A Personal Persepective on Weight Cycling

CW: Discussion of extreme dieting and weight loss

A lot has been written about weight cycling and it’s associated dangers. The conversation is usually framed in terms of “yo-yo dieting” and includes a lot of pearl clutching about how if we all could just STAY on the diet we choose and keep the weight off, then we wouldn’t be on this vicious diet cycle. If only we had more “self-control” or if only we were on this diet or that diet. Never mind that most diets don’t work because of the body’s natural, hormonal response to restrictive eating.

You can Google this for yourselves because I’m not here to rehash the same points. More articulate and better educated people than me have already done that work. I’m here to put a personal face on it.

This is my Mom and me. My mom died suddenly on April 4, 2018 of a heart attack. She was 66 years old. She was funny and loving and active and a great organizer. She was a birthday and Christmas ninja who somehow always managed to find the perfect, quirky presents. She was my anchor and in many ways the engine that kept us all going. We had an amazing relationship, and I miss her every day.

And she was fat.

I think I was 11 or 12 years old when she put us on our first mother-daughter diet. I’m sure my father and brother suffered through it as well because my mother was the primary food purchaser and cook in our house. But what I remember was that my mother looked at herself (and me) and saw something that needed to be fixed. Over the years, we went on lots of diets together, and even when I moved out and was making my own food choices, I still looked to her for guidance.

My Mom tried them all: Atkins, Weight Watchers, Deal-A-Meal, calories in calories out, NutriSystem… I watched her count and catalog and plan and budget her calories. I watched her “earn” a scoop of ice cream or a pasta dinner with intensive, exhausting, sometimes debilitating, exercise. And over the years she lost and gained over 100 pounds. She was so proud of herself when she reached her goal weight on Weight Watchers about 10 years ago. And she was ashamed at not having been a better role model for me when it came to food. I felt how much it hurt her that she was fat and that she’d raised a fat daughter. And I was ashamed.

Some day, probably with some therapy, I’ll unpack how fucked-up my relationship with food is based on all of this. I’ve since been able to break the cycle of dieting for myself and over the last several years have embarked on the hard work of unlearning all the things I’ve been taught about my fat body. But she never did.

Nana, Mom, and me at my wedding, November 2017

I knew that she wanted to lose weight before my wedding in November 2017, even though I stressed that I didn’t expect her to do that. She assured me it was something she was doing for herself (and because she wanted to fit into the same dress she wore to my brother’s wedding in 2005). I found out only after she died that she was using NutriSystem to do it. Her last month of meals shipped to my parents’ house before she died. My father, rather than throw them away, decided to eat them himself. We talked about it on the phone a few weeks later, and he commented that he didn’t know how she was doing it. He was having to eat 2 or 3 of the dinners at a time just to feel satisfied. When I replied that Mom was starving herself to lose weight, there was silence on the other end of the line.

One of the things that weight cycling does is increase inflammation, which puts stress on the heart. Starvation also puts a great amount of stress on the body, including the heart. I can’t say for sure whether NutriSystem caused my mother’s heart attack, but I firmly believe that systemic fat phobia and decades of weight cycling were a contributing factor.

It makes me so angry when I think about it. She did everything “right.” She dieted, she exercised, she made herself smaller to fit a world that was increasingly harsh to people like us over and over again. And instead of making her life better, instead of the years of golden good health that diet culture promised, it contributed to her death. That is what systemic fat phobia and fat shaming did to me. That is what weight cycling did to me.

For myself, I refuse to participate any more. I will not be ashamed of my glorious body and all the things it does for me, exactly as it is.