Glamour Magazine Article

Glamour Magazine 12/05 Issue:
"Why Diets are Dumb"

Diets force you to ignore your own hunger cues.
People who diet lose touch  with  their body's natural hunger signals, and often eat based on external cues that have no relationship to how hungry they really are.  Take, for example, what University of Toronto psychologist Janet Polivy calls the "what-the-hell effect."
Polivy, who studies dieting behavior, invited three groups of dieters and nondieters to eat as much ice cream as they liked.  The catch:  before they were given the ice cream, some of the subjects were required to slurp down one milkshake, while others were required to slurp down two of them.  A third group was given nothing at all.
Not surprisingly, among the nondieters, those who didn't have a shake heforehand ate the most ice cream.  Nondieters who had one milkshake beforehand didn't eat as much, while those who filled up with two ate even less.
But among the dieters, the opposite occurred:  those who had two milkshakes went on to eat the most ice cream--presumably, Polivy says, because they knew they'd already blown their caloric goal for the day.
Polivy's latest research also suggests that the reason perennial dieters keep coming back for more punishment may lie in workings of memory.  In a still-unpublished study, she presented volunteers with ten word puzzles that in reality had no right or wrong answer.  As the test proceeded, some volunteers were told that they did well at first, but then missed most of the final questions.  The other were told the opposite--that they started poorly, but then improved.  When asked later how they felt about the test, the ones who were told they did well early on remembered being more successful overall, and felt much better about their performance then those who started out badly.
The same happens with dieters, Polivy says.  When learning any new skill, or set of habits, you typically follow a learning curve--it's difficult at first, but then you get better.  With dieting, exactly the opposite occurs.  "Early in a diet, you succeed," she says.  "The huge results happen quickly--but they go away just as quickly."  She suspects dieters tend to recall the thrill of "taking control" and dropping those first few pounds, but forget how tough it really was to stick to it.

Never say never.  Don't even think about swearing off your favorite food.  "That's stupid," Polivy says.  "Of course you're going to eat it again, and when you do, you're going to eat a lot of it, because you've been trying so hard not to eat it."  Look at it this way, she says:  "Dieting is about giving up the foods you do like and substituting the foods you don't like--is that really what you want to do?"  Rather than demonizing something delicious, learn to enjoy it in moderation.  A good way to do that, Polivy says, is to fill up first with a salad or a bowl of soup.  That way, just a little will be more satisfying.