What is common between authoritarianism and dieting?

Authoritarianism — The enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom.

Dieting — A special course of food to which a person restricts themselves to lose weight.

Yesterday while promenading my husband and I had a discussion of the cyclicality of authoritarianism and I’ve got an insight how close the phenomena of authoritarianism and dieting are. So, what do I imagine they have in common?

1. Efficiency in short-term period

Dictators have the leadership to implement any law or to make any decision without listening to the other opinions and taking into account the interest or comfort of other members. It’s way faster and the result does not keep you waiting.

Making a decision to diet you become kind of a dictator, who does not listen to the natural body’s carvings. It actually works and impressive stories of 10 kg weight lost in a week are the proof.

2. Extractive methods

How does an authoritarian system provide such impressive efficiency in a short-term period? By using extractive methods instead of inclusive.

Acemoglu and Robinson in a book Why Nations Fail theorize that political institutions can be divided into two kinds — extractive and inclusive.

In extractive institutions a small group of individuals do their best to exploit the rest of the population.

In inclusive institutions many people are included in the process of governing hence the exploitation process is either attenuated or absent.

We can see how the extractive projects work in authoritarian regimes nowadays (f.e. amazing economic growth but devastated ecology and exhausting working conditions in China) and in the past (f.e. USSR space programme which happened to be pretty successful, but cost an enormous amount of money and people lives).

Is dieting extractive? Yes, it is. How many resources of our body and mind we spend to bring this “-5 kg project” to life? How much do we think about calories, how much do we dream about a piece of chocolate or workmate’s donut while eating bowls of kale? How many worries does we process while dieting? I’m not saying that it’s 100% the rule, but I saw the many situations when a dieting person became an anxious “full-time food thinker”, I was in the place myself. So, it’s not rare when dieting extracts from the person all the mental and physical powers. You get the desired effect, but at what costs?

3. Degradation of the decision-making system

Authoritarian nation control system keeps the last word in decision making that removes responsibility from every single member who is not engaged in governing. In long prospective it’s able to kill even the smallest and natural person’s initiative to clean up the trash in his/her own yard (I lived in Russia and I’m witness to the phenomenon).

So it becomes naïve to speak about growing new personalities for making complex economic, political decisions, personalities who could replace the ruling elite when they naturally grow old or become disable to rule.

Dieting. We have the natural system where hormones such as ghrelin and leptin, which keep the balance and notify you with feelings of hunger or satiety when you need to eat or stop eating. Once you start to create some artificial system and eat a special amount of food in a special time, it affects the system. The hunger and satiety mechanisms are violated by the long diet intervention, so the natural “decision making system” can not run efficiently, it adapts to decisions from the top. And the only question is how wise and scientific based they are.

4. Instability

The previous two points are part of the reasons why the dieting and authoritarianism are unstable and tend to fail in the end. Extractive methods put too destructive cost for the success and some part of the mechanism degrades or becomes unusable. Since everything strives for self-preservation, sooner or later the unfortunate part of the extractive mechanism fights back or raises the alarm. And it’s gonna be a “big hunger” instead of daily “small hungers” (as in an inclusive approach), by all means.

For dieters instability represented by eating disorders, which can neutralize all the positive effects of the diet (by some estimates, 80% of people who successfully lose at least 10% of their body weight will gradually regain it to end up as large or even larger than they were before they went on a diet).

5. Сyclicality

Both authoritarianism and dieting are started with an extractive approach, have great and fast results and then degrade slowly to the maximum point of instability and fail. What kind of thoughts do you have in the moment of failure if everything was so shiny and bright in the beginning? Probably: “I’ve put not enough effort, let’s do it again!”

That’s how dieters start a new diet from Monday, and the heir of the USSR — Russia begins to strengthen authoritarianism despite the previous failures of the Russian Empire and the USSR.

The authoritarianism cyclicality — is the reason why we start the discussion in the first place. A friend of mine from Russia said to me several days ago: “Oh, I watched a film about the time period before the revolution of 1917 and read some articles about Perestroika. There are so many similarities to nowadays time, the history is so cyclical!”. “History is cyclical’’ is a statement I’ve heard hundreds of times from random people or at school, and most of the people translated it in a conspiracy theory way. So I said: “Come on, history of France or Germany or Lithuania is not cyclical, thank god, so cyclicality is not characteristic of history itself”. But then I realised that she was right, she (and a teacher of history in Russia) was right, because Russia has been an authoritarian country for centuries, and now we can clearly see the cycles of the authoritarian regime. It fails, it rebuilds itself with the same attributes, it fails again.

Seeing myself failing the other week’s calorie plan (with a calorie counter constantly in my hand), and seeing how my body can be tired of “healthy” food restrictions is almost the same as seeing how ineffective and helpless become all the systems in authoritarian Russia. I genuinely believe that dieting and authoritarianism should die in the twenty-first century.

P.S. I’m not against the idea of losing weight or changing body composition, moreover a lot of people need it for medical reasons. But after my dieting experience, I believe that understanding of nutritions and changing the way of dining has to be slow and not separable from lifestyle changes. It has to be an all inclusive approach where the goals of your life stay in the first place and knowledge of nutrition principles are only tools to serve your needs, not vice versa. It works slower but it really builds a sustainable system, not a cyclically failing dieting system.

Sources of inspiration:

1. The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson;
2. Ep. 69: Intuitive, Realistic, and Sustainable Eating (Interview with Paige Smathers, RDN, CD), podcast.