It's true. If you suffer from bingeing, compulsive overeating, diet addiction, emotional eating, stress eating, night eating, or eating in secret, these may be symptoms of too much dieting. All folks with these kinds of food dysfunction have much in common, regardless of their weight.

If you do have weight problems, you've probably tried some methods to lose the weight. Now you're frustrated by failure, and you're not alone. Even the famous Weight Watchers company advertises this disclaimer™, "For many dieters, weight loss is temporary." And have you ever noticed this disclaimer, "Results not typical"? Isn't it time you stopped expecting yourself to magically succeed on a diet when the truth is that most people eventually fail? Worse yet, the act of dieting itself creates new problems.

Even if you don't appear to have weight problems, you still may have eating dysfunction. Perhaps you are starving yourself, or you are bingeing and then compulsively exercising to burn the excess calories.

Diets are intended to solve problems, but they can cause new ones. Some of those problems can become life-threatening. Others can be an annoyance that diminishes the quality of our lives. Actually, it's not really the diet's fault, and diets don't have to fail. Rather, dieters often abuse their diets or put their diets in charge. By giving over your judgment and "food wisdom" to a plan, a club, or a regimen, you do your body a disservice.

How so? Look at it this way. You're overweight because something about your hunger and fullness sensor is out of whack. Yet, all those diet rules have nothing to do with restoring your proper hunger and fullness sensor. In fact, they take you further away from tuning in to what your body needs. Your judgment only gets worse.

The solution is to treat the diet rules with some disregard, and instead seek out your own judgment. Then, and only then, will you be free to choose a diet which will bend to your needs, or better yet, set aside the diet mentality altogether.

"How do I lose weight, then, if I'm not on a diet?" you might ask. The answer is that there's another way. You don't have to alter the content of your food or count calories to lose weight. Instead, you can learn the "hunger and satiety" approach. You can learn portion control and normal eating. It's not easy, though. It takes work, but not the work of willpower. It takes internal work. To learn more, choose one of the diet problems below.

Click on the dieting problem you would like to solve

Compulsive exercise

Is there really anything wrong with exercise? Of course not. But what about the kind of exercise that's interfering with your life? Compulsive exercise often begins with a strong desire to control your weight.

Compulsive exercisers often report that their obsession began innocently enough with a desire to "eat more food" and a discovery that 30 minutes of vigorous exercise can equal a chocolate sundae. Some of these exercisers even keep careful track of how many calories they're burning, and obsess over a certain food they are planning to eat!

Eventually, the exercise gets out of hand, taking up ever-increasing hours, and the dieter doesn't realize the extent to which the rest of his life is falling away.

You can recover. Read more about compulsive exercise.

Binge eating and compulsive overeating

Are you a binge eater or compulsive overeater? Do you want to stop overeating? While this may seem counterintuitive at first, it's usually dieting that comes first. That is, dieting actually contributes to this problem, and does little or nothing to cure it.

Strict dieting, yo-yo dieting, and repeated frustration then lead the dieter to compulsive overeating. Often the overeating is caused by your body's rebellion against unbalanced meals. Sometimes it arises from an "all-or-nothing" attitude, in which the dieter temporarily goes off his strict diet, and then loses all control. Unfortunately, the dieter believes that he must redouble his dieting efforts to make the overeating stop, thus leading to a never-ending vicious cycle.

Find out more about compulsive overeating.

Diet addiction

Do you define how you're doing in life by what diet you're on? Whether you're on or off your diet? Do you think of diets as permanent? Perhaps you think of yourself as a diet addict.

Some dieters even lose weight successfully and still become diet addicts. They believe that they must continue to diet in order to maintain success. These dieters either drop their weight too low, or learn a pattern of bingeing and dieting.

Did you know you don't have to be a diet addict? Your whole life doesn't have to revolve around diets.

Find out more about diet addiction.

Eating disorders

Anorexia and bulimia. These conditions are life-threatening. If you are underweight and starving yourself, or if you are engaging in purging (throwing up) after some of your meals, you should seek medical help immediately. In addition, try to find a support group in your area. In your support group, you will find people like yourself, and will learn to be able to talk openly about your problem. Discussing the problem will aid your recovery.

Why do we advise against staying "private" about your embarrassing problem? Because, to borrow a slogan from the twelve-step groups (such as AA) "you're only as sick as your secrets."

If you suspect that you have either of these conditions, you should see your doctor. However, once you are under the care of your physician and have connected with other people who share your problem, then the other advice contained herein will become helpful.

Get help for your eating disorder.

Emotional overeating

Do you eat for comfort? Do you want to stop your emotional eating? Eating to dull your nervous system plagues many people. Emotional eating can lead you to your first diet, or your dieting can lead you to emotional eating. Many dieters claim that they've always been an emotional overeater.

But often, diets make emotional overeating worse, because they make the dieter feel emotionally deprived. Food becomes a beloved friend, and eventually it takes precedence over family members.

Dieters look forward to their next secret rendezvous with their lover, and fear being found out. They feel completely unable to give up their love affair with food. If this describes you, it may even be hard for you to believe that there is another way. But there is. Even if you've been this way all your life, even if you were this way as a child, you can unlearn it, not with a diet, but with some internal work.

Find out more about emotional overeating.

Low carb diets

If you're tired of your low-carb diet, there's a reason. Your body does not like the lack of balance! But you can modify this diet to make it work for you.

Low carb diets often appear to work in the short run, and for some people, they can even work in the long term. But most of us need better balance and portion control. There is no diet that allows you to eat massive amounts of food and still be thin in the long-term. Acceptance of this fact will place you at the starting gate to recovery.

Find out how to make low-carb diets work for you.

Low fat diets

If you're tired of your low-fat diet, there's a reason. Fats are where the flavor is. Since your fat intake is lower than your taste buds would like, your appetite is never satisfied. You can modify this diet to make it work for you.

Low fat diets were invented on a faulty assumption—that if you consume the same portion size on your plate that you did before, but the portion has some of its calorie-laden fat grams reduced, you will still be satisfied, and you will thus consume fewer calories over the course of the day. After many weeks of doing so, goes the theory, you will find you've lost weight. The problem is that fat enhances flavor, leading to a more satisfied appetite.

Learn how to make low-fat diets work for you.

Night eating syndrome

Do you wake up in the middle of the night to eat? Or maybe you even eat in your sleep? There are many possible causes for this, but you may not have to attack the night eating directly. Find out a new way to think about your night eating.

Portion control

For many dieters, the thought of eating normal, delicious food, in smaller amounts, seems unreasonable. "I'll starve," goes the reasoning. Dieters often associate small portions with deprivation. Yet they don't seem to see that the real deprivation is in removing entire food groups or reducing fat so as to make the food less tasty.

Does the thought of controlling the portion size on your plate scare you? Take heart. In the beginning you'll need some courage to face your fears, but in the long run you'll realize there was nothing to be scared of. What nobody told you is that some guidelines exist which, if you follow them, will help you be fully satisfied with small meals.

Doctors and dieticians urge portion control, but perhaps yours may not have given you enough information to help you reduce your portion size without going hungry. Or it's possible your doctor did tell you, but you weren't ready to listen. Are you ready now? You need to know that timing, coupled with a balance of fats and carbohydrates, play an essential role in creating small, satisfying, meals.

Learn how to make portion control work for you.

Sleep eating disorders

What can be done about night eating? Some people with nocturnal eating disorders aren't even awake while they're raiding the refrigerator! Others can't fall back to sleep unless they eat. There is recovery from these disorders. There can be many causes for this problem. If it is affecting your health, you should seek medical advice first.

Find out more about sleep eating disorders.

Stress eating

Are you concerned with stress and your eating? Many people eat to reduce stress. But they usually complain that the eating, in the long run, enhances their stress because being overweight is stressful! How does one end this terrible cycle?

Here is a challenging question: Why is it that we want to reduce stress anyway? Instead, can we learn to tell ourselves that stress is part of life? You can learn to live with stress. You don't have to chase it away with food or any other substance.

Learn more about stress eating.

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You might be starting to get the idea by now that we've been telling ourselves the wrong things about weight loss. Many dieters today have been brainwashed into believing that diets will be their savior. In fact, weight loss is mostly internal work—the work of changing our beliefs and self-talk!

What better way to change your self-talk than by replacing the old words with new words? That's why Diet Survivors was created. View this month's issue. Every month this free newsletter will help you with rational, wise words that will help you restore your own judgment. The Diet Survivors newsletter will arrive in your e-mail once a month. There is nothing to download. Instead, you will click on a link that will take you to a page on this Web site that was written to help you.

You could just as easily visit the page once a month without subscribing, and you are free to do so. But what better way to approach diet recovery than to have a newsletter arrive in your e-mail on a regular basis? There's just no down side to subscribing. You can unsubscribe at any time, and remember, it's free.

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Order How to Survive Your Diet

In addition, you may want to order the book, How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever by Linda Moran. Why order the book? Because it offers a systematic approach to dismantling our diet beliefs.

Because it's fun, light, engaging reading. A book you can curl up to, and a book you can pass along to your friends.

And because it's personal. It describes the author's own struggle and triumph over the diet life. It's written from a warm, first-person point of view by a highly qualified author who deeply cares about you and wants to help you. And it's a real bargain, at only $14.95 plus shipping and handling.