Warning: this feature contains discussion of disordered eating and diets

During lockdown, we were bombarded with messages to stay at home, wear a mask and wash our hands. Another message also came over loud and clear: if you’ve put on weight, get ready to lose it again. In fact, even Boris Johnson banged on about how fat we all were and how we was spending 2021 losing weight after his stint in ICU.

Now that we’re coming out of lockdown, the pressure to diet has never been so high. Instagrammers tell us how to get post-lockdown ready while the (ever-changing) travel advice has meant that lots of people are now panicking about being seen on a beach or in anything other than sweatpants for the first time in 18 months.

All this is leading to yo-yo dieting, says PT, nutritionist and founder of Shapes Studio, Paola Langella. “Right now, people are crash-dieting like crazy. I’ve been getting frantic texts from people asking how they can lose the 5lbs they put on during lockdown!” She explains that all that anxiety and panic is actually having the opposite effect that these people want: “The more stressed we feel, the more bloated we become because our stress hormone is running wild. That stress often leads us to eating a lot junk food, then to make up for it, we try to cut out carbs or try intermittent fasting.”

Lockdown created the “perfect storm” for eating disorders, according to the eating disorder charity, Beat. It reported that the number of people contacting its helpline between May and July last year increased by 97%. The fear, then, is that the pressure to diet now that society is going back to “normal” may compound those issues.

“During lockdown, people did put on weight because they couldn’t work out as usual and it was a stressful time but now, the pressure is huge to lose it all. Throw into the mix the fact that it’s June, we can travel again and people will try the quickest diet ever. We need to send a message not to do that,” Paola says.

The thing weight-loss companies never tell you is that dieting is a scam. You restrict what you eat to lose weight and as soon as you reach that arbitrary goal, you put it all back on. This process of quickly losing weight, regaining it and dieting again is known as “yo-yo dieting” because of the way it causes your weight to go up and down like a yo-yo.

Aside from the fact that there’s more to life than what we weigh (which isn’t necessarily a sign of health or fitness), yo-yo dieting can have a seriously negative impact on physical and mental wellbeing. Here are just some of the ways that getting stuck in a cycle of on-off restriction can affect health:

Yo-yo dieting: how pressure to achieve a post-lockdown “summer body” is damaging women's health