Does dieting cause depression?
Q.I have wondered something for a long time but never got around to asking. Do you think chronic dieting, maybe "yo yo" dieting can cause or contribute to depression? The reason Ive wondered this is they say that when you go on a diet, your serotonin "setpoint" is changed. In short, dieting messes with serotonin and not in a good way either. The more extreme (low calorie) diet, the more the serotonin "setpoint" is changed. Anybody out there have any thoughts on this? Anybody truly knowledgable on the relationship between dieting and depression? Im not talking about anorexia and bulimia type crazy eating disorders either. I am just talking about the way so many people go on low calorie diets at least once a year. Ive done this myself. Any takers?
A.I think poor dieting or eating habits could cause vitamin and minerals shortages in a person's body that could make depression worse. I have no reason to believe that dieting per se causes depression. However, people who diet, especially again and again, are usually obese (if elizabeth is reading: notice that I said "obese people," not "people with obesity" . Being obese results in having many traumatic experiences which, over the course of the years, can add up to depression. Astounding as it may seem, one needs no particular gene or "chemical imbalance" to experience depression. A sufficiently long stream of unhappy experience will cause it in almost anyone. I am talking about clinical depression here. You have to have a "chemical imbalance" to experience clinical depression. No healthy person gets clinical depression without having a chemical imbalance. A stream of unhappy experiences can actually cause a "chemical imbalance" to develop which then leads to depression. Have YOU ever had clinical depression Eaton? There is some evidence I that repeated, low calorie dieting changes the serotonin "setpoint" in people, this not only makes people fatter, it can also play havoc with mood. The term "clinical depression" as opposed to just "depression" has nothing to do with the cause, simply that it's been clinically diagnosed. It's a common misnomer that it refers to brain chemistry; it does not. Of course I'm posting from the UK, so elsewhere YMMV. At this time, it appears to be understood that people are quite capable of being depressed without the aid of neuronal chemical imbalance; the fact that this appears to be the case in many depressed people doesn't necessarily mean that it occurs in *all* depressed people, or at least not in a way that anybody comprehensively understands at this time. Please consider that last phrase before you decide to publically slag someone off for, in your opinion, being wrong with regard to this subject. Every subjective state will have a neural correlate; in fact, fallacious reverse reasoning from this fact is what gives biological reductionists a lot of their punch. But who knows how this will manifest in each person? And, better yet, what, specifically, is an "imbalance?" No vague terms, I'd like someone to tell me exactly, precisely, and literally, what a "chemical imbalance" is. People who suppose that "clinical depression" is the name of a "thing" which someone could "have" sometimes don't like the idea, but "clinical depression" just means that the clinician agrees with the patient that the patient is depressed. It does not mean that the doctor has performed some kind of exotic neurochemical assay on the patient and discovered the existence of an incredibly delicate "imbalance" in the patient's neurochemistry.
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