The fat monster.

How is that beautiful, competent, clever, successful people – often women – can work with great authority in their professional lives, but be out of control when it comes to what they put in their mouths? Or how they feel about their bodies?

According to a recent UK survey:

• 75% of women are unhappy with their shape.
• 6 out of 10 say that their body image makes them feel depressed, and
• 84% of normal weight women want to be slimmer by an average 9lbs.

And it’s not just a female problem. Some figures suggest that 45% of men are now unhappy with their bodies compared to just 10% twenty five years ago.

It appears that the vast majority of us are locked in some psychological battle – wishing to be other than we are, and making ourselves miserable in the process.

And it’s a battle that the diet industry understands very well. So well that latest figures suggest it’s going to make $586.3 billion from it by 2014.

Feeding on insecurity

You can probably list as well as I can the products that are out there that say they’re going to transform you. There’s no end to slimming club innovations, weightloss pill advancements, bootcamp programmes, diet food, meal delivery or meal replacement systems.

But beware if you think that their primary motive is to heal you. What profit-making organisation would really, really have a vested interest in getting rid of its income stream?

No, at heart they want to foster your dependence on them. Here are 5 aspects of the diet industry that ensure they do.

Focus on scarcity

The whole system is geared around getting you to think about what you can’t have. It’s about having you set limits and constraints. Siding with a part of you that feels shit about yourself and offering self-punishment in the form of oppressive meal plans and exercise schedules.

So long as you’re feeling bad enough about yourself, this will work for a while. But sooner or later you’re going to rebel. In which case, the most obvious thing to do is overeat as a way of asserting your psychological freedom.

Symptom not problem

The industry does not help you get to the root of the upsets or unhappiness that are causing you to have such a downer on your body.

Instead it tackles the symptom. Your real or perceived extra pounds. The thing on which you’ve pinned your misery.

In some instances dieting will work. You might even change your shape for a while.

But it’s a bit like taking a painkiller to cure a chronic stress headache. It may get rid of it for a while, but without addressing the underlying reason for the problem, it’s just going to come back.

In which case you get locked into a kind of Groundhog Day scenario, losing and gaining, and losing and gaining. Trying solution after expensive solution believing this time will be different.

Loss not gain

And the mindset of the diet business is about loss. Losing the weight. Dumping the fat. Giving things up. Thinking about what you no longer want to be.

In contrast, the positive psychologists will tell you that focusing on the negative won’t give you the psychic strength to overcome a problem for the long term.

No, our profiteering businesses rarely help you focus on what you can gain – lasting, ongoing health; vitality; peace of mind; freedom from the struggle, an different kind of body confidence than you’ve known before.

Head not body

The emphasis of most of the system is on getting you to control your body by using your head. Counting calories, carbs or points; watching fat units; figuring that dress size 12 is good, and 14 bad.

But where are you taught that your body has its own deep wisdom about food, nourishment and weight and that, left to its own devices can find balance by itself?

Crap food is crap food

Much of the food we eat these days is synthetic. Fast food, takeaways, ready meals. Some of these things may contain natural produce, but most of the time it has all sorts of crap added. Fats, sugars and salts are just the tip of the iceberg.

Diet foods are no different just because they have the what appear to be healthy words in front of them.

Crap food is toxic to our bodies, harms our natural digestive processes and confuse our natural hungers. A great example is of diet soda that far from assisting weight loss, contributes to weight gain because it doesn’t allow the natural blood sugar responses to do their job.

But what do you do if the diet industry has left you so out of touch with your body that you don’t know where to start to make things different?

A large part of it is in deciding to stop the perpetual internal struggle.

The Fat Monster

When I work in therapy or coaching with folks who bring to me the issue of body image or excess weight, it’s amazing how often, if they dare talk about it, they uncover an ugly side of themselves. It’s what I’ve come to call The Fat Monster. It’s a part of them that they’d really rather disown. It’s vulnerable, anxious, needy. And hungry. Often hungry.

In times of feeling good about themselves they can reign it in, even feel good about what they look like. At other times the monster wins, leading to all kind of self-destructive behaviours that they often won’t even want to talk to their friends about.

They feel stupid, guilty, ashamed.

This is the problem that is exploited rather than solved by the diet industries.

Instead, The Fat Monster needs to be understood and befriended. Its hungers need to be listened to because often they’re not for food at all. They’re for forms of nourishment – psychological, spiritual and physical – that have rarely if ever been present in a person’s life. Or for which food became a convenient substitute.

The diet industry won’t get this up close and personal with you. It won’t teach you how not to need it. But you can do it for yourself, or with the help of someone who really understands.

Whatever, it’s in calling a ceasefire to the warring parts of our own psyches that we can begin to reassert ourselves in this complex challenge, slay the fat monster, and stop letting a rich corporate system get even richer.

From your own experience, how else does the diet industry make money at your expense? How can you, or have you stopped it? With what results?

photo credit: Smabs Sputzer