The Questions Diets Never Ask
- Bronwyn Fletcher
- Aug 4
- 4 min read
One of the reasons I enjoy receiving questions from listeners is that they tell me where women get stuck.
Not because they aren't intelligent, or because they haven't tried hard enough, but because they've spent years learning to think about one thing: weight loss.
Ask a woman how to lose weight and she'll usually have plenty to say. She can tell you about the diets she's tried, the foods she avoids, whether she's counting calories, eating more protein or cutting back on carbohydrates. It's familiar territory because she's probably been thinking about those things for years.
What questions do diets never ask?
Let's move the conversation away from weight loss and towards weight regain, and something interesting often happens. The conversation slows down.
Women will often say to me, "I can hear what you're saying, but I can't quite get it to sink in." Or they'll tell me that every time they try to think differently, they somehow end up back at the same conclusion: I probably just need another diet. I understand why that happens.
Our brains like familiar explanations. Once we've accepted that diets are the answer, it's surprisingly difficult to think about the problem in another way. That's one of the reasons I keep developing new models, illustrations and ways of explaining repeated weight regain. Sometimes we don't need more information. We need a different way of looking at the same problem.
Annie's question
A question from Annie in this week's podcast is a good example. She asked why I spend so much time talking about what happens after a diet has finished.
It's a fair question because most of us assume the important part is the diet itself.
Of course, the diet matters. But if you're trying to understand why the weight keeps coming back, I think the period afterwards deserves just as much attention. The difficulty is that we rarely stay with it long enough to learn anything.
If a diet doesn't work, we call it a failure and move on. If it works for a while, we tend to celebrate the weight loss and then become frustrated when the weight returns. Either way, we close the chapter and begin looking for the next solution. From a Weighting for Happiness perspective, that's a missed opportunity. That period after a diet often contains some of the most useful clues about your eating.
You might notice that every diet seems to fall apart after a particularly stressful week. You might realise that the moment the food rules disappear, rebound eating begins. Or perhaps you've started a new diet every Monday for as long as you can remember. It might even become a family joke. But jokes have a way of hiding patterns we've never thought to investigate.
None of those observations explains repeated weight regain on its own. But they all tell you something. They add another piece to a picture that has probably been forming for many years.
Sandrine's question
Another listener, Sandrine, asked whether it was unusual to feel uncomfortable when people noticed she'd lost weight. My answer was no.
Not because every woman feels that way, but because experiences like that are exactly the sort of thing that become visible when we take the time to look beyond the diet itself.
You might remember the story I shared a few episodes ago about Elise. She reached the weight she'd been working towards, yet something still didn't feel right. As she looked more closely at what happened after the weight loss, she realised she'd never been comfortable being noticed. Without the weight, she felt exposed. Regaining it brought back a feeling of safety she hadn't realised she'd lost. Now, that's Elise's story. It doesn't need to become yours.
Benefit for other women's stories
The value isn't in borrowing someone else's explanation. The value is in recognising that your own experience may be holding explanations you've never stopped long enough to see. You can discover those questions about weight regain diets never ask.
That's why I describe the work we do at Weighting for Happiness as collegial. You know your life in a way nobody else ever could.
My role isn't to tell you what your experience means. It's to bring questions, tools and ways of organising that experience so the patterns become easier to recognise. When those two forms of knowledge come together, understanding begins to grow.
And sometimes that understanding begins in the place we've spent years rushing past.
The period after the diet.
Your Investigation
Think back to the last diet you finished. Before you think about starting another one, spend a little time with what happened afterwards.
Not to judge yourself. And certainly not to work out where you failed. But simply to notice what that period might have been trying to show you all along.
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