The Five Types of Overeater. Type 1: The Yo-yo Dieter

You'll seek out new diets no matter how many failures you endure

In the next five posts I’ll be describing the five types of overeater and asking you to spot which one you feel most closely fits your type. These ‘types’ are really stages in the lifecycle of an over eater and all overeaters experience at least one (sometimes all) of these stages.

This first overeating type is the most obvious one and if you are at this stage in the overeating life cycle, you will already know that you’re a yo-yo dieter, but this won’t spur you to try to get out of the trap - you’ll just passively keep on yo-yoing out of a belief that there is no other option.

I’d like to introduce you to Wendy who has been in the yo-yo dieting stage since she was a child. She is now 42.

“I’ve been dieting since I was 10. I must have been on every diet going and I have lost quite a lot of weight in the past and for my wedding I managed to get to my target weight with Weight Watchers. I’ve put it all back on again though. I’ve tried Weight Watchers again a few times since then, but I just don’t seem to be able to stick to it. It feels boring. Same old, same old and I get a sinking feeling when I start.

“New diets are the way to go because there is feeling of hope and novelty. I am swiftly running out of diets though! I seem to have done them all. I’ve even done 100 days on a liquid meal replacement diet called LighterLife, I did lose a lot of weight but my hair fell out in chunks and I felt very ill so I had to come off it. I maintained my weight for a while because I’d got used to eating so little, all meals felt enormous! I eventually upped my intake again, began overeating and regained all the weight.

“Most recently I went to Slimming World and I thought that would be my saviour at the time because it allowed me to eat so much. But then I began to feel depressed and I burst into tears when I was out having a meal with my girlfriends. They said not to do the diet and to have a night off if I was getting so upset about it. So I did and after that something took over me and I went on the rampage – stuffing down all of the things I couldn’t have on the diet for two whole weeks. I don’t understand it. It seemed so easy at first and I wasn’t hungry for even one moment.

“I’m a bit stuck as to what to do now and am thinking of trying Atkins once more as you can eat lots of cream and fat, which I like. Although last time I did it I craved bread so much I thought I was going to go mad. I was dreaming about it!

“I think I’m weak and I feel ashamed of myself when I think about how often I’ve let myself down. I am worried about the future and all I can see is ill health and struggling to get about because of my weight. I am so tired of dieting but I don’t think I have a choice if I look at the alternative.

As you can see, Wendy has been on and off diets ever since she was a child and has never succeeded at getting out of this trap. She is convinced she lacks willpower and that it is her fault she can’t stick to a diet. She reads the diet magazines and sees the many successes and doesn’t understand why she can’t do it and they can. Despite all the evidence for her repeated failure, Wendy is still on the lookout for a diet that will ‘work’ for her.

If you’re like Wendy and a Type 1, you’re likely to be stuck in the yo-yo dieting trap. Convinced you lack willpower but that there will be one diet out there that will work for you, you either hunt through different diets or ‘healthy eating plans’ trying to find the one that will work or you keep on trying the same one that worked once or twice before for you but which ultimately failed…

…Each time you begin a diet you feel determined and a little high on the promise of what your life will be like when you’re thin. But you eventually (or sometimes immediately) give in to the overwhelming cravings to eat things that are not allowed on your diet plan. You go into an overeating phase, making the most of your temporary freedom, promising yourself that you will start the diet again soon, usually ‘tomorrow’ or ‘Monday’.

You will be heavily influenced by diet industry marketing. You will ignore your own internal evidence that you’ve never managed to stick to a diet and the evidence in your immediate surroundings (most of your friends might be yo-yo dieters too) and that you don’t really know anyone personally who has lost weight using a diet and kept it off for more than five years and you will focus on diet industry’s use of temporary success stories in magazines and advertisements as your guide to reality.

You will never make any decisions yourself about what you want to eat and will always be following someone else’s guidelines. When you’re in a binge phase, you will eat all the ‘bad’ foods but always feel deep down like you ’shouldn’t’ be eating what you’re eating, although this will remain largely unconscious and be barely perceptible. Always thinking: “I’ll get back on it, I’ll get back on it.”

Then you will “get back on it” and the whole yo-yo cycle begins again.

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