Episode 210 Transcript

You're listening to the Fierce Fatty Podcast, Episode 210: What Dieting Does to Your Mind and Body. I'm your host, Vinny Welsby. Pronouns: they/them. Let's do it!

Hello, welcome to this episode. So pleased that you're here, fatty and fat allies. Trigger warnings for this episode are that we are talking about eating disorder behaviors, specific calorie numbers in regard to the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, and self-harm. So if those don't feel good for you today, then we'll see you in the next episode. If not, we've got some very interesting things to talk about today. Links for everything that we are talking about in the show notes. This is episode 210, and so you can find the show notes. If you know the episode number, you can always find the show notes really easily. It's FierceFatty.com/the episode number. So this one is 210. You'll also find the transcript for this episode there. And you'll also find, if you fancy it, the link to my Ko-fi, so you can buy me a Ko-fi, a cup of coffee, if you'd like. Don't have to, no pressure. If you can, that's great. If not, thank you for being here. I appreciate you. Let's get into it.

And before we start, just a disclaimer on everything that we're talking about today in regards to what dieting does to us. Everyone is different, right? We're all so special. We have our unique bodies. So because we're all different, we can't predict how intentional weight loss or dieting is going to affect us or anyone's bodies or how at risk we are to develop an eating disorder. Also, the amount that someone eats when on a diet doesn't indicate how they will or won't be affected negatively. Right? So in case you're thinking, well, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm just, I'm doing a quote, "sensible diet" so that I won't be afflicted by these outcomes. We don't know that, right? So just because you're not doing a very low calorie diet or sticking celery and dust up your bum doesn't mean that a diet is safe.

So plus, when we think about diets, we have to also think about intersectionality, intersectionality, term coined by Kimberly Crenshaw to describe the experiences of people as we have multiple identities. We all have multiple identities, right? And how they interact. So being a trans person, being a white person, being a disabled person, right? There's some of my identities, and so each of those identities affect other identities. Anyway, that's what intersectionality is. So we have to think about what has your or my or anyone's life experiences been up until starting dieting, after, during? Do you experience stress due to marginalisation, whatever that might look like? Are you food insecure, are you disabled, neurodivergent, racialised, trans, et cetera? All of those factors could increase the harm that dieting could have.

So, for example, growing up I was food insecure. So we were poor, right? We were poor and we were in diet culture. So double fun. So when we did have food, don't eat it because you'll get fat. So that made me more susceptible to being preoccupied with food. Even as an adult, and I had access to food, and as an adult, it's taken me so long to learn how to feel secure around food and learn how to eat. Due to things like having autism and ADHD, I have interoception issues, which is knowing that I'm hungry. So, you know, understanding the feelings of my body, like intero, so inside, as well as the impact of anti-fatness and probably many other things.

The other day I was talking about, I made a post about, you know those posts that people report on Instagram, like, "Here's some facts about me," and they've got arrows and shit. And I love Diet Dr Pepper. And I was like, why, why, I asked myself this a few times, like, why is it that I prefer diet drinks? And I've said to myself, oh, it's because I have proprioception issues, which is clumsy and it's hard to know where my body is in space. Anyway, I spill drinks all the time. And when a drink is not diet, it gets sticky, right? And so it's really annoying. And so I have diet drinks.

But is there also some underneath thing where I'm like, oh, look at me. I'm so good because I'm having a diet drink. I don't think so anymore, but maybe there is, right? So anyway, saying that to say, there's so much about us that changes the way we experience dieting and potentially have worse outcomes if we're experiencing more, more marginalisation in our lives. So keep that in mind, everyone's different. And I'm sharing the outcomes of dieting from a population level, right?

You know what? Doing a podcast, you so notice all the things that you do in your language. I say so and right all the time. I shouldn't have pointed it out. You probably already know, but you're probably going to be like, that's so fucking annoying. You do it all the time, Vinnie. Stop it. Oh God, I was just about to say so. I need someone here with me. I know we're only on 211 episodes or 10 or whatever this episode is. I should have got it under control by now. I need someone here with a bell to be like, ding, whenever I do it or something. Anyway, so let's start off with what dieting does to your body. We'll do body, then we do brain, then we'll do general stuff and then we'll do other stuff. We'll just talk about stuff, okay?

So what happens to your body when you're dieting? Okay, so here's a quote from Jennifer Gaudiani's book, Sick Enough, A Guide to the Medical Complications of Eating Disorders. Jennifer explains it as a cave person brain. So I quote, "The cave person brain refers to the part of our brain that manages day-to-day functions of our bodies. It takes care of us as a mammal rather than as a thinking, talking human being. It manages our temperature, digestion, heart rate, blood pressure, reproductive hormones, and to some extent, our animal reactions to the world, and others." So cave person brain and metabolism.

Jennifer continues, "When our cave person brain senses it is not getting enough to eat, it has no insight that an eating disorder is enforcing rules, that self-imposed or external bullying is driving a diet, or that everyone at work is doing a cleanse this week. It can only interpret we must be in a famine. We have to protect our person. Humans have survived as a species in part due to our exquisite," well, I like that word, I should use that more, "exquisite ability to tolerate starvation. Our ancestors frequently faced food shortages. The cave person brain evolved into a human evolved to be highly responsive to this stressor. When a person consumes too few calories, a cave person brain decides their metabolic rate decreases, their metabolic rate, so that fewer calories are burned, as I will detail in chapter two. It does this by slowing down our heart rate, lowering our blood pressure, slowing digestion, reducing blood flow to our hands and feet, and decreasing our feeling of energy to get things done in order to make us hold still and conserve energy. This increases the likelihood that a person will survive until food is again available. In addition, the cave person brain fiercely strives to maintain our body weight."

Yeah. So that's a big thing about this whole, well, I'm dieting for health reasons, or I'm dieting for this or that or whatever. Your body doesn't know that. Your body doesn't know, "Oh, well, you know, our human is trying to fit into this stress for this event that's coming up," or whatever, right? Our body is like, "What the fuck is going on? Uh, hello? We, uh, are we dying? We dying? Okay. We're still not getting our food here. Hello? Come on, human." And does all of these things to help us. Like Jennifer says, "Keep us still. Keep us surviving. Uh, don't move. Stay there. Your body's like, 'I'm taking over because this motherfucker is doing some stuff,' or 'We're going through some stuff. We've gone into a famine or something.'" Right? It's kind of like, "We can't trust that we're going to get food, so we're going to take things into our own hands."

I think about that part of me and how it takes so long to build up the trust back with your body after you've gotten off the diet roller coaster because your body is then going to become even more sensitive to things happening, and because it needs to, because it's like, "Oh, okay. Well, we happen to live in a place where we don't get enough food. And so I'm going to be really quick at taking action because we've seen this before. We know what happens."

So the other things that are going on specifically in your body, I'm going to list them out. Your basal metabolic rate drops to conserve energy, lowering body temperature, and resting heart rate. To supply glucose to the brain, the body breaks down its own muscle and fat stores. And so some people might say, "Oh, fat stores. I want to break those fat stores down." The body is going to go to the muscle first because it's easier to digest. And it's also going to fat.

But the thing is, a lot of people think that fat is this evil, benign thing. This stuff that's stuck to us. But adipose tissue is one of the body's most active and dynamic organs. As we discussed in episode 206 of the podcast, 49 Benefits of Being Fat, fat does loads of things like producing hormones, communicating with organs, regulating temperature and immunity, cushioning organs and joints, and supporting metabolic functions. And so even if the diet is working perfectly and is not even touching your muscle, it's only taking the fat, still having a negative impact on your body because we need that fat to live.

And I'm saying, "Even if the diet is going perfect." Oh, we know. As we know, if you're a long time listener of the show, you know, almost all diets don't work, right? So that's probably not what's going to happen. Because the body is in this alarm state. It's going to start sacrificing things that aren't immediately necessary for survival.

So the body is triaging. You know, like if you go to an emergency room, they're triaging. What's the most important? What's the least important? Oh, you've only got a little bit of time. You can wait in the waiting room. Oh, your heart's falling out. Oh, you should come here. And so our body is doing the same thing and triaging. And so when that energy is scarce, your body is deciding what it can afford, literally afford to keep doing. You know, like, do I need to spend energy on this thing? Like reproductive hormones being suppressed, changes in menstruation, reduced libido and sexual function, thyroid changes, potential organ dysfunction in severe malnutrition, right?

So our body is like, "Do I need to do all of those extra things?" You know, the bells and whistles, the bells and whistles of our body. You know, I say bells and whistles. They're not really. They're really important things. But you know, if your body is like, "Well, okay, well we'll keep going. We can't keep in the heart beating and the lungs moving. Let's not worry about those other things because they're not immediately important to keep us alive."

And you might be saying, "Well, this is like eating disorder stuff." No, not necessarily. Not necessarily. Again, we don't know how much we all need to eat for our bodies to thrive individually. We're all different. We can't tell what is happening in our bodies unless we're having, I don't know, our saliva tested and our blood taken and all that type of stuff. We just don't know.

Other things, digestive issues, digestive paralysis, so gastroparesis. That's the word sound familiar to you? That's what GLP-1s are doing, gastroparesis, which is the paralyzing of your GI, slowing the stomach, causing bloating, nausea, constipation, that type of stuff. And repeated dieting, which is also known as weight cycling, triggers inflammation in the body.

And so inflammation in the body is not great. It causes higher blood pressure, insulin resistance that can make it harder for the body to regulate blood sugar, changes in blood fats such as cholesterol and triglycerides leading to poorer long-term cardiovascular health. Now, does that sound familiar? Insulin resistance, high cholesterol triglycerides, poor cardiovascular health. What are they all things that apparently only fat people get or is caused by fatness in quotation marks?

And there's something we talk about on the show quite a lot is how much of health outcomes that are associated with fatness is actually to do with more correctly linked with dieting as well as poor healthcare and anti-fat bias. So a quote from the book, Secrets from the Eating Lab by Tracy Mann. Quote, "Over time, you become more susceptible to infections, bone density decreases, your blood pressure increases, and blood vessels get damaged because your heart has to work harder to divert these energy resources."

The body becomes more insulin resistant." And then hormones as well shut down, the brain suppresses reproductive hormones that were mentioned, testosterone drops as well. There can be irreversible bone loss, which is a really painful thing for many people to realize that even if they had a lot of dieting in their past and they no longer diet, that their body is still bearing the marks and will still bear the marks.

Quote from Bacon and Aframore, "Dieting is known to reduce bone mass, increasing risk for osteoporosis." This is true even in a fat population, though, fatness is typically associated with reduced risk for osteoporosis. So, Bacon and Aframore saying, "Fat people have a reduced risk of osteoporosis, but dieting still increases the risk for osteoporosis, even though there's a decrease from being fat." Right? So, the protectiveness of the fatness may be overridden by the sh*tness of the dieting.

The decrease in bone density comes from elevated stress hormones and lower sex hormones. Quote from Weight Science, evaluating the evidence for a paradigm shift, "There is emerging evidence that persistent organic pollutants," in brackets, POPS, P-O-P-S, "which bioaccumulate in adipose tissue," fat tissue, "and are released during its breakdown." So, when you lose weight, these POPS are released. These POPS can increase risk of various chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Two studies document that people who have lost weight have higher concentration of POPS in their blood, and POPS, again, is persistent organic pollutants. One review of the diabetes literature indicates that fat persons that do not have elevated POPS are not at risk of… are not at risk… elevated risk of diabetes, suggesting that POPS, rather than fatness per se, is responsible for the association. Just what we just said.

By the way, I'm editing out the O words. I'm just saying fat, but these motherfuckers are wrangling out words. So, lots of things happening in your body. What's happening in your brain? What's happening in your brain when you're dieting? Obsessive preoccupation.

I don't know about you. I don't know about you. But yes, I have dieted, and I have been obsessed with food. Oh, my goodness. Hence why so many people who engage in dieting and restricting really feel like they are addicted to food. Because that feeling, or as they would say in the GLP world, food noise. That feeling is driven by dieting and other factors. Food insecurity and there could be other things that are happening. But anyway, hunger dominates our minds, forcing us to have thoughts, dreams, fixations on food.

Talking about it. Looking at recipes. I've mentioned many times just that feeling of waking up in the morning, my eyes open and just thinking, oh my God, yes, I'm allowed to eat breakfast. And then after having breakfast, not being satiated obviously because I ate some air. Being like, okay, well, how many hours until lunch so that I could be not satisfied again and countdown until dinner and the cycle continues forever until my body is like, fuck's sake, fucking stop it.

And our bodies are doing that, right? Our brains are like, we need to get you fixated on food because we do not have enough. This is the thing that is so important. You know, it's like anything. If you need to do a wee, and you're like, I'm going to piss myself, you can't be like, okay, well, let's sit down and I don't know, do an exam or something. You're like, I'm going to piss myself. I can't do an exam or worse. I'm going to shit myself.

I, for me, like, I feel like I can hold piss a lot longer than poo. There must be something. Did you know that your bladder also has a sphincter? Do you know? I didn't know that. Your bladder has a sphincter and the wee comes down from the kidneys into tubes and squirts into your bladder. I was Googling this the other day. I was like, does it slowly drip in, you know, like a sand timer clock thing, like a drip or what, but like it squirts in, you can see videos of it. I thought that was interesting.

And then we have muscles that make, that squeeze the bladder to force it out. I always thought it was just gravity, but then that wouldn't work because then what if you're... Yeah, I was going to say what if you're doing a wee when you're upside down, but I don't think I've done a wee upside down.

Anyway, so what the fuck was I talking about? Okay, I'll stop talking about wee and poo and go to cognitive impairment. So calorie restriction reduces working memory. So we have different types of memory and working memory is a way that your brain works. It's a cognitive brain function that lets you temporarily hold and process small amounts of information in your mind.

And so you're like, oh, something like, oh, what tips should I put for that bill? Well, the bill's $20. So I guess what, like 20% of 20 years, blah, blah, blah. That would be working memory or like remembering someone's name. And then unless you do something to remember, that thing will go out of your memory. But then if you work on it, then it can be stored into long-term memory.

So working memory is like a clipboard almost for your memory. So it reduces your working memory and slows reaction times and impairs executive function. So executive function in that same process of working memory, the executive function is kind of like the air traffic controller of your brain, helping you juggle multiple tasks.

So, for example, you're cooking dinner, and at the same time, you're listening to a podcast, and then someone knocks on the door and you go and answer it. And then you take the pot off the boil. And that's your executive function, handling all those tasks like a conductor. So your brain is basically, your brain is just foggy, right? You can't access information as easily. You can't do the things that your brain used to be able to do because it doesn't have the calories. And remember, our brain is like, well, do we really need to be able to cook dinner, listen to a podcast, answer the door? No, I'm going to make the person feel overwhelmed and sit down and tell them to eat something better for dinner because that dust and air is not good for me.

And so that causes emotional distress. And so triggers severe mood swings, depression, apathy, low self-esteem and explosive irritability, because you don't have the resources or bandwidth to deal with anything more than the very basics. And even if someone isn't experiencing dramatic starvation, an enormous amount of mental bandwidth can be drained because dieting is cognitive labour.

There's this article called The Fog of Hunger that talks about the cognitive price of hunger, including being easily dismissed by others because you're less able to thrive in life and easier to control and easier to manipulate, right? We're not at our best at all, but we don't expect it, right? We're doing a diet and you're not thinking, oh, this is going to be difficult. My brain and my body is just really going to be doing stuff to get me to stop doing this and that stuff is not going to feel so great. I never thought about that. I just thought I'm carrying on with life. Yeah, I might be absolutely starving, constantly thinking about food, but it's good for me. I thought that every day I'm just getting a step towards health and I wasn't. It was the opposite. Every day I was a step towards increasing my risk for an eating disorder, which I had two eating disorders and poor health outcomes, right?

We also move into hypervigilance and increased anxiety because this hungry brain operates in constant threat detection mode and it disrupts your sleep and people engage in rigid safety planning because your brain is thinking something bad is happening. We're starving over here and no matter what I do, I'm telling this motherfucker to eat, I'm throwing everything at it and it's not working. So we're not safe. Something's going on and so your brain is not able to shut off as well and it's saying, okay, we'll be on watch for whatever terrible thing is going to come in at any moment.

By the way, links for everything that I'm talking about in the show notes. Everything I'm saying is backed up with studies, links to books and like that article I just mentioned. Too many links. Too many links in the show notes. Too many links.

Anyway, finally, social withdrawal. Post in socialization, hobbies and intimacy declines because energy is directed towards survival. Plus you don't want to go out with your friends who are going to a restaurant as much, right? Because you don't want to be tempted. You don't want to be tempted. You don't want to go out. I'm going to say you, me. I didn't want to go out on a night out because I knew if I drank, I'd be like, "Fuck it." And then I'd eat food. I'm so naughty. I was like eating food and drinking liquid like some heathen. And then the next day I'd feel awful. So I would not go out because I'm like, "I don't want to ruin my diet."

There's this picture of me that is like seared in my mind of me thin at the counter of a kebab shop, absolutely twatted, drunk as fuck and smiling because I'm getting a kebab and then also feeling of shame and being like... I'd look at that photo and be like, "Oh, look, you are so close." And you had to go and ruin it. And I was so hungry. See, you're not able to make decisions as well when you're drunk, right? You're impaired. And my brain was like, "Okay, this is it. This is our chance." They're impaired because they've been drinking. We're going to get in there and get them to eat something. Oh, my poor brain. My poor brain was like, "Please."

So there is this... You've probably heard about it before, but if you haven't, there's this thing called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. And there is a book that was released following the experiment called Men and Hunger, A Psychological Manual for Relief Workers. You can go and read the book. It's from 1946. It's like a guide, a smaller guide, maybe. I don't know how many pages, 70 pages or whatever.

Anyway, they wrote this book to help with the rehab of people coming from World War II instances where they didn't have enough access to food or were starved or whatever. So how do we rehabilitate people? Do we just give them lots of food? Is there a better way to do it? And so they got 32 young men who were conscientious objectors, conscientious objectors of people who were like, "I don't want to fight in a war. It's against my morals or values. And so I object because of my conscience." And so they volunteered really happily to do this experiment where their goal was to lose 25% of their body weight.

So they did three months of baseline where they just ate as normal, then six months of semi-starvation and then another three months of rehab where they were given more food. Anyway. So in... And by the way, the most, the men were assessed and they had to be mentally sound and also were able to get on with others because they were doing it as this group of 32 people.

So there's a chapter called "How does it feel to be starved?" And these are quotes from the men's diaries. So this is in 1946. So they started out with a baseline being fed 3,200 to 3,500 calories a day for three months. Then they went into eating... It started out at, for six months, eating 1,800 calories and then down to 1,570 for some men to meet their targets. So some men were having 1,800 calories and some were on 1,600 basically. And that was divided between lunch and breakfast and they were given the common foods that are around at the time, vegetables and potatoes and meat, dairy products, less meat and dairy products.

But anyway, I wanted to highlight the calories because how often have we gone on a diet that is less than 1,800 calories? It's probably a common experience for many people. And so these were the experiences of people eating between 1,500, 1,570, so 1,600 to 1,800 calories a day. This is what people were saying.

Okay, so quotes. This is month one. "I'm definitely weaker than I was and though my energy levels remain high, I have no reserve left." This is month one. This is month one.

Next quote, "When I feel lowest, it seems as if all I'm doing is sitting like a little kid waiting until school's out. Movements have slowed considerably this week. Also less desire to move."

By the way, they weren't trapped in this experiment room where they were not doing anything. They were going about their life and they were doing a little bit of exercise like walking. They were doing work and then they were gathered as well with the other participants.

Yeah, so next quote, "The time between meals has now become a burden. This time is no longer thought of as an opportunity to get those things done which I have to do or want to do. Instead, it's time to be born, killed until the next meal which never comes fast enough." Uh-huh. Sounds familiar.

That's month one, right? Month two, "I just don't have any desire to do the things I should do or the things I want to do. Instead of writing a letter, I read a newspaper. Instead of studying, I read a pamphlet."

That's so funny. Just culturally, I should write a letter, but I'm reading a newspaper. So in their time, reading a newspaper, that was like watching Netflix or something. Whereas now, if we're like, "Oh, I'm reading a newspaper," it'd be so high brow. "Instead of studying, I read a pamphlet." Oh, you bad boy. Read that pamphlet. Oh my god, just wasting his life reading a pamphlet. Anyway, it was to this person at that time.

"Instead of cleaning, I put around making excuses such as, 'Well, I really won't have enough time to do the complete job. I'll do it later.'" Well, the cleaning is similar, right?

Next, this is still month two. "It wasn't what the boys did with their food that I didn't like, but it was their method. They would coddle it like a baby, or handle it, and look over it as they would some gold. They played with it like kids making mud pies." So that participant was getting annoyed at the other participants because they were coddling their food like a baby.

Month three, these are all different men, by the way. Month three, "I purchased a tube of toothpaste yesterday. Finally got around to using it for the first time last night. Had a desire to eat the paste, but controlled it." Yeah, that sounds familiar. I wonder if I love chewing gum. It's a stimmy thing. But I also too wonder if my love of chewing gum spawned from it being something that I could, quote, "Eat" and it not be food.

Next quote, "Received a new insight and shock as to my physical condition today. Tried to play table tennis for the first time in four months and was amazed at the amount of effort it took to hit the ball. Also the lack of coordination and poor response of the arm. I had no idea coordination would be so poor."

Next quote, "I'm finally becoming more and more frank about showing my emotions and indicating my stripes, particularly at the table. I got up and left the table telling so and so that I did not appreciate his licking his plate so noisily. I told him that he sounded like a damn cow." Hmm. There you go. There's that one. Struggling to control, struggling to deal with things that maybe before, maybe they could have dealt with. Then the other participants behaving in ways around food, which were not acceptable at the dinner table because they're really hungry.

Oh, and I would do this too. Every last morsel of food that I could find, that I could eat out, that I was quote, "allowed to eat." I would be eating that motherfucker.

Okay. Month four. So they're into the fourth month out of six months. "This week of starvation found me completely tired practically every day. If they want to get any more work out of me, they're going to have to feed me."

Month five. "I also found myself becoming senselessly irritable, particularly when I watched some of the bizarre eating habits of others. One mixture that came near flooring me was potatoes, jam, sugar, ginger bed, all thrown into a bowl of oatmeal and used as a sandwich spread. I hate to see guys picking around with this or that and make a superb sandwich all the time, letting their soup get cold. Last week was unquestionably my toughest. I had hunger pains every day. Tuesday afternoon, I had to quit work because the pains were so bad."

Could you imagine now saying, "I need to quit. I'm going to go home because I'm in pain from my diet." We wouldn't do that, right? I don't think so. I don't think most of us would do that because we would be blocking it out, being like, "I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. Don't worry." Or leaning into it being like, "Oh, sign that it's working." We might be miserable about it and stuff, but maybe we would be going home. I don't know. I don't know. That would be my experience of blocking out and also in the back of my mind thinking, "Oh, look at me. I'm so good. Look at me. I'm starving."

Month six, this is the final month. "The day seemed to go slower to me anyhow, more a living or passing time from one meal to the next. I do things to pass time rather than to gain from the doing. Stayed up until 5 a.m. last night studying cookbooks."

So absorbing, I can't stay away from them. Hyper-focused on food. Those words must sound artificial to the well-fed, but so is the day dark to the blind."

And the author finishes by saying, "With this understanding of the nightmare that is starvation, let us consider the matter in a more systematic fashion. First, the changes in motivation. Then, the behavioral consequences of the physical changes. And finally, the emotional, intellectual, and social changes which so profoundly influence the personality. Remember as you read these sketches that all persons are not affected identically. The normal range of differences between individuals were greatly widened during semi-starvation. Without exception, however, each man experienced some of the behavior patterns and reactions which are described. Remember too that these changes are the result of having a daily ration that in six months reduced the men's weight by about 25 percent and that they are not due to social stresses."

They have an illustration under the text here, and it's a man looking at himself in the mirror, looking downtrodden, and it has a caption, "That haggard look." So, I guess the haggard look of the participants.

So, in the book, you can keep reading these different stories. There's also a really good article by Kelsey Miller, "The Starvation Study That Changed the World," and she describes the things that are in the book, the books, like people were stealing things from shops. They did things like guzzled water to seek fullness, smoking cigarettes, one person chewed up to 30 packs of gum a day until the laboratory banned it. That would have been me.

And then other elements of their life faded into the background. So, budding romances collapsed. At parties, the subject found conversation both difficult and pointless. They preferred solitary trips to the movies, adding that they could barely recognize comedy and then they never felt compelled to laugh anymore.

"In a store when shopping, they were easily pushed around by the crowd. Their usual reaction was, 'Resignation.' Sometimes this permeating dullness gave way to moments of inexplicable euphoria followed by an emotional crash. One subject was eventually eliminated from the project for sneaking unauthorized food in town. After doing so, he found himself so high that he stopped at 17 soda shops on the walk home. He kidded with the founding girls, thought the lights were more beautiful than ever, felt that the world was a very happy place. This degenerated into a period of extreme pessimism and remorse. He felt he had nothing to live for and he failed miserably to keep his commitment of staying on reduced rations."

So then they did the rehab for three months. The rehab initially, it's like refeeding. They were being given 2,200 to 3,600 calories a day depending on which group they were in. What the researchers found is that they weren't rapidly recovering, and some men were still losing weight, and so they had to up the calories to around 3,000 to 4,200 calories a day.

Even though they were now allowed food, their mental health continued to decline. So, quote, "The result of this is that they were significant increases in depression, hysteria, and hypochondrias."

I'm guessing that's hypochondria. Let's Google it. But now, hypochondria is called illness anxiety disorder. Interesting. Anyway, side note.

So, all of the things that they were experiencing before with their body and their brain kept happening, and they were still obsessed with food, still irritable, depressed, still social withdrawals.

And quote, "Some of the subjects exhibited edema in their extremities," that's bruising, "presumably due to decreased levels of plasma proteins given the body's ability to construct key proteins based on energy sources."

From the Kelsey Miller article, quote, "During the rehab phase," which was said to be the most difficult phase, isn't that interesting? So, during the rehab phase, which was the most difficult, one man, Sam Legg, chopped off three of his fingers with an axe.

Remember, the men were tested for their mental health before they came in. Okay, so, he chopped off his three fingers with the axe. Sam said he didn't know if he did it deliberately or not.

Quote, "I admit to being crazy mixed up at the time." Legg later explained, "I'm not ready to say I did it on purpose. I'm not ready to say I didn't."

And even when the study ended, the men were still fixated on food. One man had to go to the hospital for seven days, having to have his stomach pumped.

And then after that, so they had the three months, six months, three months rehab. And then some people, some of the men stayed for another three months where they were allowed to eat as much as they liked.

And so, they would eat 5,000 up to 11,500 calories a day. And even when they were eating 11,500 calories a day, they reported that they couldn't satisfy their hunger. Filling their stomachs didn't satisfy their hunger because their brain was still, you know, being like, "Yeah, but, you're giving me food now. We don't know if it's going to change."

And there was this huge energy deficit that they were having to rebuild. Remember, this is from 1,600 to 1,800 calories a day.

And then moving on into their later lives, the recovery still took much longer. The researchers thought that the men would return to normal around food pretty quickly. And the later follow-up showed that it took months and years to feel stable around food.

And many participants reported having a higher weight than before the experiment. And what the pattern they found was, "See if it sounds familiar."

So, they were starved, aka dieted, like had the same amount of calories that many of us do. They lost weight. They felt enormous hunger. They regained the weight. They regained more weight than they started with. And then they had this prolonged period of altered eating.

And eventually, after having access to food throughout their life, they settled.

And if you think about what the brain is doing, a quote here from Health at Every Size book, "Your brain causes you to crave high-fat foods, which is not necessarily bad, but your brain is trying to help you survive. And that could make you feel like you're some greedy, out-of-control, food-addicted monster because you're craving things that are going to keep you safe. It makes your appetite increase. It reduces your energy levels, lowers your body temperature so that you're using less energy, reduces your ability to feel hungry and full, making it easy to confuse hunger with emotional needs."

So, our brain is doing all of this magical stuff, which can be devastating to our mental health.

So, general impacts of dieting. There's the increased chance that you're going to develop a full-blown eating disorder. And food restriction, okay, dieting is a primary predictor for developing eating disorders. Even if you don't engage in dieting yourself, being in a culture that supports the idea of diets increases eating disorder risk.

Another thing it does, aging from stress. So, dieting elevates cortisol levels, which is that stress, and that sets off a stream of chemical changes throughout the body which damages blood vessels, impairs immunity, and shortens cellular telomeres. I'm going to explain those in a moment.

I think about telomeres. I think about telomeres quite a lot. I don't know why. Anyway, let me read a quote here from "Secrets of the Eating Lab" by Tracy Mann.

"Scientists have conducted studies that suggest excessive cortisol release may also harm a part of the cell responsible for aging. This part of the cell called a telomere is a protective cap at the end of a chromosome. Every time a cell divides, telomeres get shorter."

So, the protective cap on the chromosome gets shorter. "Telomeres eventually get so short that the cell can no longer divide, at which point the cell dies. As this happens to more and more of your cells, the effects of aging, weakened muscles, eyesight and hearing issues, thinking abilities diminish."

They say wrinkles, but I don't see that as a negative ... It's a sign that you've lived.

Janet Tomiyama, a scientist, "Found that the more cortisol people released in response to stress, the shorter were their telomeres. And other researchers have found that chronic dieters have shorter telomeres than non-dieters."

So, another thing. So, like I mentioned, it takes a long time for your body to physically and emotionally trust hunger, knowing what hunger means.

I remember telling my boyfriend at the time, this is when I was thought out straight. I have this weird feeling, now saying to him, I have this weird feeling like in my stomach, like in the mid afternoon. I don't know what it is. I think I'm going to go to the doctor because it's like this ache.

And he was like, could you be hungry? And I was like, whaaat? What do you mean? I put a carrot up my bum for lunch, so I can't be hungry, silly.

And then I, and he said, why don't you just, you know, eat some food to try it out? And I did and I was like, ehhh, I was fucking hungry. I literally couldn't understand, because you know, all this time dieting, it's like that.

Do you remember if you were in the UK, there was this commercial in the 90s? This ad for like a children's charity. Oh, it's so fucking sad, but it was like this, it was a child in a crib and it says, this is Timmy. He no longer cries because he knows no one will hear his, no one will come and cuddle him or whatever.

And it's like with our body, it's the same. What's the point? Our body is like, for fuck's sake. What's the point in me spending energy telling this ding-dong to eat? They always ignore me. They keep trying though.

And then, you know, maybe one day we might notice him, then have that conversation and be like, I've got a weird feeling in my tummy.

The other thing is because we know diets don't work, weight, the most common outcome for a diet is weight gain. Weight gain, nothing wrong with experiencing weight gain, doesn't mean that you're bad.

What can happen with experiencing weight gain is a lot of distress, right? And shame. And they are not good things.

And with that weight cycling, which is going on a diet, gaining weight, losing weight, gaining weight, blah, blah, blah. Weight cycling is the most, most common result of dieting and it increases morbidity.

Morbidity means the state of having a disease or illness or condition or the rate of disease in the population. So, morbidity means, you know, rates of sickness. So, weight cycling increases morbidity and mortality risk.

Mortality risk means the chance that someone's going to die in a given timeframe based on certain factors. So, you're sicker and your risk of dying is increased basically.

As well, weight loss, so just losing weight and not doing yo-yo dieting. So, if you lose weight and then that's it, and yo-yo dieting is associated with increased all-cause mortality. So, that means the number of deaths from any cause within a specific group of people during a certain time.

So, more people die during a certain timeframe after dieting and yo-yo dieting. So, it's associated with an increase in people dying.

And weight cycling quote can account for much of the excess mortality conventionally attributed to higher body weight. You know, like, fat people are dying, left, right and center. And then they look at the actual data and they're like, oh, and this is saying, oh, we know if there is, because depending on your body weight, the higher body weight is increased mortality. And then this is saying, is that increased mortality from dieting?

Okay, so, other things we have to think about are I mentioned at the beginning how this affects people differently. And marginalized people can often face increased pressure to engage in dieting or decide to diet to increase their safety or acceptance, right.

So, if you are a disabled racialized trans person, life is going to be throwing a lot of barriers your way. So, to be seen as a more acceptable person in society, if you're also fat, it may be a decision that you make to engage with dieting to increase your safety.

Or you can also be experiencing greater pressure to diet. An example of this, genderqueer people are eight times more likely to be diagnosed with an eating disorder. And part of that, the reason of that is that could be dieting or compulsive exercise to alter features of your body or to delay puberty.

And queer people, not genderqueer people, so queer people have higher eating disorder symptoms severity. The symptoms, it's worse.

Also, we think about minority stress, so chronic discrimination and expected rejection, drive disordered eating as a mechanism for safety and control.

And we know the body weight tracks closely with socioeconomic status. And so people with bigger bodies are normally poorer. So if you are fat, you are more likely to be poor.

Who are the people who are more likely to be poor? People who are marginalized, racialized people, immigrants, women, trans people, et cetera, which keeps compounding the barriers that someone is facing in life.

And food insecurity, it predicts restriction. And if someone is able to get help, which they're less likely to.

So, for example, a study of young people with EDs, who they were recommended to go to treatment, 21.3 percent of Latina youth received no treatment compared to 11.4 percent of white youth. So twice, twice as, twice as likely to not get treatment for Latina people.

Another study compared people with ED histories and found that racialized people received significantly fewer, fewer eating disorder treatments than white people.

And then so say if you're able to get over that and think about all the other intersections, who, who are also not getting access to treatment.

Imagine if you do get treatment. This is often not affordable, not appropriate. For example, the providers have a lack of education around your identity, or they have outright bias and discrimination, culturally insensitive, inaccessible treatment facilities for people with disabilities, gendered clinics for non-binary people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Right. And so, is the treatment you're going to get, can you afford it? Is it going to be good?

And so all of that layers onto the experience of dieting, because dieting is predictor, one of the strongest predictors for eating disorders.

So, yeah, all of that sucks.

So, you know, why we keep dieting is we're trying to survive the world, aren't we?

I need to, I'm going to share on my Instagram again, I have this image that I created, the levels of anti-fat bias. It's like a pyramid about the, the different ways that, that we can experience anti-fat bias.

And it's, and basically it's just fucking everywhere. And, and it goes from our internalized experiences with us, you know, shaming ourselves, to others shaming us, institutional anti-fatness, how society treats us, and an ideological anti-fatness, the idea we all know that fat people are greedy, lazy, horrible, blah, blah, blah.

And so that those levels of anti-fat bias is a huge reason why we keep dieting. We have hope that this is going to be the one, and we're trying to survive the world. And we're trying to repent for this horrid body that we have.

And with a world that treats fat people like shit, there's no work, no wonder, even though we experience all these awful things from dieting, we still do it, right?

And just thinking about going back to me when I was in that world, what would I give to be in a smaller body? So much, so much, so much.

And so to hear that if I heard this episode, if I heard this episode and I was deep in diet land and I heard, it's going to increase your chances of this and blah, blah, blah, all of that stuff, I'd be like, I don't care. I don't care that I might die because I might become thin and I might become worthy.

But I think this stuff is interesting because dieting is so often treated as this benign thing. It's not going to hurt you, you know, just give it a go. It's probably going to make you healthier.

And it's not benign at all, at all, at all.

And we think, well, you know, I'm not, I'm not, I don't have an eating disorder. I mean, come on, you know, this is a lot of those things that you're saying. It sounds like people who are just, you know, they're starving themselves, not me, you know.

I'm doing, you know, in a balanced way. And again, I just want to repeat that, you know, so many of these studies that I'm talking about, this information, it's not people who have eating disorders. It's dieting.

And it doesn't matter if you're eating more than, you know, you think it's safe. You might be having experiences in your body that are really harmful. Maybe you're not. We don't know because everyone's different, right?

So, yeah. So what do we do?

You know, I don't want to leave you with a little bit of hope.

Hell sounds so depressed now. "Vinny, thanks for ruining my life."

Listen, there's so many things that we can do instead of dieting.

If you want to improve your health, so say if you have a health condition, you can look at things like Health at Every Size. You can look at HAES Health Sheets, which is a great resource that tells you about how to approach certain conditions outside of weight bias. And that is evidence-based, right?

You can look at intuitive eating and reconnect with your hunger and fullness cues and restore peace with food. Might not work for everyone. Like, for example, someone who's neurodivergent might struggle with that. But there are other things to help.

Leaning into fat liberation and unlearning all of that bias that drives us to want to diet.

Self-compassion.

Weee, such a big word, self-compassion.

I mean, and as well, maybe, you know what? Maybe this is going to help increase self-compassion this episode, because you realize that you're not a giant pile of shit because you failed at dieting.

When you hear about all the stuff that our bodies are doing, like, no shit, the diet failed. It's not a you problem. At all.

And I think that was a big thing for me being like, why? Why? Why?

And that's one of the reasons I went to therapy the first time. Because I was like, I need to fix my brain. There's something wrong with my brain. And that's the reason why I can't succeed at dieting.

Once I fix that issue with my brain, I'm going to be thin.

And I'm so pleased I went to therapy to try and "fix my brain" to get me thin. Because I eventually was like, oh, my brain is not broken. It's doing exactly what it should be doing. And I need to work on this other stuff.

So I'm lucky that I did that.

But it's kind of funny to think. And also funny, the first session I was like, to my therapist, I'm like, so how long do you think it's going to take to fix this?

I went in there with complex PTSD, eating disorders, depression, a long list of issues. And I was like, how long does it take to fix this? And then make me thin too.

And she was like, I'm not sure, maybe eight sessions. She didn't want to say, you know.

And I remember thinking, eight sessions? What? That's loads. Eight sessions. I'd think that I'd learn to fly in eight sessions.

And then, you know, joke's on me, LOL, but ten plus years later, I still go to therapy.

You know, it's like going to the doctor. You can't just be like, how many doctor's appointments until I'm fixed?

Well, I have a body. It's going to be forever, you know, sorry to break it to you.

But if she had told me that at the time, I would have been like, fuck this, I'm going to go try another diet, or I'm going to, I don't know, watch some silly show that tells me that I'm a horrible person, or read a silly book that is like, I used to read loads of books like, "You're a piece of shit, get motivated, you lazy loser."

And I'm like, yeah, and then be telling others, "Come on, let's get motivated, you losers."

Oi, oh, poor younger Vinny.

Anyway, thanks for being here.

You can find the links for everything in the show notes, fiercefatty.com/, who knows what episode this is? 210. 210.

If you appreciate the content, feel free to subscribe to Ko-fi or just do a one-time donation. That would be great. But if you can't, no worries.

Remember, you are worthy. You always will, you always will be.

Stay fierce, fatty.

We'll see you in the next episode.

I'm going goodbye.

Tatty bye.