How Diet Culture Sneaks Into Our Psyches
When I decided in 2014 that I was going to quit dieting, I felt like I was on the precipice of an exciting, yet terrifying adventure.
While I was certainly onto something big, important, and very different from what I knew, when I look back, I think I was actually approaching the anti-diet lifestyle with a diet mentality to a large extent.
When we begin a new diet, we are flooded with feelings of hope, excitement, and determination. Anything seems possible, and more than that, I think that we are romanced by the idea that we may no longer have to actually deal with ourselves. “This time will be different,” we think, “I’m really going to do it.” It’s as if we are once again committing to being someone different. And we go into the experience with the hope that we’ll finally become someone we can be proud of. We’ll stop being a disappointment to ourselves and, perhaps, many others in our lives as well. Many of us believe on some level that life will be relatively easy and our suffering will greatly diminish once we’ve finally cracked the code on how to be thin forever.
While I knew that making this drastic anti-diet shift to my lifestyle wouldn’t be easy and that there would be a lengthy process involved, I think I believed that within a few years, I’d get to a point where things would be stable and pretty easy and that it would just continue that way for the rest of my life. I was giving up the diet struggle, and I was sure that without it, I’d have significantly less struggle in my life in general.
Living an anti-diet, intuitive, body positive lifestyle can come with lots of new and amazing benefits, like the release of tons of shame, increased self-empowerment, confidence, clarity, pleasure, and joy, finding new hobbies and passions, improved relationships and sex, and more. But what I’ve found after being on this journey myself for almost eight years (and in working with and supporting others) is that the struggle does not go away. Of course, when there’s lots more of the good stuff in your life, perhaps the struggle doesn’t occupy center stage as much, but guess what! We are human. And being human is messy and hard, no matter what.
I think that the biggest lie diet culture sells us is that our suffering is our fault and that if we can just be good enough, we can transcend it. If that’s true, I think it’s proooobably more likely that meditating all day and renouncing your worldly possessions will get you there, over dieting or thinness. But maybe that’s just me.
If you’re interested in monthly community support to help you stick with your anti-diet, weight-neutral wellness journey, join us on the second Sunday of the month for Move and Mingle: a monthly, virtual meet-up for a weight-neutral wellness community. (May’s meeting will be on the third Sunday, May 15th. Register here!
