No taunters we

When the truth about the efficacy of diets is discussed, a lot of people take the view that this is done with gleeful malice and spite, not so. What they never consider is that those who understand this have tried them. Repeatedly and failed. They don't seem to conceive that we were as disappointed and angry as them, even more so as we desperately counted on them to work and save us from fat hating inside even more than out in some cases. We invested in them just as much as anyone else, if not more so.

When we could finally acknowledge the truth ourselves, for some of us this has taken years. We weren't exactly breaking out the bunting saying, 'yippee, no more diets for we!' Our hopes and dreams crashed to the floor. We had to re-arrange our hopes and dreams, some of us had to backtrack sharply enough to get whiplash, on some of our ideas about ourselves. It hasn't been pretty or easy for us and we've done in mostly alone, in the face of many who wish us to keep on, at little cost to themselves, whilst harming us, sometimes greatly. The longer you continue, the greater the ripple effect potential of this harm as it spreads to greater and greater areas of your life. That's what stops you in the end, the cost of continuing is way too high in too many areas of your life.

The truth about dieting is not a taunt.There is nothing to taunt anyone else about without taunting ourselves. It is bitter realisation that often comes at great expense to us all the way around, whether we continue or stop.

The idea that we are gleeful and somehow getting at those still holding out for diets to come good, is about a person's investment in diets being effective. I'm sorry about that, but I cannot not tell the truth because of this.

I didn't reason my way out of dieting, or losing weight by healthy eating. I was stopped physically by burn out. I had to let go because I was hanging by my fingertips and eventually, the ability to hold simply gave out. Even then, I expected my enforced break from healthy eating/dieting to be only as long as it needed to be. And then back to before, but hopefully better, because one must always have hope. One has precious little else.

Weight loss diet burn out is a fascinating and under reported phenomena where your ability to diet simply breaks down. It seems to be a bit like being suddenly thrown by a horse you've been riding. Someone once described it as having a nervous breakdown but just in this one area.

You can get over it, but like a full one, only rest will do it. It was from there that I decided to take a different approach, you see, I expected to continue once I'd recovered.

But things didn't turn out that way and I crept slowly toward a different direction, trying to cling on and stick with it all the way. Until I managed to accept that I had to begin to try and move on. The ripple effect of negativity I spoke of meant that certain things were really catching up for me. I had to decide to force myself to stop hating myself, because I wasn't functioning in any way and I could stand this no longer. I actually felt a little bit down about that as it was a long road back.

But it was the moment I started to repair my negative mindset in general, that was enough to waylay my dieting course. I began to realise that self loathing was an integral part of being able to stick to a diet, even in the form of a healthy living plan. Before this, I'd assumed my extreme negativity came from my diet failure, now I could see that it was more that I was demanding weight loss via this route and my mind and body were facilitating it the only way possible. Through self loathing, this is easy to dismiss as, it's because I'm fat, and so it goes.

And all this started well before I could begin to feel OK about myself. That's how I knew that the game was well and truly up. If I wanted to continue, I'd have to stay hating myself, I actually would have considered it, if it wasn't having such a dysfunctional effect on the rest of my life! Can you believe that? But I see it in so many others too.

Something that had expanded sneakily into my life and consciousness was suddenly over, kaput. I had come to the end I felt very lost indeed. It's taken a long time to realise just how deep this has gone how hard it has been to change course. I get why people find that too much. If I'd known it wouldn't have stopped me, but I would have been warned.

So when people hear us say, diets don't work, we have more than earned the right to say it, if one was necessary, which it isn't. We've done our time.

We aren't arrivistes or dilettantes who flit around taunting the efforts of our more earnest fellow humans, we are the earnest triers who've been smacked out of our stupor by brutal reality. And you think you're hurting?

We've tried and we've not so much failed as had feedback, which we've finally decided to listen to, because we've finally cottoned on that it's not going to change and sustaining the illusion is no longer tenable.