Check check and check! I can't believe I suffer all these symptoms, goodbye to diets for good! These come directly from the Intuitive Eating book by Tribole and I'm just paraphrasing, the explanations in the book are much more in depth.

1. Merely thinking about going on a diet brings on urges and cravings for "bad" foods.
2. Going on a food binge at the end of every diet and then feeling guilty about it.
3. Having no trust in yourself with food - diets teach you not to trust your body or the food you eat. It teaches you that you need to follow the diet on when to eat, what to eat, how much to eat and to ignore hunger signals that fall outside of those parameters.
4. Feeling you don't deserve to eat because you're overweight.
5. Diets last shorter and shorter time each time you restart one.
6. Last Supper Syndrome: Always eating a big meal the day before your new diet begins. Constantly saying farewell to favorite foods and consciously making promises of new beginnings.
7. Social withdrawal - not attending parties due to the anxiety caused by the presence of food and not trusting oneself around that food. Preemptively eating before social occassions to ward off compulsion to eat forbidden foods.
8. Slowing metabolism - yoyoing interferes with our natural metabolic rate since our body is constantly uneasy about whether or not it will receive what it needs/wants.
9. The overuse of caffeine that is abused as management to feel energetic while being underfed and unsatisfied.
10. Eating disorders - dieting is often a stepping stone to disordered eating, obsessive food thoughts and rigid food rules.

OH my LORD Me too! This list applies to the last 10 years of my life...diet fatigue has really picked up steam lately especially. I've found myself dreading family get-togethers I previously enjoyed because not only do I have to show everyone the new thicker me, but I have to navigate all the delicious, high calorie food choices. I'm SOOO done with dieting. All this, this is not living. That's why "we" (95% of people I guess) can't do it forever. Something eventually gives.

The slowing metabolism interests me. I've noticed with my last couple of forays into WW or calorie counting the weight was much "stickier." It was harder to budge than my earliest diet attempts- then I could easily lose 5-7 pounds the first week, 15 the first month, and 30 by three months, without question. Not so much now, and I thought it was due to age but then I'm only 28. It could be related to aging but maybe moreso to all the yo-yoing. Our poor bodies, the things we do..

I'm actually quite happy to say that even though I am counting calories, I don't suffer from ANY of those symptoms. Which is a great sign, since I genuinely feel that I'm getting it right this time around.

I definitely want to read more studies about this. From what I understand deprivation is not just physical, it is mental as well. Of course our bodies are fine without junk food and cookies, and plenty of diets offer adequate calories. In my opinion and experience the problem is more psychological. When we start a new diet we make a list of foods that we cannot eat, we reject them and our body is left wondering why? Even though it's not physical starvation it is a type of psychological starvation which is far far more dangerous than physical starvation, that's what keeps us yoyoing.

I too remember when it was easier to lose weight. A little bit of dieting would go a long way. I never thought about that until now. I count all the wonderful habits I've worked so hard to put in place (no sodas, no eating after 7pm, cutting out all sweets and limiting carbs, reducing the amount of oil/butter in our cooking, eating lots of fresh raw foods, etc) and I think dang, this weight is not budging!

Thanks for this list Wannabeskinny. I've struggled with one or more of these over the years. The slowing metabolism element is of particular interest. While I haven't been on all that many diets, re-losing 40 pounds seems to be much harder than when I lost 85. Age could be a factor but I also know that there are areas I could improve so I need to be honest about that.

Years ago I read the Bob Greene and Oprah book Make the Connection and one of the things he mentioned was having to "rev up" Oprah's metabolism because she had been on so many different diets, the most famous of course was the liquid diet. She mentions that even when she was completely on plan with these various diets she could never get her weight below a certain number and she couldn't figure out why. So not only did they overhaul her diet (by this I mean her overall approach to eating and not necessarily calorie deprivation for a limited time) they worked out twice a day. Even then the weight came off consistently but slower than she thought it would.

I'm 10/10 on that list. The only thing missing is being absolutely obsessed with food, weight, and dieting. If I'm not thinking about food, I'm thinking about nutrition, dieting, weight loss, and how unattractive I look/feel. I'd say more than 50% of my thoughts are about these subjects. That's the absolute worst. To have your mind imprisoned is worse than being in actual prison.

Maybe she had unrealistic expectations. Gee no one on a diet ever has those, lol! TV "experts" so often have trendy, non-validated "theories" about how our bodies work, especially womens'. And who can blame them--those theories earn them $$$. I have a hard time believing that Oprah's 'metabolism' was slow. That's code for "I wish I could lose weight faster." Don't we all. It's a question of expectations 99.99999% of the time, not metabolism.

Wow. I'm 10/10 as well. I'm particularly guilty of #5 and #6.

I used to be able to stick to WW really well for 3 months or so without any "slip ups." The first time I tried it in 2009 I knocked off 30 pounds easy peasy. Since then it's been my go-to but I've never been able to commit to it anywhere near as long. Within the first few weeks I'm typically making new rules so I can "borrow" my weekly flex points from next week's (LOL). The last time I did I lasted two weeks. I never knew why it didn't work as magically as it did that fist time. It was a great source of frustration and negative self-talk.

This list is right on except in my case there are some foods I have to restrict myself from. I have trigger foods that cause me to go right in to binge mode. With certain foods it's all or nothing for me.

When I was doing it right before I didn't have any of these problems, up till now I tried to go on my diets or whatever you call it and I'd have all these problems, nooooo more no more!

Agreed, just the WORD diet gets me staring at the refrigerator, so I have eliminated that word out of my vocabulary. The word diet, is something that is temporary, a quick fix solution, that typically has the continual dieter gaining weight.

So you can say, I am watching what I am eating and how much I am eating. I am making a healthier decision for the rest of my life regarding food and exercise. I am cutting my calories through portion control. And finally, my favorite, I don't diet, I take control.

I've experienced all of these. I am most affected by #3 and #10

#3 makes me into an insecure little puppy I guess. I would fear foods, I wouldn't trust myself around food, I would be afraid to have certain foods in my house, I would try to put a lot of space between me and a certain food at a party etc. Worse of all, I would try to avoid a food when I craved it, let's say that I craved a taco for example. I would scold myself, tell myself that tacos are too fattening or whatever and they're not part of my diet. I would obsess about the taco and go eat my "approved" food, feeling completely unsatisfied and then I'd get angry and resentful and go out and buy 10 tacos and binge on them. If I just had the darn taco to begin with I would not have gone through that roller coaster of emotions and end up binging. Now I honor my craving and really really really, they are not as demonizing as I thought they would be.

I can't claim that my eating disorder was caused by dieting because it started when I was a teenager, before I restricted myself. However it wasn't until I started dieting in my 20s that I actually started gaining weight. The more I dieted the more weight I gained, the more I would descend into the depths of the eating disorder. I tried to control my ED with a diet and that only made things worse and worse and worse. That's why restrictions dont work with me, my ED is like a rabid dog - you can't control it, you just got to get rid of it.