Why You Need to Stop Trying to Lose Weight
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Many of my clients tell me they want to lose weight. In fact, it’s fairly common language today to say that your goal is to “lose weight”.
We’re even told by doctors we should lose weight! But most of the time it doesn’t even work.
Why?
Today I want to talk to you about some of the problems associated with the way we think about weight. Specifically, we’ll look at the research behind Weight-Inclusive vs. Weight-Normative approaches to health.
Admittedly, I’m not a medical doctor, psychologist or nutritionist. I am a certified life coach and weight coach through The Life Coach School and I earned my Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies. I understand the research, have seen it applied with my clients, and I want to share it with you in an accessible way.
As the conversation about health changes, health care professionals are trying to focus more on what works--and we know that simply shedding pounds isn’t enough. Things are shifting away from “weight-loss” and moving more toward “weight-inclusivity”. Toward what is important for health and well-being.
Makes sense, right?
Let’s go over the weight-normative approach that society has been touting for far too long. I’m summarizing the research articles (see the below for references) to give you an overview:
Our body mass index (BMI) is an outdated tool. A high BMI doesn’t mean we will develop diseases or poor health. Unlike smoking, which we know causes lung cancer because it is backed by empirical research, BMI and poor health have no established causality.
Body weight isn’t voluntary. Many factors are at play: genetics, access to healthy food, physical activity and other resources.
When people try to lose weight and can’t, learned helplessness can develop. Because they don’t lose weight on the first try, they may give up completely on their health.
No weight-loss intervention has worked long-term for the majority of participants. People who have maintained weight loss are the exception, not the rule. I’m an outlier myself as I’ve maintained my weight loss of 20-28 lbs for over a decade. But that’s unusual and most people gain back the weight they lose (sometimes more).
Weight cycling is when the weight goes up and down the scale. Weight cycling IS connected to poor health. This yo-yoing is connected to inflammation, cancer, and possibly even premature death. It also negatively influences psychological well-being because we simply don’t feel good about ourselves when we weight cycle.
Trying to maintain weight loss puts people at risk for eating disorders. All kinds of unhealthy behaviors can emerge from rigid dieting.
The weight-normative approach encourages us all to be thin and constantly striving for that. It encourages stigma against people of different sizes. These stigmas tend to show up across various settings in our lives, including health care professionals. Overweight people are viewed as lazy while thinner people are judged for being able to eat what they want. It’s a vicious cycle with a massive amount of bias. In fact, it is actually this weight stigma that is connected to poor health - not the pounds themselves.
Wow, so did you know all of that?
I certainly didn’t realize that this is where the research had taken us in 2020. It’s so easy to fall into the pattern of counting calories and thinking that the way we grew up was correct. We’ve learned a lot, however, and it’s time to re-train our brains.
Regularly, I see how the weight-normative approach affects my coaching clients on a daily basis. Many of them are consumed with thoughts about tracking food as they think obsessively about losing weight.
If only this mental energy could be freed up so they would have the time and space to think about other, more important things! To create the work they want to share with the world. Instead, they are focused on the guilt they feel from last night’s dessert. And it’s heart-breaking.
In the weight-normative approach, my clients beat themselves up for not reaching their goals. They constantly feel shame for not doing the work they “should be doing.” And they over-complicate their lives, thinking there’s one magical answer out there.
All in all, the weight-normative approach that many of us have become accustomed to is a hazardous burden that is harmful to us in the long run.
Photo by AllGo - An App For Plus Size People on Unsplash
Now, let me introduce you to the weight-inclusive approach.
Are you ready for some good news?
This approach focuses on health--on the positive instead of the negative. Health has many components and can be measured in a variety of ways. Attention is placed on daily actions rather than a targeted end-goal. The vision is for long-term change.
These clinically significant improvements are associated with weight-inclusive approaches:
Lower blood pressure
Increased physical activity
Decreased binge eating
Increased self-esteem
Decreased depression
No adverse outcomes to this approach (unlike the weight normative approach)
Higher body appreciation
Lower habitual appearance monitoring
The weight-inclusive approach also calls for more empirical research about what works and what doesn’t. This approach recognizes it is important to increase access to healthy options.
Models for the Weight-Inclusive Approach:
Rather than focusing on the negative, weight-inclusive language uses positive vocabulary, such as “body awareness”, “intuitive eating”, and “health”.
One of my coaching clients is focused on her health--and that’s the language we use. Not “losing weight”. She recognized the need to drop the “shoulds” around losing weight and to start defining health for herself. Right now, that includes sleep and taking vitamins--not tracking her food or reading more books about weight loss.
Now that you understand a bit more, focusing on the weight inclusive approach is accessible for you. Check out my free training on how to stop overeating today.
References Used to Write this Post:
Thanks to Paula Brochu for directing me to these published articles.
Bacon & Aphramor, 2011 - https://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2891-10-9
Logel, Stinson, & Brochu, 2015 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/spc3.12223
Tylka et al., 2014 - https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jobe/2014/983495/
Hunger, Smith, & Tomiyama, 2020 - https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/sipr.12062
