What the cycle costs you

I've argued mechanism. This chapter is the bill, and most of it doesn't show up on the scales.

The blame. A dozen Fridays a year of calling yourself greedy and weak, for a decade. That's a hundred and twenty verdicts, all of them unfair, and a person can't hear that many verdicts about themselves without some of it sticking to how they think they are.

The stress. Tomiyama's women had raised cortisol from three weeks of restriction and raised stress from three weeks of counting. You've done that in fortnights, repeatedly, for years, and then had the aftermath on top.

The weight, if it's a concern of yours. The twins and the teenagers and Mann's review all point the same way. The years of dieting were, on the evidence, years in which dieting made things a little worse.

The food thoughts. A person on a diet thinks about food most of the day, because forbidden things take up room. A person in the write-off thinks about it too. There's very little of the cycle in which food is just food, and that's a lot of attention spent on something that ought to be a small part of a day.

The money. Apps, plans, shakes, the special foods that go off in the fridge after the second week, the second shop when the diet ends.

The meals not enjoyed. A diet meal is a compliance event, and a write-off meal is eaten fast with a feeling. Neither is dinner. Over a decade of the cycle, a fair number of the meals you've eaten were one or the other, and that's a loss that nobody counts.

And the people watching. A partner who's learned to ask whether this is a diet week before suggesting a restaurant. A child who's watched a parent forbid themselves food, break, and call themselves names, and is learning what eating is. The cycle runs in families the way most habits do, by being demonstrated, and a daughter at the table on Friday is learning it now.

None of this is the cost of one diet. It's the cost of the cycle, and the cycle only stops when the fresh start does.