In the weight loss forum someone wrote about dieting as addiction. I responded over there, but wanted to post it here since this feels like my "home" forum.

I can totally relate to the dieting as addiction. I've been there. Three times in my life I have lost 75+ pounds, each time by making dieting an obsession and going to extremes. (Atkins, optifast, and extreme calorie control.) Dieting and exercise didn't control my life, it was my life. I felt terrific. Rather than feeling deprived I was on a deprivation high.

The problem was...I couldn't maintain it. Two to three hours a day of exercise plus work didn't leave room for much else. I would walk 3-4 miles to work at an aerobic pace...on about 100 calories of breakfast...and then one morning I passed out at work. (The irony here is that I never achieved my goal weight, despite all the deprivation.) And of course, in the long run I couldn't maintain it. When I started to come off the extreme diet I didn't know how to eat, so instead I just went back to the past...with predictable results.

This time I'm with JayEll, mindful eating is my goal. My doctor has suggested I try to lose two pounds a month...and I'm on board with that. I've lost more (I'm not complaining) but thinking that losing will be slow, and that I want to eat mindfully, has really changed my focus. Food is becoming part of my life, not the obsession either way. (When I wasn't dieting, I was binging.)

I don't trust it yet, I've only been doing this for three months...but so far I'm feeling good about it. I don't want to be controlled by eating, either positively or negatively. I want to exercise because moving makes my body feel good, and to eat healthy foods in healthy proportions because food is both fuel and pleasure.

I have taken classes on mindfulness. It's a helpful concept. That's where I first learned to meditate years ago. I have many meditation tapes -but, one pertaining to mindfulness and eating. It's "Mindful & Mindless Eating" - Guided Meditations to Become Light with Food by Robin Maynard-Dobbs. It's a good one.

You know, I just don't think of "dieting", or life plan, or healthy way of life...(what ever a person calls it) is a true addiction for me personally. An addiction is HARD to break. A "diet" is EASY to break. I can turn my back on one and not look back for years. I don't crave a diet, I don't withdrawal from a diet, (I might feel crappy for awhile, but nothing an ice cream cone can't fix.) No, in MY case, I've never been addicted to losing weight...if I was truly addicted, I would have never started a second diet, no need, I'd still be on my first one.

Now as someone pointed out in the other thread, anorexics, and bulimics could be the exception. In my humble oppenion.

I become easily addicted, addictive habits are everywhere... one may be addicted to dieting I would think, but not necessarily to losing weight.

I think it falls in line with someone who is addicted to shopping, or even being addicted to work... not because you are good at it, but because without it you wouldnt know who you were kind of addiction maybe?

I think if you were addicted to losing weight, you could have stuck to the first diet you ever started