How yo yo dieting can affect your self esteem?
Yo-yo dieting, in most cases, is devastating for a person’s self-esteem. Self-esteem describes a person’s sense of self-worth. It describes how a person feels about themselves, their body, their state of mind, their state of happiness. Being overweight usually hurts a person’s self-esteem. Some people are comfortable with being overweight but most people are not. When a person is overweight they often feel undesirable and ugly. This negative attitude is usually reinforced by the people in their lives and the images portrayed in the media of what a perfect body is supposed to look like.
There is a tremendous amount of information available about how to lose weight. There are diets that involve commitment to lifestyle changes that will take time to make the extra weight to come off and there are diets that promise quick results. Quick weight loss plans usually include pills and fad diets that are supposed to help a person lose weight quickly. Many of these pills and diets do help a person lose weight but the weight loss is often short-lived. More often than not, a person who uses these pills or fad diets will gain back all the weight they lost and more. They go back on a diet, lose the weight again, only to gain it back again. This cycle of yo-yo dieting is bad for a person’s health and their self-esteem.
Besides their self-esteem already being damaged by being over weight, the yo-yo dieting may make them feel like a failure over and over again, increasing their low self-esteem until they sink into a depression and give up trying to lose weight altogether. Sarah Dray in her article at LiveStrong.com says this about low self-esteem from yo-you dieting, “It might also lead to more serious emotional problems down the road. As you lose weight, you feel better and stronger. When you gain it back, you might feel humiliated and weak.”
Courtney E. Martin discusses the effects of yo-yo dieting in her book "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body." On page 174 in the chapter entitled, All-or-Nothing Nation she says, “Thirty-five percent of those who diet go on to yo-yo diet, dragging their body’s through a cycle of weight games and losses; 25 percent of those who diet develop partial- or full-syndrome eating disorders.” She later explains the mentality that was expressed by the women she interviewed for her book on page 183, “It is a zombie mantra of a generation of perfect girls: control, control, control. Their eyes glaze over, their authentic hungers dissipate, their unique notions of beauty or health or quality of life fade into a guilt-producing, impossible rigid refrain.” This need for control will continue to damage the self-esteem if they feel that they can’t maintain control or if they have a lapse in control because they set impossible goals to achieve with their weight. This is especially true if they keep repeating the cycle of losing weight and gaining it back, yo-yo dieting
There is a tremendous amount of information available about how to lose weight. There are diets that involve commitment to lifestyle changes that will take time to make the extra weight to come off and there are diets that promise quick results. Quick weight loss plans usually include pills and fad diets that are supposed to help a person lose weight quickly. Many of these pills and diets do help a person lose weight but the weight loss is often short-lived. More often than not, a person who uses these pills or fad diets will gain back all the weight they lost and more. They go back on a diet, lose the weight again, only to gain it back again. This cycle of yo-yo dieting is bad for a person’s health and their self-esteem.
Besides their self-esteem already being damaged by being over weight, the yo-yo dieting may make them feel like a failure over and over again, increasing their low self-esteem until they sink into a depression and give up trying to lose weight altogether. Sarah Dray in her article at LiveStrong.com says this about low self-esteem from yo-you dieting, “It might also lead to more serious emotional problems down the road. As you lose weight, you feel better and stronger. When you gain it back, you might feel humiliated and weak.”
Courtney E. Martin discusses the effects of yo-yo dieting in her book "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body." On page 174 in the chapter entitled, All-or-Nothing Nation she says, “Thirty-five percent of those who diet go on to yo-yo diet, dragging their body’s through a cycle of weight games and losses; 25 percent of those who diet develop partial- or full-syndrome eating disorders.” She later explains the mentality that was expressed by the women she interviewed for her book on page 183, “It is a zombie mantra of a generation of perfect girls: control, control, control. Their eyes glaze over, their authentic hungers dissipate, their unique notions of beauty or health or quality of life fade into a guilt-producing, impossible rigid refrain.” This need for control will continue to damage the self-esteem if they feel that they can’t maintain control or if they have a lapse in control because they set impossible goals to achieve with their weight. This is especially true if they keep repeating the cycle of losing weight and gaining it back, yo-yo dieting
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