What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [97]
If you are coming into middle age and have gradually gained weight since your early twenties, you are probably tempted to diet for health reasons. Resist the temptation. Two exemplary studies show that you may have less health risk than those who have not gained weight. The Framingham people who gradually gained some weight over the years were at lower risk even than people whose weight was stable, and at much less risk than the yo-yoers. In a study of seventeen thousand Harvard alumni, men who gained fifteen pounds or more after graduating were at one-third less risk of death than everyone else. No one knows why, but a gradual gain in weight across your middle years seems normal and healthy.31
Depression and Dieting
Depression is yet another cost of dieting, because two root causes of depression are failure and helplessness. Dieting sets you up for failure. Because the goal of slimming down to your “ideal” weight pits your fallible willpower against untiring biological defenses, you will often fail. At first you will lose weight and feel pretty good about it. Any depression you had about your figure will disappear. Ultimately, however, you will probably not reach your goal; and then you will be dismayed as the pounds return. Every time you look in the mirror or vacillate over a white chocolate mousse, you will be reminded of your failure, which in turn brings depression. On the other hand, if you are one of the fortunate few who can keep the weight from coming back, you will probably have to stay on an unsatisfying low-calorie diet for the rest of your life. A side effect of prolonged malnutrition is depression. Either way, you are more vulnerable to it.
If you scan the list of cultures that have a thin ideal for women, you will be struck by something fascinating. All thin-ideal cultures also have eating disorders. They also have roughly twice as much depression in women as in men. (Women diet twice as much as men. The best estimate is that 13 percent of adult men and 25 percent of adult women are now on a diet.) The cultures without the thin ideal have no eating disorders, and the amount of depression in women and men in these cultures is the same. This suggests that around the world, the thin ideal and dieting not only cause eating disorders but also cause women to be more depressed than men.32
The problem of fat consciousness and depression starts shortly before puberty. Earlier, boys have at least as much depression as girls. When puberty starts, boys go from flabby to muscular, but girls, whose weight gain is primarily fat, go from lean to voluptuous. Boys move toward their ideal body, but girls move away from it. Soon after puberty, girls are twice as depressed as boys, and the girls who are most depressed are the ones most upset about their body.33
In a culture that glorifies being thin and young, many of us who are neither are discontents, vulnerable to continual messages that we are failures. It is just a few short steps from constantly feeling like a failure to becoming a depressed patient.
The Bottom Line
I have been dieting off and on for thirty years. I diet because I want to be more attractive, healthier, zestier, and more in control. How do these goals stack up against the facts?
Attractiveness. Losing weight will make me look more attractive. I am, however, a married man with four children, and I have pretty much gone out of the attracting business. If I were a twenty-five-year-old woman, however, this goal would loom much larger. In this society, the closer a young woman is to her “ideal” weight, the more attractive she is deemed. I do not approve, but these are the facts.
If your attractiveness is