When One Diet Leads to the Next

Weight-loss programs spend a lot of time telling us how to lose weight. Far less attention is given to what happens afterwards.

The usual language is maintenance: you’ve lost the weight, now the job is to keep it off. But that framing can hide an important part of the picture. Your biology doesn’t simply move into a new phase because the diet does.

In this episode of Before Dieting, I look at what can happen when calorie restriction ends, why the maintenance phase can shift responsibility for weight regain back onto the woman, and why the period after a diet contains information worth investigating.

I also share Vivienne’s story. After two decades of dieting, she knew she was good at starting diets but had trouble sticking with them. Her solution was to choose diets that promised increasingly fast results, until she found herself considering a five-day water diet.

When Vivienne stopped looking at each diet as a separate event and brought them together, a pattern became visible. Her previous dieting experiences were influencing what she chose to do next.

In this episode

• • Why the term maintenance deserves closer examination
  • What calorie restriction can ask of a biological system
  • The holding-your-breath metaphor and what it can tell us about biological responses to restriction
  • Why difficulty maintaining weight loss isn't explained simply by willpower
  • How one dieting experience can influence the diet chosen next
  • What Vivienne discovered when she stopped looking at her diets separately
  • Why repeated weight regain needs to be investigated as a pattern
  • How your dieting history can become evidence rather than a record of successes and failures

Something to think about

Rather than asking what you should do differently on your next diet, consider your previous diets together:

What have all my previous diets been trying to tell me?

The diets you finished, the ones you abandoned, how restrictive they became, how long you could stay on them and what happened afterwards may reveal far more than any single diet viewed on its own.

Next week

Before Dieting welcomes its first guest.

I’ll be in conversation with Lanette Helene, owner of Canberra Pilates, talking about something I hear from many women living with repeated weight regain: feeling disconnected from their bodies.

Our conversation ranges across midlife, balance, flexibility and practical ways to stay connected with your body as you get older. Lanette also shares some simple exercises you can try yourself, starting with your feet.

It’s a longer episode than the usual Before Dieting monologue and the first of our occasional guest conversations.

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