Yo-Yo Dieting

Strap yourself in for a wild ride on the rollercoaster of yo-yo dieting! My guest is utterly fierce HAES psychologist and eating disorder specialist Deb Burgard @BodyPositivePhD who is DISEMBOWELLING a new study which claims that yo yo dieting is actually really good for you. You will not believe how shaky this science is, or the lengths that Deb went to in order to sniff out the truth! Join us for a fabulous rant about the evils of the weight cycling industry, mouse research, dodgy science, cake icing, white supremacy, and more!

Show Notes

The fabulous Deb Burgard is fired up about the weight scientists desperately trying to legitimise the failure of dieting by using mouse research to justify weight cycling. The vast majority of people who diet put the weight back on. The evidence to support this is extremely robust - Level “A” evidence according to the National Health & Medical Research Council. We are as sure that people will put weight back on as we are that smoking causes lung cancer. The evidence just doesn’t get any stronger in research! But the weight loss industry has profited from selling the hope of long term, permanent weight loss, and it has even convinced us that when we fail, it’s us that’s the failure, not the product itself! It’s probably one of the largest gaslighting industries in the world. It’s hard wired in us to regain weight, it’s a normal process of our bodies returning to homeostasis. We are supposed to have size diversity. Weight suppression is a pathology, not an achievement. But we only recognise it as a pathology in thin people, and we completely miss it in larger people. Higher weight people with exactly the same illness (AN) won’t get the diagnosis as easily (or at all!) as a thin person with AN. We prescribe for fat people what we diagnose as eating disordered in thin people. Deb is renowned for standing up and calling things as she sees them. She’s not afraid to call out the weight cycling industry and challenge the paradigm! Deb has seen people for 30 years, she’s seen how people suffer at the hands of diet culture. Larger people with lives worth living, the casualties of this idea that they’re supposed to spend their life pursuing thinness. For Deb, pursuing diet and weight loss is a giant waste of time which we can’t get back. No-one should have to lose years of their lives dedicated to this project of weight loss, which science shows us won’t work. Deb wants everyone to divest from the weight cycling industry, because it’s a death industry. We need all hands on deck to dismantle weight-centric business models. It’s a white supremacy model, based on oppression. Deb has been around for a long time, she grew up absorbing the atmosphere of the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, and for a long time she has fought for social change. Getting together and fighting battles really does and can change the world. When we wake up and realise that it’s not us, but the world that is wrong, and we come together as a community, we become strong. Looking at diet culture nowadays is kind of like the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where you’re standing there looking around for the other people who can see that he’s naked! We need each other. We need to know that other people think like this! Deb has a big community of people, both locally and online, and this community has helped her to find and use her voice, and to gallop the HAES movement forward. This is how we got started on today’s topic: in a chat room, a new study came out on mice which showed that mice who weight cycled - ie the mice who went off and on diets - lived longer than mice who stayed fat. The paper concluded that people should still try to diet, even if they will put it back on, because presumably the same effect would generalise to humans. It’s a really irritating way to interpret the failure of dieting - that even though diets don’t work, we should just put up with weight cycling and yo yo diet all of