Weighing The Facts: body image diet

International No Diet Day is today!

Created in 1992 by Mary Evans Young, a recovered anorexic, International No Diet Day's intent is to raise awareness of eating disorders and to combat the diet industry.

"I started INDD in the spring of '92 following two things. The first was seeing a television programme where women were having their stomachs stapled. One woman had split the staples and was in for her third op[eration]," she explains. The second thing that inspired INDD was, " a young girl of 15 committed suicide because 'she couldn't cope being fat.' She was size 14 (12 in US)."

Mary Evans Young knew someone had to stop the "bloody madness" and decided it would be her. "Desperate to keep the anti-diet/size acceptance concept in the public eye," she sent out a press release entitled, "Fat Woman Bites Back," and the media paid attention.

Are you putting your life on hold until you lose weight?

International No Diet Day was established to challenge the cultural attitudes and values that contribute to chronic dieting, weight preoccupation, eating disorders, and size discrimination. Participants will wear light blue ribbons symbolizing the day's goals. These include:

1. increasing public awareness of the dangers and futility of dieting, weight loss surgery, and obsession with thinness;

2. affirming that beauty, health and fitness come in ALL sizes, and everybody's right to eat normally, enjoy physical activity and emotional well-being;

3. helping change the way people of size are perceived and treated by society.

"When you love your body, you are most able to share its pleasures with those who light your heart."

Huitaco

click for: The TOP 10 Reasons NOT To Diet

Did you know that dieting is a 50 billion dollar industry?

Statistics show that those who diet are five times more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who don't.

The act of restricting food intake, and viewing certain foods as "bad,"make food the enemy.

More often than not the weight lost from dieting is often gained back, bringing with it several additional pounds.

The sense of failure from this has also been known to lead to eating disorders.

Cycling weight loss and weight gain compromises health, too; blood pressure increase, decreased stores of necessary good fats, and increased risk of developing several diseases and other health issues.

Dieting forces your body into starvation mode. In order to conserve energy your body slows it's normal functions.This means your natural metabolism actually slows down.
Dieters often lack important nutrients such as calcium which is needed for strong bones and to combat osteoporosis.

Dieting often leads to unhealthy and dangerous attitudes towards food. Restriction, being the nature of dieting, places negative values on certain foods such as too many calories, too much fat, etc. The tension and stress of struggling over our food choices puts food in the position of enemy. A child/teen exposed to these attitudes in a dieting parent, sibling, or friend has an increased risk of developing an eating disorder. Anorexia and Orthorexia are two eating disorders to commonly result from dieting.

I finally realized that being grateful

to my body was key to giving

more love to myself.
Oprah Winfrey

Take The INDD PLEDGE!

(printout available)

check out INDD's Goals

Some Interesting Stats:

Women and Men:

The average American woman is 5’4" tall and weighs 140 pounds.

The average American model is 5’11" tall and weighs 117 pounds.

91% of college aged women have dieted in an attempt to control their weight
25% of American men are on a diet on any given day
40-50%% of American women are on a diet on any given day

Children:

42% of 1st-3rd grade girls want to be thinner
81% of 10 year olds are afraid of being fat Over 50% of 10 year old girls wish they were thinner
51% of 9 -10 year-old girls feel better about themselves if they are on a diet
46% of 9-11 year-olds (and 82% of their families) are sometimes/very often on diets
90% of female high school juniors & seniors women diet regularly though 10%-15% are over the weight recommended by the standard height-weight charts

Overall:

95% of all dieters will regain the weight they lost in 1-5 years
35% of dieters will progress to pathological dieting.
20%-25% pathological dieters will progress to partial or full-syndrome eating disorders
Those who diet moderately are 5 times more likely to develop eating disorders than non-dieters
Those who diet severely are 18 times more likely to develop and eating disorder
1% of teenage girls & 5% of college-age women become anorexic or bulimic
Between 90% and 99% of reducing diets fail to produce permanent weight loss
15 percent of young women in the US who are not diagnosed with an eating disorder exhibit substantially disordered eating behavior and attitude
8 million people in the US suffer from an eating disorder
In your lifetime 50,000 people will die as a direct result of their Eating Disorder
The current media ideal of thinness is achieved by less than 5% of the female population
Americans spend more than $40 billion dollars a year on dieting and diet-related products (That’s roughly equivalent to the amount the U.S. Federal Government spends on education each year)
Quick-weight-loss schemes are among the most common consumer frauds
Diet programs have the highest customer dissatisfaction of any service industry
Girls develop eating and self-image problems before drug or alcohol problems
Drug and alcohol programs are in almost every school, but no eating disorder programs
A recent survey: only 30% out of 250 randomly chosen women 21-35 years of age had normal bone mass. It was concluded that women are so afraid of gaining weight from eating dairy products