – screw you, world, I’m going to take up all the space I can!

    I’m resolving that insecurity too. I love what you said about relinquishing control to your body. Letting go of the illusion of control and coming to terms with the nature of chaos – which doesn’t mean craziness all the time – has been the most powerful part of my commitment to body-positivism.

    Interestingly as well, the discipline I used to dedicate to training and nutrition I now dedicate to protecting myself from the weight-loss industry and body-hating satus-quo. The role of discipline I now believe, is to enable you to protect that which is fragile, that which needs protecting – it’s not to help you participate in your own oppression. So my discipline now serves to protect my inner self gently, with the care I deserve, it is no longer harsh, and it no longer serves my debasement. This is what I think it means to turn weakness into strength – harshness into robust gentleness that protects and enables you to grow.

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