If You’re Only Looking at Your Last Diet, You’re Missing the Story

Karen described herself as a “great diet starter”. She had tried Weight Watchers twice, intermittent fasting, meal replacements and so many other diets she could no longer remember their names. More recently, she had stopped eating breakfast, hoping that removing a meal would make losing weight easier. Some days, after skipping breakfast, she found herself at the vending machine at work buying two or three chocolate bars to get through to dinner. Karen was approaching fifty and the diets she had previously relied on to lose a few kilos were no longer producing the same results. Perimenopause seemed the obvious explanation. She wanted to lose a persistent 20 kilograms and she felt increasingly urgent about doing it. Her mother was living with complications from type 2 diabetes and Karen was worried about where her own weight might take her. There was plenty of information available about what Karen was doing now. We could have tracked her food, calories, weight or the chocolate bars from the vending machine. But Karen didn’t have a tracking problem. She had decades of weight and dieting history that she had never looked at as a whole. In this episode of *Before Dieting*, I look at the difference between tracking what is happening now and charting what has happened across time. The most recent diet gives us a snapshot. A weight and dieting history gives us a different view, one that can reveal repetition, changes and turning points that are difficult to see when each attempt is treated as a separate event. Karen thought the important question was why her diets had stopped working as she approached fifty. Going back through her history raised a different one: how long had this pattern actually been developing? If you have spent years starting diets, losing weight and eventually starting again, your history isn’t irrelevant information from the past. It may contain some of the most useful evidence you have. **In this episode:** • Why the latest diet gives us only a snapshot of a repeating problem • Karen’s long history of dieting and her persistent 20 kilograms • What happened when skipping breakfast collided with the working day • Why Karen attributed her changing results to perimenopause • The difference between tracking calories, food and weight and charting a history across time • What becomes visible when individual weight-loss attempts are viewed together • Why going back through your weight and dieting history can change the problem you think you are trying to solve **Start with your Weight & Dieting History** - - If you have regained weight more than once, you already have a history worth examining. The Weight & Dieting History diagnostic gives you a structured way to bring that evidence together so you can see the pattern across time rather than judging another attempt in isolation. **OR** Copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/weight-and-diet-history-diagnostic Read the Blog or copy and paste the link below: https://www.weightingforhappiness.com.au/post/looking-at-your-last-diet-your-missing-the-story