It is impossible to miss the contradiction when you walk into any British supermarket. Family-sized bags of crisps are available in one aisle with buy one, get one free offers. Low-fat yoghurts, protein bars, and meal replacement shakes in clinical white packaging that promises a new body in six weeks are sold in the next aisle. It is no coincidence that the UK has become one of the most diet-obsessed countries on the continent and the largest consumer of ultra-processed food in Europe. The weight management industry, which is worth hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide, has very little financial incentive to break this cycle because they are two sides of the same broken system.
The statistics on dieting are terrible, and they have been for many years. 97% of people who lose weight through traditional dieting are thought to gain it back in a few years. That statistic, which is cited by both clinicians and psychotherapists, should likely put an end to discussions about restrictive diets as a practical long-term approach. It doesn’t. Keto, paleo, juice cleanses, and intermittent fasting are just a few of the new diets that keep popping up. They all have the same underlying promise: if you restrict something, you’ll lose weight. The commercial diet industry’s structural reliance on repeat business is something that is seldom discussed. A program that resolved a person’s weight issue would permanently lose that client. Observing this cycle recurring year after year gives one the impression that the business model’s failure is not coincidental. The business model is what it is.
Most diet marketing fails to acknowledge the complexity of the biology underlying all of this. Genetic variations, especially mutations in the MC4R gene, which are carried by about a fifth of the world’s population, have been found to directly affect how hungry a person feels and how quickly they register fullness, according to research led by Professor Sadaf Farooqi at Cambridge. Because metabolism is influenced by other genes, two individuals who consume the same foods may gain significantly different amounts of weight. According to bariatric surgeon Andrew Jenkinson, the brain defends a specific weight range in the same way that a thermostat defends a temperature, increasing hunger and slowing metabolism when weight falls below the range it deems normal. This is known as the “set weight point theory.” This explains why crash diets frequently result in a rebound. Severe calorie restriction is not interpreted by the body as a lifestyle decision. It interprets it as starvation and reacts appropriately.
All of this is made worse by the food environment in Britain. In order to achieve what the industry refers to as “bliss points”—the exact ratio of salt, sugar, and fat that overrides the body’s natural fullness signals—manufacturers substituted sugar and chemical additives for fat when it was demonized in the 1980s. As a result, a generation of low-fat products that were designed to encourage people to eat more but lacked nutritional value emerged. This pattern is still seen in diet versions of processed foods, which replace one problematic ingredient with another while promoting the outcome as health-conscious. It is difficult to ignore the fact that weight loss programs are frequently sponsored by the same food companies that sell highly processed meals.
Beyond calories and macronutrients, there is cultural harm. When foods are categorized as good or bad, a moral framework surrounding eating is created, which consistently results in guilt and emotional eating. Dieting itself was found to be a predictor of future weight gain and, in certain situations, the emergence of eating disorders in a study that followed dieters for five years. Early exposure to these messages causes children to develop food anxiety through school programs, social media, and household language. By the time they reach adulthood, many have internalized an antagonistic rather than nourishing relationship with eating, seeing food as something to be managed rather than relished.
Clinicians who treat patients for years instead of offering them six-week plans say that what truly works is nothing like a diet. It seems like learning to eat when you’re hungry and stop when you’re full—a seemingly straightforward concept that millions of people have found extremely challenging due to diet culture. It resembles resistance training to increase resting metabolic rate and gain muscle mass. It appears to involve treating chronic stress and sleep, both of which increase cortisol and encourage fat storage in ways that no meal plan can counteract. To be honest, it appears to be destroying the entire structure that the diet industry in the UK has spent decades building. It is still unclear if there is sufficient cultural will to accomplish that. The promise of a quick fix will always be easier to sell than the slow, unglamorous process of mending a damaged relationship with food because the industry is huge and the messaging is ubiquitous.
