Image courtesy of Ethan Hein
One of the things that I hear often at my WeightWatchers.com® meetings is that those of us on program are not “dieting” but attempting to change our lifestyle. There’s a very valid reason they try to make that distinction. For most of us diet is a four letter word, albeit one you’re allowed to say on television (Link contains profanity and is NSFW). If you tell the world you are on a diet not only are you letting everyone around you know that you are not comfortable with your current weight (and thus do not “love yourself for who you are”), you also open yourself up to an uncomfortable level of scrutiny in social situations (“Are you sure you should be eating THAT?”). So instead of packaging their program as “diet” (and all the negative baggage that goes along with it) the folks at Weight Watchers instead choose to say they are promoting a healthy lifestyle change.
The positive labeling trend seems to be catching on, but some of these new “healthy lifestyle changes” are nothing more than good old fashioned starvation diets wrapped up in a pretty name.