Running On Empty: Why Starving Your Body Never Works (Part 2)

I am going to confess something that I am not particularly proud of, although I have a feeling I will not be the only woman who has done something equally drastic. Years ago, whenever I thought I needed to lose weight, I had a rather unhealthy habit of going to extremes. I was not interested in losing a kilogram or two sensibly over several weeks. No, I wanted results, and I wanted them immediately. Patience was not one of my strongest qualities when it came to dieting.

On more than one occasion, I spent weeks eating nothing but grapes. Yes, grapes. Looking back now, I can hardly believe it, but at the time it seemed perfectly logical. Grapes were healthy, they were low in calories, and surely if I ate very little, the weight would have no choice but to disappear. And disappear it did. I lost a lot of weight very quickly. Unfortunately, I also became lethargic, irritable and thoroughly miserable. My colleagues and anyone else unfortunate enough to spend time around me had to put up with my moods.

The funny thing is that, at the time, I did not look at any of that as a warning sign. I looked at the number on the scale going down and considered the diet a success. I had somehow convinced myself that feeling hungry, tired and miserable meant I was being disciplined. The worse I felt, the more I thought I must be doing something right.

The Endless Dieting Merry-Go-Round

The problem was that the weight loss never lasted. The moment I stopped eating grapes only and returned to something resembling a normal diet, the kilograms came back. Before long, I was back where I had started, wondering what had gone wrong and deciding that I obviously needed to try something even stricter next time. And so, the whole cycle began again: lose weight, regain weight, feel disappointed, blame myself and start another diet.

I repeated versions of this pattern many times, and I now look back and wonder why I thought being hungry, tired and miserable was evidence that a diet was working. The scale was going down, so I considered that a success, even though almost everything else about the experience was telling me that something was wrong. I was measuring success with a single number while completely ignoring how I actually felt.

And that is one of the problems with extreme dieting. It can give us an immediate result that feels incredibly rewarding, even when the method itself is completely unsustainable. The faster the number changes, the more convinced we can become that we have finally found the answer. Then, when we inevitably cannot maintain the diet, we blame ourselves rather than questioning whether the approach was ever realistic in the first place.

When the Body Fights Back

It took me a long time to understand that we cannot just keep reducing the amount of food going in and expect everything else to carry on as normal. Our bodies are remarkably adaptable. When we drastically restrict food for a prolonged period, the body can respond by reducing energy expenditure, increasing hunger and making us feel increasingly preoccupied with food. These are not signs that we are weak or lacking in willpower. They are very understandable responses to having less energy available.

We can also lose muscle along with body fat when weight comes off, particularly when we are not eating enough protein and are not doing resistance training. That matters enormously as we get older because maintaining muscle is something I now see as worth protecting rather than sacrificing in a desperate attempt to make the number on the scale decrease. I spent years thinking that the goal was simply to weigh less. I am now much more interested in what that weight is made up of and what my body is capable of doing.

This is one of the reasons my thinking about food and exercise has changed so much since turning fifty. I do not want to spend my later years constantly trying to make my body smaller at the expense of making it stronger. I want to give it the raw materials it needs to function well.

Running on Empty

This is why the “empty the tank” approach can leave us feeling so dreadful. Imagine trying to drive across the country while watching the fuel gauge sink closer and closer to empty and then wondering why the car is struggling. Your body is not a machine that exists purely to make your jeans fit. It needs energy to keep your heart beating, your brain working, your muscles moving, your body temperature regulated and all the other jobs that are happening inside you every minute of every day.

When you give it far less fuel than it needs, it has to adapt. You may feel tired, cold, distracted, hungry and generally unlike yourself. I certainly remember feeling as though I was dragging myself through those grape-based weeks, yet somehow I had convinced myself that feeling terrible was proof that I was being disciplined. It seems ridiculous to me now, but I genuinely thought that the discomfort was part of the price I had to pay for losing weight.

I think many of us were taught some version of this idea. We were told that dieting required sacrifice, that hunger meant we were doing well and that if we really wanted to lose weight, we simply needed to have more willpower. There was very little discussion about whether the plan was nourishing, sustainable or compatible with having an actual life.

The Reality of Restriction

When we finally stop restricting ourselves and start eating normally again, our bodies do not suddenly forget everything that has happened. We have also been living with increased hunger and, often, a very strong desire to make up for everything we have been denying ourselves. It is hardly surprising that the return to normal eating can feel like a free-for-all.

Some of the weight regained after a restrictive diet is also simply the restoration of glycogen, water and food in the digestive system rather than being pure body fat. That is something I wish I had understood years ago, because the bathroom scale can make the whole process worse than it actually is. We see the number climbing again and immediately assume that we have undone all our hard work.

Then the familiar thoughts begin. “I have ruined it.” “I have no self-control.” “I need to get back on the diet.” And there we are, right back on the dieting merry-go-round, preparing to restrict again.

The most frustrating part is that we can spend years believing the problem is our willpower when the real problem may simply be that we keep choosing approaches that are almost impossible to maintain.

Finding Value in Proper Fuel

I eventually had to accept that starving myself was never going to be a sensible long-term strategy. These days, I look at food very differently. Instead of asking myself how little I can get away with eating, I am much more interested in what I can put on my plate that will actually help me feel strong, satisfied and energised. Protein has become much more important to me, particularly because I want to protect the muscle I have and continue building strength.

I want vegetables, fruit, good-quality carbohydrates, healthy fats and enough food to support the life I am actually living. I want to have enough energy to exercise, to go for walks and hikes, to get through a busy day and still have something left in the tank afterwards. I still enjoy a little sweet treat because apparently, I have learned absolutely nothing about grapes but plenty about chocolate, and I have no intention of making healthy eating miserable.

What has changed most for me is that I no longer see food as something I have to earn or something I need to fear. I see it as fuel. And I have become much more interested in the quality of that fuel than in seeing how little I can put into the tank.

That does not mean I have stopped caring about my weight. I am not going to pretend that I suddenly became completely indifferent to how my clothes fit. I still notice when my jeans feel tighter, and I still have days when I would quite happily lose a few kilograms. The difference is that I no longer believe starving myself is the answer.

Losing weight is not the only measure of whether I am doing something good for my body. Being stronger, having better fitness, maintaining muscle, having enough energy to exercise and being able to enjoy everyday life are all victories too. At this stage of my life, I would much rather have a body that is well fuelled and capable than one that is simply smaller because I have spent weeks surviving on grapes.

Learning to Play by New Rules

We cannot undo the things we did when we were younger, and I certainly cannot go back and tell my younger self to put down the grapes and eat a proper dinner. What I can do is make different choices now.

I can stop punishing myself for gaining a few kilograms. I can stop believing that hunger is a sign of success. I can stop thinking that every meal needs to be an exercise in restraint. I can pay attention to what my body is telling me and give it the nourishment, movement, strength training and rest it needs.

After all, this is the same body that has carried me through more than six decades of life. It has got me through work, illness, stress, exercise, hikes, celebrations, disappointments and everything else along the way. It has carried me through days when I felt fantastic and days when I absolutely did not. It has kept going regardless. The least I can do now is give it enough fuel to keep going.

And perhaps that is what playing by the new rules really means. It does not mean giving up on ourselves or deciding that our bodies no longer matter because we are getting older. It means understanding that punishment is not the same thing as discipline, hunger is not the same thing as success and weighing less is not automatically the same thing as being healthier.

Now I am much more interested in nourishing my body and having the energy to achieve whatever I want to.

That feels like a much better plan for the years ahead.

So, I have to ask: have you ever fallen into the trap of an extreme diet? Perhaps you did not eat grapes for several weeks, but maybe you survived on soup, shakes, boiled eggs, endless salads or some other wonderfully miserable diet that promised to transform your life in fourteen days. Did you find yourself caught in that exhausting cycle of losing weight, regaining it and then blaming yourself for not having enough willpower? If you have a dieting confession of your own, I would genuinely love to hear it. I suspect there are quite a few of us who have something to share.

🌿 Continue Your Journey

If this blog resonated with you, here are three more stories you might enjoy:

Why I Finally Walked Away From Dieting: After years of trying to control my weight, I finally began to question whether dieting was helping me at all.

Are You Really Hungry? Learning to Listen to Your Body: Learning to recognise what your body is actually asking for, rather than automatically reaching for another diet rule.

Bring on the Strappy Dresses: My Four-Month Strength Experiment at 61: What happened when I stopped focusing only on the number on the scale and started focusing on becoming stronger.

— Frannie ☕