Do Diets Cause Eating Disorders?

Despite the common claims, the answer is probably not.

Pictured: A fork with a tape measure wrapped around it. Metaphorical or just weird? Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

There are a million people recommending diets online. You can find people telling you to eat almost any food grouping imaginable with a simple search, from the raw food vegans to the butter munching carnivores. If you want to lose weight, there’s a wild world of conflicting recommendations out there to confuse and delight you.

But when people talk about diets online, there’s also a common claim that we shouldn’t be doing them. Not because diets are generally ineffective — although that is quite well-demonstrated, with the majority of people gaining back the weight they lose — but because diets can do something much scarier. They can cause eating disorders.

But can they? It’s always struck me as something of an odd claim. Certainly, there’s evidence that dieting and eating disorders — or more specifically disordered eating behaviours — are correlated. In some ways, we define eating disorders as a diet that’s gone too far. The difference between anorexia and healthy eating is to an extent down to how heavy you are at the time.

Equally, it’s not clear that these are causal effects. Yes, lots of people with eating disorders go on diets before they’re diagnosed, but most people who go on diets never develop eating disorders…