- Constantly on a diet
- Preoccupied with food, weight, and body shape
- May alternate periods of dieting with binge eating, purging, or starvation
- May exercise constantly
- Weight may increase and decrease according to dieting/bingeing cycles
- Irritability, fatigue, or poor concentration due to food restriction
Chronic dieters are constantly dieting. They are always trying to lose weight and are regularly trying out new diets. At the beginning of each new diet, compulsive dieters are hopeful that this diet will be the one that will help them shed their unwanted kilos.
Chronic dieters often wind up weighing more than they did before they started dieting because restricting food results in binge eating. Diets assume that people can't trust their own internal rhythms of hunger and satiation and eat according to those rhythms. Diets assume that you can't be trusted to eat your favourite foods and stop when you are full. Because diets tell women when they are allowed to eat and what they can eat, they take the power away from women to meet their bodily needs. In response to all of these food prohibitions, warnings, and restrictions, the body can't help but need to eat what it is deprived of.
Diets also hold an alluring promise. They tell a woman, If you follow me, then you will be thin and happy . Because Western cultures promote thinness as the key to popularity, acceptance, wealth, status, relationships, and happiness, diets hold a strong allure to women who are unhappy. They see diets as the solution to their unhappiness and keep trying to lose weight. When they break their diet, they tell themselves, I am weak and worthless. Why can't I just not eat?
The next diet serves to reduce the guilt, frustration, and anxiety over breaking a diet. The diet becomes the solution, over and over again.
