Sabotage Is a Ruthless Enemy in Battle of the Bulge : Urging the dieter to be bad ‘just this once’ is a subversive activity practiced by co-workers, friends and relatives everywhere.
The champagne was flowing a few weeks ago at Lida Nelson’s 45th-birthday celebration, and she was the center of attention. But whenever her friends handed her a glassful of bubbly, she politely declined and passed it on to someone else.
“I love champagne,” admits Nelson, a Newport Beach resident. “And someday I’ll be able to have it again. But right now I’m on a diet, and I didn’t want to cheat.”
Oh, come on, they urged her. It’s your birthday. Indulge yourself just this once. What harm will it do?
“It’s really interesting, because these people are my best friends. They meant well, but I don’t think they realized what they were doing.”
What they were doing was diet sabotage, a subversive activity practiced by innocent--and not so innocent--friends and relatives of dieters everywhere.
“It’s impossible for any dieter to successfully control his or her weight without going through a lot of sabotage,” says Dr. Marshall Stamper, founder of the Orange County-based Lindora Medical Clinic chain of weight-loss centers.
Sometimes it’s blatant, such as the husband Stamper recalls who beat his wife--an overweight former beauty queen who had just started losing weight--and forced her to drink a milkshake.
“He had married her fat, and he was so emotionally insecure that he just couldn’t tolerate her being thin because he was afraid he would lose her,” Stamper says.
But often, diet sabotage is a subtle art, so much so that even its practitioners may not be conscious of it: The mother who makes fried chicken every time you come to visit because “it’s always been your favorite,” even though it’s no longer on your diet. The guys who go out once a week for beer and buffalo wings and wouldn’t hear of switching to a salad bar. The cheerful secretary who brings cakes to the office for every occasion and insists that everyone have “just a little piece.” However well-meaning, they’re all saboteurs.
Mothers and spouses are the worst offenders, says psychologist Marvin Rofsky of Orange. When they say, “I love you just the way you are,” what they may mean is “I don’t want you to change.”
“Their motivation is often simply fear of losing you,” Rofsky says. “Or they may be trying to keep you in a bad place, because what you’re doing points out their own sense of inadequacy, possibly their own weight problem.”
Rofsky, who deals with many eating disorder patients, also knows firsthand how it feels to battle a weight problem. He dropped 50 pounds about a year ago and has managed to keep it off, despite the diet saboteurs in his own life.
“They can be really up front with what they’re doing. Often they’ll put things out that you like and have capitulated to before. If you’re a sugarholic, they’ll put sugar out. They seem to know instinctively what you’ll collapse in front of, and they put you in positions where that’s available to you,” Rofsky says.
“And they use guilt as a weapon: ‘Oh, come on. But I made it just for you.’ ”
Sometimes the culprits are thin people who subconsciously think of themselves as better than their overweight friends or co-workers. Or they may be fat themselves, and fearful that a friend’s success will make them feel more like a failure.
“To succeed with a weight-loss program, you change in lots of ways besides just your weight,” Stamper says. “You become more self-confident; you develop a new image of yourself. And those changes can be uncomfortable for the people around you.”
Nelson says she might have been more likely to give in to temptation at her birthday party if she hadn’t done exactly that a week before. “It was a romantic dinner, and I had a glass of wine and dessert at one of my favorite restaurants. I told myself, ‘It’s OK, I’ll take care of it tomorrow.’ But I noticed an increase in weight because of that, and it was a setback. Having just been through that incident, I knew I couldn’t take the chance again.”
Mark Huckenpahler of Costa Mesa, who last year lost 70 pounds in three months and has since kept the weight off, says parents are the worst diet saboteurs.
“My mom makes lasagna, or pork roast with mashed potatoes and gravy. When I first started the diet, it would really stress me out. I’d have to leave without eating, or I’d just eat a tiny portion of each thing and then leave. Last year on the Fourth of July, they had a huge buffet, with pork and beans, steak, the whole works. I wanted to keep going back for more. But I went away, and then I got all bummed out. I said to myself, ‘Everybody else is fat,’ so I went back and had a couple of helpings. I fasted afterward to try to make up for it.”
Johnny Parks, who works in Costa Mesa, says he’s become aware of diet sabotage since he began losing weight several weeks ago. “This evening at work, we have a dinner meeting, and every Sunday at church, it’s the same thing. People tell you to have a little bit, this one little bite isn’t going to hurt you. But it does.”
Sometimes it helps to confront the saboteur, the experts say. “Give them information about your diet and ask for their help,” Stamper says. “If you do it properly, you can defuse the situation.”
Rofsky says: “It really depends on the individual. Sometimes you can gently confront them and say, ‘You know, I really need to be fastidious with my diet, and this isn’t helping me stick to it.’ But sometimes you just have to keep your mouth shut.”
No matter what form of diet sabotage you encounter, Rofsky says the ultimate responsibility belongs to the dieter.
“Basically, you are the one who sabotages yourself. You need to have enough self-esteem and desire to go where you want to go, to be able to resist and say no.”