Here’s one that will make you rejoice and groan at the same time: Dieting is worse for you than being overweight. That’s right, the restrictive behavior of significantly reducing calories and eliminating entire categories of foods puts such a toll on a body, it’s better to simply be obese. But why? It’s all due to weight-cycling, the well-established phenomenon that large shifts in eating habits lead to weight loss followed by even more weight gain. Studies show that along with excess pounds, a complex mess of changes to gut flora, metabolism, fats, and, yes, mental health all work together to make you fatter, unhealthier, and more miserable. So why should you quit your well-intentioned but altogether unhealthy diet plan? And what can you replace it with? Let’s get into it.

Dieting Messes with Your Metabolism

Here’s what happens when you follow a diet — any diet — that is restrictive compared to your everyday eating habits: Your basal metabolic rate, or the minimal amount of energy your body needs to perform simple functions at rest, drops. Put another way, when you drastically cut the number of calories you eat in a day, your body flips out and says, OK, I’m going to drastically cut the number of calories I burn in a day, too. It’s not doing this to spite you. Rather, it sees the massive drop in incoming energy and fears the worst: There’s a famine. Your body then launches starvation survival mode and refuses to burn any more calories than absolutely necessary, leaving you wondering why, on three slices of rye toast a day, you’re still not losing weight. (The good news: You usually can reset your metabolism when you start eating like an adult again.)

Dieting Is a Nightmare for Your Gut Health

If you’ve ever had the experience of working hard to shed a few pounds, only to find yourself gaining back those pounds plus a few more the next time the holidays roll around, you’re not alone. One of the insidious truths of weight cycling is that most people don’t just lose X and gain X back—they gain X +Y back, too. A study in the journal Nature explains why: Every time you add or subtract pounds, a bunch of body-related variables change including blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, and the bacteria in your gut, known as your microbiome. When you gain weight, you develop more of a certain type of gut bacteria that supports the weight gain. But here’s where it gets tricky: When you lose weight, changes in your microbiome are slow to follow suit. So if you begin to regain the weight you lost before your gut bacteria catch up to where you’re at in your yo-yo cycle, the weight-gain-promoting bacteria still in your gut accelerates the process of packing on pounds, causing you to put on even more than before.

Dieting Develops the Wrong Kind of Fat

Not all fat is created equal. Sure, fat of any kind will give you hell when you try to squeeze into the dress pants you bought for your cousin’s wedding. But under the surface, there’s subcutaneous fat and visceral fat. It’s the latter, also referred to as deep belly fat, that begins to pile up in people who weight cycle — and that’s a problem because visceral fat tissue is metabolically active, meaning it plays a role in the production of hormones that contribute to heart disease, diabetes, and inflammation in your body. As your weight swings higher and lower, again and again, the amount of visceral fat continues to climb, putting you at risk for equal or greater health problems than you would face if you never lost the weight to begin with.

Dieting Is Horrible for Mental Health

Here you are trying to do the right thing for your health, and all you’re managing is to make yourself feel worse. Yo-yo dieting has been linked with depression and low self-esteem as well as a decrease in the chemical production of serotonin, the neurotransmitter in your body responsible for the regulation of stuff like mood, sleep, and, the place the slippery slope begins, appetite. Depression causes its own negative feedback loop, as the worse you feel, the more food becomes a method for self-soothing, leading to weight gain, followed by more dieting, and greater depression. There’s also the less measurable but no less painful element of feeling like a failure: Regaining the weight you’ve worked so hard to lose makes you feel helpless and like you have no control.