Depression is yet another cost of dieting, because two root causes of depression are failure and helplessness. Dieting sets you up for failure. Because goal of slimming down to your "ideal" weight pits your fallible will power against untiring biological defences, you will often fail. At first you will loose weight and feel pretty good about it. Any depression you had about your figure will disappear. Ultimately, however, you will probably not reach your goal; and then you will be dismayed as the pounds return. Every time you look in the mirror or vacillate over a white chocolate mousse, you will be reminded of your failure, which in turn brings depression. On the other hand, if you are one of the fortunate few who can keep the weight from coming back, you will probably have to stay on and unsatisfying low - calorie diet for the rest of your life. A side effect of prolonged malnutrition is depression. Either way, you are vulnerable to it.
If you scan the last of cultures that have a thin ideal for woman, you will be stuck by something fascinating. All thin ideal cultures also have eating disorders. They also have roughly twice as much depression in woman as in man. (Woman diet twice as much as man . The best estimate is that 30% of adult men and twenty five percent of adult women are now on a diet.) The cultures without the thin ideal have not eating disorders, and the amount of depression in women and men in these cultures is the same. This suggests that around the world, the thin ideal and dieting not only cause eating disorders but also cause woman to be more depressed than man.
The problem of fat consciousness and depression starts shortly before puberty. Earlier, boys have at least as much depression as girls. When puberty starts, boys go from flabby to muscular, but girls, whose weight gain is primarily fat, go from lean to voluptuous. Boys move towards their ideal body, but girls move away from it. Soon after puberty, girls are twice as depressed as boys, and the girls who are most depressed are the ones most upset about their body.
In a culture that glorifies being thin and young, many of us who are neither are discontents, vulnerable to continual messages that we are failures. It is just a few short steps from constantly feeling like a failure to becoming a depressed patient.
