The Psychology of Eating: From Healthy to Disordered Behavior

Dieting 125

lighter over the last few years. The general population is getting gradually
heavier (see chapter 8) and yet the population which attends dieting clubs
is getting lighter. The dieting industry creates a need for itself by expanding
its potential market from people who are fat to those who perceive them-
selves as fat. It then treats this perception as fact. When dieters say “I feel
fat” it is translated into “I am fat,” and the industry offers to solve this prob-
lem. For example, in the opening to his book The BBC Diet(1988) Lynch
said, “If you feel fat your body is trying to tell you something: lose weight”
( p. 1). Further, in his chapter “A Nation of Fatties,” Lynch wrote, “A third
of the population are regular users of one or more slimming products.
It seems that it’s the norm in this country to be overweight” (1988, p. 5).
The book translates feeling fat into being fat and assumes that dieters
are actually overweight. Conley’s Complete Hip and Thigh Diet(1989) also
illustrates this expansion of the dieting market. She recorded numerous
readers’ success stories, many from women who say, “Although I have never
exactly been overweight...” (p. 35), “As I was not really overweight or fat
to start with...” (p. 31), and “I could hardly be described as overweight”
( p. 29). These women were not fat, nor did they see themselves as being
fat, but they still dieted. This process expands the dieting market and offers
dieting not just to women who are objectively overweight, or even perceive
themselves as fat, but to those women who don’t even feel fat. Dieting is
marketed at everyone regardless of either their health need or their actual size.
The dieting industry responds to a need by providing overweight women
(and some men) with information, reinforcement, and social support. The
industry also creates this need, first by being part of the media world
which both creates and perpetuates the idealization of thinness, second by
promoting the belief that dieting works, and finally by expanding the bound-
aries of the need for a dieting industry and treating a perceived problem
of body size as an actual problem. It is the perfect industry. It ensures that
women will continue to feel fat and to believe that dieting is the solution,
and by offering a product which only rarely works it ensures its market
never deteriorates (Ogden, 1992).

A backlash

Although the dieting industry in all its permutations continues to thrive,
there has been a backlash. In 1982, Katahn subtitled his book How to Stop
Dieting Foreverand his opening statement read, “I am writing this book
because, frankly I am sick and tired of the nonsense being written that offers