Weight Regain: The Frame We’re Using Is Too Small
Imagine I tell you about a thirteen-year-old girl who waits until nobody is looking and secretly takes food from the pantry or fridge.
It’s easy to start forming an opinion. She knows she shouldn’t take the food, but she wants it anyway, so she makes sure nobody sees her.
We could examine that behaviour closely. We could ask what she took, how much she ate and how often she did it.
But before deciding what her secret eating means, we need more of Amy’s story.
Amy remembers being hungry throughout childhood. By eight, she was taller and heavier than her older sister. At ten, after being teased at school about her weight, the amount of food in her lunchbox was reduced and some foods were replaced with low-calorie alternatives.
At thirteen, her mother took her to the family doctor hoping he would prescribe something to suppress her appetite. He refused.
At home, Amy’s food continued to be restricted. While the rest of the family ate dinner from ordinary plates, Amy’s meal was served on a plate barely bigger than a saucer.
Now go back to the pantry.
She is still taking food secretly. Nothing about the behaviour has changed, but it becomes harder to explain simply as a problem with controlling herself around food.
Changing the frame
There was more to Amy’s food environment. She wasn’t given pocket money because her parents were concerned she would spend it on food.
Other people determined how much food she was served. Her access to money was affected by what she might eat if she had it. Even her appetite had become something adults were trying to reduce.
Then Amy turned eighteen and left home. She remembers thinking, “Never again is anyone going to tell me what I can and can’t eat.”
For the first time, she had complete authority over her food. She describes over-catered dinners, takeaway and treats, with food available whenever she wanted it. Her weight increased considerably over the years that followed.
If we began Amy’s story at eighteen, we could construct another apparently straightforward explanation: she gained freedom around food, ate far more and gained weight.
But eighteen-year-old Amy didn’t arrive without a history. This is where a useful idea from systems thinking comes in. Whenever we investigate a problem, we draw a boundary around it. That boundary determines what information we include and what we leave outside.
Think of that boundary as a frame.
Draw the frame tightly around Amy taking food from the pantry and we see secret eating. Widen it and we also see hunger and deliberate food restriction. Include more of her story and food access and authority enter the investigation. By eighteen, complete freedom over food has a meaning it couldn’t have if we began her story there.
Changing the frame hasn’t changed any of the facts. It has changed the information available to explain them.
The frame around weight regain
This matters because the frame around weight regain is often drawn very close to food and dieting. We examine what someone ate, how much she ate, whether she followed the diet and when she stopped.
Calories matter. If energy intake exceeds what the body uses over time, that matters to weight gain. But calories can tell us something about what happened to weight without necessarily explaining the eating that produced them.
A woman can lose weight, regain it and conclude that the weight came back because she stopped following her diet. That can be factually true and still leave important parts of the process unexplained.
Amy really did take food secretly. She ate more freely after leaving home. She gained considerable weight.
Putting more of her story around those facts doesn’t make them disappear.
What changes is our confidence that being able to describe the behaviour means we already understand it.
Instead of stopping at What did she eat that caused her to gain weight, we can examine what was happening around the eating that changes how we understand it. Sometimes the problem isn’t that we haven’t looked closely enough.
The frame we’re looking through is too small.
If your own experience of repeated weight regain seems to contain more than calories in and out can explain, Understanding Your Weight Ecosystem gives you a place to start reframing your weight regain.
Listen to the Podcast Episode: 62 Amy's Story
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