Foreword xiup and angrily accused me of killing people by encouraging them not to
diet. He insisted that dieting was the only “cure” for the “disease” of obesity,
a disease that would surely kill anyone so afflicted.
In fact, several researchers, including Ruben Andres and Paul Ernsberger
among others, have demonstrated that for many disorders attributed to
obesity, dieting and weight fluctuations are more likely to be the culprits
than is merely being overweight. A more sinister association that also
gets little attention from the obesity field is that between the increase in
the incidence of dieting over the past 4 decades and the corresponding
increase in the incidence of obesity. The growth in obesity is usually cited
as a reason for imposing more diets on the overweight; the fact that it is
just as likely that the proliferation of diets and weight loss programs is
causingincreased obesity is rarely acknowledged. In fact, the multibillion-
dollar diet industry relies on the failure of its products to produce weight
loss to maintain its profitability. The fact that diets may promote obesity
may simply be a fortuitous side effect, from their point of view.
Since the 1970s, a new eating-related problem has attracted increasing
attention from the media, the public, and the medical and health establish-
ment. Eating disorders, some related to obesity (e.g., binge-eating disorder)
and some not necessarily directly related to overweight (e.g., anorexia and
bulimia nervosa), have been identified and recognized as serious health
threats, especially for younger women. Body dissatisfaction and an unhealthy
desire to be thin seem to be at least partial contributors to eating disorders.
Naturally, an immediate solution to the problem of needing to be thinner
that springs to most people’s minds is, once again, dieting.
Before the mid-1970s, research on dieting focused exclusively on how
to make people eat less and lose weight. Occasionally the issue of how to
maintain weight loss was addressed, but in general, the only query was how
much weight the person could lose. The question of whethersomeone who
was overweight (by whatever definition) should try to lose weight never
arose, nor did the question of whether the dieting individual might already
be too thin. Since that time, there has been steadily increasing attention to
the impact of repeated weight loss attempts on the person and on society.
Research on dieting has shifted to an examination of what restrictive
dieting does to various aspects of behavior, emotion, and self-image, as well
as to its personal and societal costs. Psychologists, sociologists, nutritionists,
physiologists, and medical specialists have all contributed to the growing
literature examining the various effects of restricting one’s caloric intake
in order to lose weight. Societal, family, and individual factors influencing