CAN YOU LOVE YOURSELF AND LOSE WEIGHT?
Brigid Moss explores
For the past few Januaries, we haven’t featured diets in Red. The anti-diet drive brought a much-needed backlash against the cliché of post-christmas weight loss, and a huge helping of relief. But is the diet really dead? You might have noticed that weight loss is still a big topic among your friends, or in the workplace. ‘Just as many people as ever ask me to help them lose weight,’ says behaviour change expert Shahroo Izadi, author of bestselling book The Kindness Method. Her new book is for them: it’s called The Last Diet. After an appearance on Deliciously Ella’s podcast, she had a ‘huge influx of enquiries from people who were a little bit apologetic about wanting to lose weight,’ she says. ‘They said things like, “I know I should just be happy with the size I am.” That was especially true if their starting weight was slimmer than I am now.’ For the record, Izadi is a size 12 to 14. ‘The weight that I’m at now makes me feel mentally healthy. It’s sustainable. I’m not depriving myself and I’m not restricting food.’
After a lifetime spent fluctuating between sizes eight and 22, Izadi has lost eight stone and kept it off for three years. She reached this happy plateau by using her Kindness Method principles of self-esteem, self-awareness and self-belief, based on her work in addiction treatment. What finally worked for her, she says, was putting her mental health first. ‘You have to disassociate your weight from your worth. To stop beating
yourself up about your weight.’
Izadi says whatever weight you are, want to be or have been is absolutely fine with her. Despite her book’s title, it’s really a programme to help people reframe their relationship with food as a happy one. So someone who’s ‘happy and healthy and overweight, and feels freedom and joy when it comes to eating’ would have no need for it. Some of her clients are overweight; some are thin but binge on sugar and feel ashamed about it. ‘What all my clients say is, “I want this obsession to be gone,”’ Izadi adds.
The book contains zero information about what or how to eat. One of the advantages of being a seasoned dieter, Izadi says, is that you already know the practical stuff. Her programme helps you sort out problematic eating behaviours, but not those intended to reduce your body. ‘Those are two very separate things,’ she explains.
One of Izadi’s own ‘aha’ moments came when her counsellor asked, ‘What if you’re never slim?’ She says, ‘At that point, I made a decision to treat myself better than I ever had in my life.’ That is the core of her programme: treating yourself – with food, exercise and other self-care – the way you’d want a loved one to treat themselves. The way, in fact, you’d always promised you’d treat yourself once you lost the weight… but now.
Izadi’s weight-loss journey is extreme, but not unusual. She was teased as a teen for being big, so her mother kept fattening foods out of the house. Once she got to university, not knowing how to shop or cook, the yo-yo years began, with her taking laxatives and weight-suppressant pills.
‘When I was size 8, I didn’t feel good. But I’ve never been more applauded and complimented,’ she says. Eventually, though, the compliments stopped because people were used to her being that weight. ‘I was left with the shakes, patches of hair falling out, terrible anxiety. I hadn’t dealt with the root cause. My only coping strategy was to binge-eat high-sugar food. I was using food as a drug,’ she admits.
An important step in Izadi’s recovery was to forgive herself for developing those habits. ‘I even thanked them for helping me cope, and thanked my body for surviving that much abuse.’ Now, her weight ‘feels good but is sustainable’. Her periods have normalised, her back no longer hurts. When her weight goes up by a few pounds, she doesn’t go into a crisis, she just does what works for her. ‘I know I will probably always need to be someone who can’t eat whatever I want whenever I want.’
This is one place her philosophy diverges from the anti-diet movement. She acknowledges it would be best if we could all love our bodies at any size. But, she adds, perhaps our years of social conditioning mean we will never be happy when we are bigger. ‘It’s unfair if you’ve grown up being told one thing – that you need to lose weight – to now be told you need to accept yourself at this larger size. That’s a huge shift,’ she says, ‘and one a lot of women don’t feel capable of making at this stage’.
She regrets that body positivity wasn’t around during her early years. ‘I think I could have felt healthy and fit at my heaviest if I hadn’t thought I wasn’t worthy of doing all the other things that made me feel well. I didn’t wear bright colours or gym clothes or look after myself; I only saw exercise as an outcome-based task.’
Fat discrimination is real, Izadi adds. ‘I remember how it feels to live as a person who feels judged and uncomfortable in their body and is reminded of that every day. And now I know how it feels to have relief for that permanently.’ That is why she thinks you should be able to set whatever goal you like for your body. ‘I don’t want to tell anyone what to do or how to look.’ If you only want to read the self-esteem and self-worth exercises in the first part of the book, and skip the part about weight loss, that’s fine with her. ‘If you feel happy with your body at that point, I’m happy for you,’ she says.