Repeated Weight Regain: Looking Beyond Calories and Willpower

Women who have repeatedly lost and regained weight are often treated as though they still have something to learn about weight loss.

In my experience, the opposite is usually true.

Many of the women I speak with know an extraordinary amount about losing weight. They have counted calories and points, tracked macros, fasted, used meal replacements, eliminated foods and tried more diets than they can easily remember. And many have successfully lost significant amounts of weight.

The problem is that the weight came back.

When that happens repeatedly, something quite complex can get reduced to a familiar explanation: I fell off the wagon. I know what to do, I just don’t do it.

Those explanations deserve much more scrutiny than we usually give them.

Repeated weight regain contains information

If a woman has spent 20 or 30 years repeatedly losing and regaining weight, she hasn't simply accumulated a collection of failed diets. She has accumulated decades of information about what happens when she tries to change her weight.

That distinction matters.

Instead of asking only what she ate or whether she followed the diet properly, we can start looking at what was happening around her eating. We can examine what changed over time and what kept repeating.

And that can take us into parts of her experience that rarely appear in conventional conversations about weight loss and weight regain.

A woman might wait until everyone else has gone to bed before she eats. She might hide food, or feel caught between wanting desperately to lose weight and wanting just as desperately to eat. Eating large amounts of chocolate might provide relief from emotional discomfort even while the consequences of that eating are causing considerable distress.

These details aren't distractions from the serious business of understanding weight regain.

They are part of the serious business.

Eating needs more of its context

This is where systems thinking and weight regain give us a different place to look.

Rather than assuming that eating too much is a self-explanatory problem, we can ask what surrounds the eating and what function it is performing.

Something that appears irrational when viewed in isolation can make much more sense when more of the woman's life is put back around it.

Sometimes the behaviour we've identified as the problem is also solving another problem.

That doesn't mean we can take one childhood experience, one difficult relationship or one episode of relief eating and declare that we've found the cause of someone's repeated weight regain. A good explanation has to be supported by the evidence, not imposed on the story because it sounds convincing.

Moving beyond blame and shame

This also changes the role of willpower in weight regain.

When we explain a repeating pattern as a failure of discipline, motivation or character, we haven't actually explained very much. Worse, the judgement can stop us looking for a better explanation.

Blame doesn't only hurt. It can block us intellectually.

Over the next eight episodes of Before Dieting, I'll be using women's food and weight stories to examine repeated weight regain differently.

We won't tidy those stories into neat before-and-after accounts. We'll look at pieces of them, sometimes putting experiences from different women alongside each other, and see what becomes visible when we resist jumping straight to conclusions.

Because understanding repeated weight regain requires more than knowing how to lose weight.

It requires us to understand what keeps bringing the weight back.

🎧 listen to the Podcast Episode 60 here