What the Dutch Famine Teaches Us About Dieting
When we talk about food and nutrition, we often talk about it like it’s a simple math equation. Eat less, move more, try harder, be more disciplined.
But human bodies are not calculators. They are living, adapting systems designed to keep us alive.
One of the most powerful examples of this comes from research on the Dutch Hunger Winter, a period of famine in the Netherlands during World War II. While dieting isn’t the same as famine, this research gives us an important window into how deeply the body can respond to restriction, scarcity, and inadequate nourishment.
And for anyone who has ever felt like their body is “fighting back” after dieting, the truth is: it probably is.
What Was the Dutch Hunger Winter?
The Dutch Hunger Winter took place in the western Netherlands during the winter of 1944 to 1945, near the end of World War II. Due to a combination of Nazi occupation, food blockades, transportation disruptions, and harsh winter conditions, many people experienced severe food shortages.
Researchers later studied people who were exposed to famine during pregnancy and early life. Because the famine happened during a specific, documented period, it created what researchers sometimes call a “natural experiment.” This allowed scientists to compare people who were exposed to famine at different stages of development with those who were not exposed.
The findings were striking. People exposed to famine in utero were more likely to experience certain health differences later in life, including changes related to metabolism, cardiovascular health, body size, and mental health. Researchers also found evidence of epigenetic differences, meaning changes in how certain genes were expressed, decades after the famine exposure.
In simpler terms, the body remembered the environment of famine.
What Is Epigenetics?
Epigenetics refers to changes in how genes are turned “on” or “off” without changing the DNA itself.
A helpful way to think about this is to imagine your DNA as a recipe book. Epigenetics doesn’t rewrite the recipes, but it can influence which recipes are used more often, which are silenced, and how the body responds to its environment. Nutrition, stress, illness, trauma, sleep, movement, and many other environmental factors can influence these systems.
Research on the Dutch famine suggests that when the body experiences significant scarcity during critical windows of development, it may adapt in ways meant to ensure survival. These adaptations can have long-term effects.
What we take from this is that the body isn’t passive. It’s constantly listening, responding, and adjusting.
What Does This Have to Do With Dieting?
To be very clear, dieting is not the same as living through famine, but research on the Dutch famine helps us understand a broader truth: the body responds to inadequate nourishment as a threat.
When the body perceives restriction, it doesn’t think, “Great, we are successfully doing a wellness plan.” It thinks, “Food is not reliably available. We need to adapt.”
That adaptation may include:
Increased hunger
More intense cravings
Preoccupation with food
Feeling more out of control around eating
Lower energy
Changes in digestion
Changes in mood
Feeling colder
Increased fatigue
Reduced ability to concentrate
A stronger drive to seek food
Weight regain after intentional weight loss
These responses are not moral failures, but biological protection. Your body is trying to keep you alive.
The Body Is Built to Defend Against Starvation
One of the most frustrating parts of dieting is that it often seems to “work” at first.
Someone cuts back on food, follows rules, removes certain foods, or starts tracking everything they eat. They may lose weight initially. They may feel praised, motivated, or in control. But over time, the body often starts to push back.
Then it’s framed as a lack of willpower, but that’s not the case at all. Our body has powerful systems designed to defend against starvation. When energy intake drops, the body may respond by increasing hunger signals, lowering energy expenditure, and making food feel more urgent or rewarding.
Your body isn’t betraying you at all. It’s, in fact, working very hard to protect you. These are survival mechanisms, not weakness.
“But I’m Not Starving Myself”
Many people hear this and think, “But I’m not starving. I’m just trying to eat healthier.”
And sometimes, yes, people are trying to make supportive changes. Not every nutrition change is inherently harmful. Adding more consistent meals, increasing fiber, supporting blood sugar, nourishing around movement, or managing a medical condition can all be part of compassionate nutrition care. The difference lies in whether the body is supported or controlled.
Dieting often asks the body to ignore its needs in pursuit of weight loss. It may involve overriding hunger, cutting out foods without medical necessity, shrinking portions below what feels satisfying, delaying meals, compensating for eating, or measuring success by the scale.
Even when dieting is packaged as “clean eating,” “discipline,” “lifestyle change,” “getting back on track,” or “just being healthy,” the body may still experience it as restriction.
Your body doesn’t care what the diet is called. It just responds to what is happening in the environment.
Why Dieting Can Make Food Feel More Intense
Many people blame themselves for feeling more obsessed with food when they diet. They wonder why they are constantly thinking about food, why cravings feel louder, why they feel calm around food for a while, and then suddenly feel like they “lose control.” But when we look through this lens, that makes complete sense.
When the body senses scarcity, food becomes more important. This is adaptive. If food is not consistently available, the brain is supposed to prioritize getting enough.
This can show up as:
Thinking about your next meal constantly
Feeling anxious when food plans change
Feeling pulled toward foods you have been avoiding
Feeling guilty after eating
Eating past fullness after a period of restriction
Feeling like you cannot keep certain foods in the house
Feeling “addicted” to foods that were previously limited
Often, the problem isn't that you can’t be trusted around food. The problem is that your body can’t trust that food will remain available.
The Intergenerational Piece
One of the most discussed parts of the Dutch famine research is the possibility that undernutrition may affect not only the person directly exposed, but potentially future generations as well.
This doesn’t mean that one diet will permanently “damage” you or your family. But it does suggest that nutrition, stress, and scarcity can have ripple effects. Bodies are shaped by environments. Health is not just about individual choices. It’s also about access, safety, oppression, poverty, trauma, food availability, medical care, and social support.
When we reduce health to “just lose weight,” we ignore the complexity of human biology and lived experience. We also ignore the ways that restriction itself can create stress on the body.
Dieting Is a Scarcity State
Diet culture teaches us to distrust the body. It tells us hunger is suspicious, cravings are dangerous, fullness is failure, and that weight gain is always bad. But from a biological perspective, dieting often creates a scarcity state.
And in scarcity, the body adapts. It holds on more tightly. It may increase urgency around food. It may become more protective. This isn’t because your body is broken, but because your body is wise.
What If We Supported the Body Instead?
Instead of asking, “How do I make my body smaller?” we can ask:
What would help my body feel safer?
Am I eating consistently enough?
Am I getting enough energy throughout the day?
Do I allow foods I enjoy?
Am I ignoring hunger until it feels urgent?
Am I using food rules that make eating more stressful?
Do I feel guilty for needing food?
Am I caring for my body, or trying to control it?
What would nourishment look like if weight loss were not the goal?
For many people, healing from dieting starts with rebuilding trust.
That might mean eating more regularly, allowing previously forbidden foods, and learning to notice hunger and fullness without judgment. It might also mean grieving the years spent fighting your body.
A Weight-Inclusive Approach to Nutrition
At CV Wellbeing, our dietitians use a non-diet, weight-inclusive approach that honors the complexity of health. That means we can talk about nutrition, labs, digestion, energy, hormones, sports performance, eating disorder recovery, diabetes, PCOS, or heart health without making weight loss the center of care.
The Dutch famine research reminds us that bodies are deeply responsive to scarcity. Dieting may be normalized in our culture, but that doesn’t mean it’s neutral. For many people, dieting creates a cycle of restriction, deprivation, biological pushback, shame, and renewed attempts to control the body.
You’re not failing because dieting hasn’t worked for you in the long term. Your body may actually be doing exactly what it was designed to do, and you deserve care that helps you feel more supported in your body, not more at war with it.
Request an appointment to work with a CV Wellbeing dietitian.