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Oh What a Feeling! Image by Sarah Hamilton.

When Leah Summers was 14-years-old, a girl at her school called her ‘fat’. It was the first time Leah had heard someone use this word in the context of her body, but it wouldn’t be the last. This f-word followed her around for many years, plaguing her with a terrible body image and low self-esteem, sending her spiralling into a cycle of binge eating and unhappiness. Her ‘fat’ self grew to an attitude of hatred toward the mirror, and reflections of herself existed only within her family members, who, likewise, portrayed to her a deep-seated weight problem. Leah tried dieting and exercise with yo-yoing results and picked apart meals with the precision of a magnifying glass, trying for the perfect balance of foods she loved and foods that would make her thin. Yet, it wasn’t until her dad, aged only 50-years-old, suffered a heart attack and stroke, killing him instantly; that she knew something had to change.
“I turned dissatisfaction with myself and fear of my life ending into motivation,” the now 22-year-old student says triumphantly.

“In a way I gave up my old, unhappy, fat life to take on a new, slim happier one. I knew that if I didn’t do anything I’d end up like my father. In the end he was alone, overweight and miserable, and I could see that happening to me. I didn’t want my children to lose me as early as I lost him because I couldn’t be bothered to do anything about the way I was.

“I wanted to be healthy, and the only way I knew how was to change the way I felt about myself. Once I did that, my body shape changed as well,” she says.

This act of using negative energy to create a positive outlook has become popular in Australia in recent years. Just as Leah experienced, the act of shifting a negative mind-set of losing weight into action, has proven to have lasting results. In fact, psychologists worldwide are discovering the importance of the intersection between state of mind and weight loss, where taking the weight off your shoulders is necessary to taking the weight off your waist.

Such a phenomenon has become known as “the happiness diet.” In which optimism is the secret to weight-loss, and the dieting is more of a loss of emotional binge eating and education about stress fasting (the skipping of meals due to external pressures).

While ‘happiness’ and ‘diet’ are not two words that normally appear in the same sentence, let alone in succession, the weight-loss technique has been skyrocketing since founder of the United States Happiness Club, Dr Lionel Ketchian, recorded first instances in 2003. However, it has never been more accepted than in Australia, where the label “the world’s fattest nation” has pushed “the happiness diet” into a new level of relevance for today’s society.

In fact, as disheartening as it is, Leah’s days of name-calling and depression are not a standalone event. The Daily Telegraph’s Tamara McLean recently reported that over nine million Australians have been called overweight, chubby or obese at least once in their lifetime.

This, as personal trainer at Southern Sydney Curves, a women’s fitness franchise, Jane Ellis says has created a culture that is obsessed with being thin.

“Amazon sells over 350,000 diet books annually, while billboards, music videos, newspapers, magazines and advertisements daily force upon us this notion that thin is in and even slightly overweight is a failure of the most terrible kind.”

And, as Ms. Ellis explains: “obsession is often a detrimental factor to weight-loss.”

A recent poll found that some women fear gaining weight more than cancer and yet many studies show that fear, among other psychological factors, are in fact linked to weight-gain.  Martin Seligman, author of What You Can Change & What You Can’t, even goes as far as to say that “all thin-ideal cultures have roughly twice as much depression in women as men [and] without this thin ideal, the amount of depression in men and women are the same. This suggests that the thin ideal and dieting cause women to be more depressed than men.” Here, he points out that failure and helplessness are causes of depression, and mostly, dieting makes you feel both.

So, how can one change their body when a diet culture has been formed that is so intense and adverse, it makes weight-loss the epitome of success? And, how is it possible to overcome the psychological problems and emotional eating that is created with the stress of weight gain and dieting?

Psychologist Julie A. Evans, who studies the science of happiness, recently wrote about her findings in Diane Magazine, divulging that the secret is happiness.

“There is definitely a link between health and happiness,” she says.

“By being happy you have a better grasp on how to take care of yourself and, by doing so, you may have an easier time in losing weight.”

In this, she also explored the concept that when women are happy they are able to make clearly defined goals to achieve and believe they have the resources and willpower to accomplish these, particularly when related to weight-loss and dieting.

Come on Get Happy! Image by Sarah Hamilton

Ms. Ellis agrees. She defines the happiness diet as taking a series of steps toward a better state of mind, revealing that many women think they’ll be happier once they lose a few kilograms, but actually, the reverse is true.

“As you become more engaged with other people and activities and your joy increases, food takes a smaller place in your life,” Ms Ellis says.
“The extra weight no longer seems to belong on your body. That’s one reason women should start creating joy in their lives right now, and not in the future, thinking once they are thin they’ll be happy.”

However, the act of becoming happy in order to lose weight is not always going to be the easiest task. For starters, Cynthia Barnett, a former teacher and counselor, who has become a kind of international advocate for Dr Ketchian’s global happiness endeavor, doesn’t believe that happiness just happens.

“I’m happy because I work at it. You need to experience happiness, to learn to enjoy the moment and stop worrying, it won’t come naturally all the time, but once you learn to help it along a little, then you begin to grin from ear to ear daily,” she says.

“It’s a deliberate choice to change your attitude. You will never live your life without problems, but if you are happy, you can deal with them because you see the solutions.”

Gretchin Rubin, author of the best-selling book The Happiness Project continues, stating that happiness comes when you accept yourself the way you are and stop worrying about weight-loss.

“It’s the act of making a resolution. Almost no diet works for long. Most of the weight comes back,” she says in a recent blog post on her website.

“So… the [solution] is to change your attitude. If I accept my body as it is, I won’t fret about it…. By trying to be more grateful for being healthy and close to my ideal weight… I should be happy about my body.”

A recent study published by Special K Researchers found that more than 43 per cent of women who didn’t worry about their dress size were happier when compared to those who did. It also found that almost a quarter of larger sized women were extremely happy and more able to maintain their ideal shape due to overall mood.

Yet, Ms. Ellis says in order to do this you need to move your body toward the goals you’ve set.

“Once you’ve changed your attitude toward happiness and stopped worrying about weight-loss, you are so empowered and so close to achieving those goals that you once set, all you have to do is move,” she explains.

“Exercise is nature’s antidepressant. It releases brain chemicals that help you to feel happier and less stressed. If you are no longer thinking ‘I need to lose weight,’ or ‘I need to go to the gym to work off that junk food’, you begin to use exercise to make you happy and you begin to value it as more than a weight-loss workout. It gives your overall health, energy and mood a boost.”

This is something that Leah Summers knows well.

“When I lost weight, I think I lost an entire mind-set of negativity. It’s as though I replaced every depressing thought with a positive one. I no longer think of weight loss as weight that can be put back on, rather I think of health gain, and I don’t think of exercise as having a temporary place in my life only to shed those kilos. I think of exercise as my happiness boost,” she says.

“The happiness diet has changed the entire way I look at life. In fact, now, I don’t even think twice about the “fat” word, I prefer to think of the f-word as fierce, fun and fearless. And, certainly that’s something to smile about.”

For related stories to motivate you to lose weight visit What’s the Big Idea?