sueRelentlessly Positive's POSITIVE weight loss Guru Sue Thomason is back again - and this week she is looking at the thorny issue of what to do when it seems like everyone else around you is obsessed with dieting...

PS: the blog should be getting a mention in The Mirror today....if you see the feature, let me know what you think!

"I’ve always had a weight problem and I’ve always dieted. My weight just seemed to be going up and up. Then when I got pregnant I decided that I could eat whatever my body wanted and I even gave myself permission to binge. A funny thing happened – I stopped eating as much and lost weight. My baby was healthy and a good size but I lost a lot of body fat apart from the bump. It was amazing - I thought I had finally got it cracked (and I had!). However, I recently went back to work and my office has a real culture of competitive dieting and they talk about weight loss ALL the time.

I tried to ignore it and I hadn't realised it was affecting me until I found myself thinking "Hmm, maybe YOU should diet for a bit, just to get a few more pounds off," and then BAM! it was like the floodgates opening and I was right back to where I was before my pregnancy - bingeing like mad.

I did an experiment yesterday – to exorcise the diet demon. I said to myself: “Ok, you can start a diet tomorrow if you like.” As soon as I told myself this I went berserk, eating cheese and bread and butter. I carried on eating mindlessly until I was halfway through dinner and then all of a sudden I thought: “No - you are NEVER doing diet again!" and I knew that I wanted to stop eating. I did stop.

My experience is the most direct and obvious evidence that even THINKING about dieting messes me up. It has confirmed for me what I know already - dieting of ANY kind equals loss of control, misery and bingeing!

The problem is that I can’t shut myself off from the influence of the girls at the office. It’s a bit drastic but I feel I might have to leave my job for my own sanity. What shall I do? Please help."

Sue Says:

Dieting and any type of food restriction directly causes overeating and you can clearly see this after your pregnancy. This is quite a profound realisation that you’ve had and it’s one that all dieters will probably identify with in some way or another – even if they haven’t realised what they’re doing consciously. It sounds to me like you’re quite a good way along the journey out of disordered and compulsive eating, into normal eating and weight loss. You’re lucky because most people don’t recognise that they are compulsive eaters and they just spend their lives trying to control their compulsion by dieting, which they cling on to even when each diet ends in a binge, their weight is only going upwards and their own experience tells them that it’s never going to work. Some people continue banging their heads against the wall by trying to diet unsuccessfully for their whole lives!

Even those that do work out that they are compulsive eaters and who know dieting doesn’t work for them really don’t often believe that there is a solution or that they can ever be normal. There is a way out of compulsive overeating, as you have worked out for yourself. And once you’re out weight loss is inevitable. So the first thing I’d recommend for you is that you appreciate your thinking ability and celebrate your luck.

As for your work situation, it’s so hard to get away from dieting – it’s everywhere – and wherever you go you’ll have the same problem. So the solution is not to try to change your environment, but to change your thinking in this area too. You have learned to trust your own inner voice where overeating is concerned and you kept listening to it all the time you were on maternity leave, which means you must have resisted the diet message to some extent.

You must come to learn to trust your own inner voice again at work and strengthen your trust in your own judgement. If you give up now, you will not only sink back into the hell that is the life of the compulsive overeater, but you will also lower your self esteem and feel less in control of every area of your life. Take control of this situation and keep your individual way of thinking and your self worth will soar, you’ll be free from overeating and you can look forward to a future that is 100 per cent happier than if you let yourself be influenced. 


There is help out there too. Try my Food Philosophy online course, which has a kind of no-win, no-fee ‘pay afterwards’ policy (if you don’t feel the course is helping you, you don’t have to pay a penny). It will teach you further ways to control overeating that don’t involve dieting and give you the tools to resist outside pressure and build a strong self trust."