But I still want to diet?

Aug 8
4 min read

I get it.

You want to lose a bit of weight for health. You want to feel more at home in your body. You’re craving a sense of control after things have felt off-track for a while. Wanting to diet isn’t wrong, and it often feels like the first step toward change.

The real question is whether now is the right time to make adjustments to your food intake, and that depends a lot on your history with food - especially if restriction has played a big role before.

Reality of dieting

While the conviction to "go on a diet" suggests more control, quick transformation and excitement... for most people dieting is just part of a cycle in which the end result is giving up - with less energy to make healthy choices than before!

The dieter often ends up with a more and more drastic response to restriction - not even able to go on a diet for one day, or eventually binging at the mere thought of a diet. This is sometimes referred to as diet fatigue. Take a look at the cycle below:

This image is just one example of how the diet cycle plays out

The good news? You still have the chance to lay down the foundations that will let you move toward your goals, more permanently.

I still think I can do it this time!

We all have one good diet in us. Maybe it lasted a day, a week, 6 months, or a few years. It might have been a small, or a large calorie deficit. Perhaps only one food, or an entire food group was disallowed.

One of my clients told me in disbelief of herself, "I was slimmer of the week, every week in 1999". She 'd found herself binging yet again, despite all the self-promises and intentions, and her past success! If she had proved this level of self-control, how was it even possible that she couldn't even stick to one day of healthy eating now?

My client's intense dieting history was in fact, the exact information that I needed to understand why her eating behaviour was now completely out of hand. Her body knew that given half the chance, she'd be starving again - going against all of the powerful biological instincts designed to keep her alive!

The body remembers

The key thing to note here is that, our nervous system is sensitive and tuned in. When someone has gone through periods of strict control - whether through formal dieting, intense “clean eating” rules, or skipping meals to earn food - the brain wires in survival responses because it has experienced the trauma of famine. This area of the brain doesn't care whether it was a real famine, or we paid for a weight loss programme - it all hurts the same!

These responses don’t disappear just because intentions are healthier this time. Intentional restriction can re-activate powerful in-built food scarcity alarms that scream louder than anything conscious that we could fight back with. The body (appropriately) pushes back through rebound eating, and the mind can swing between over-control and over-drive. These cycles can happen quickly or slowly, but the underlying process is the same.

Why Psychological Stability Matters First

Before making changes to food intake, it’s essential to establish stability. That means being able to eat consistently without guilt or panic, recognising and responding to hunger and fullness, and using strategies other than food to regulate emotions. It also means having the capacity to notice when a “healthy” goal is tipping into rigid, high-pressure thinking - and to have the tools to step back before the spiral starts.

The Medication Problem

These same principles apply when appetite is reduced by medications like GLP-1 receptor agonists. This medication can lower physical hunger, and help to reduce the trauma, physical pushback, and stress of lowering food intake. However, they can’t erase increased appetite after finishing a course, they can’t improve self-worth, or diminish emotional triggers or unmet needs - which is often the very reason for the initial weight gain.

If food has been a primary way of coping, those needs will look for other outlets. Without the underlying work, old patterns tend to re-emerge when the medication stops (or the body adapts).

When There’s Room for Agency

Dieting becomes less risky when eating feels predictable and non-chaotic, when you can adapt to stress without swinging to extremes, and when hunger or fullness don’t provoke outright panic. In reality, for many people the subconscious hoarding instinct never truly goes after intense restriction.

Myself and other health coaches with a history of disordered eating still experience this now - even though the trauma of starvation was up to 20 years ago. Missing a meal, a later-than-usual meal time, or keeping hyper-palatable in the house during a period of depression can cause our brains to suggest that overeating food is the solution.

Yes, even now. Yes, even when we know why. Yes, even after therapy, and with all the tools.

So go easy on yourself! And take comfort that even health coaches - people who consider themselves recovered - are no different to you. The only caveat is that we have developed the capacity to stop acting on our destructive thoughts about food - most of the time. (We are still human, too!)

From a secure, firm foundation, you can introduce structure and gentle food modification. You can experience weight loss and improved health without making it about restriction and lighting up those old scarcity pathways.