It’s Not Your Fault - It’s Diet Culture
In this episode, I’m going to get fired up talking about a topic that is extremely important to me - how to break free and ditch diet culture. Dieting and the culture that surrounds it has stolen years of my life and precious energy, causing me to feel deep shame about my body starting at a young age, and hold myself back from simply living life and loving myself as I am. I’m not going to stand around any longer and watch other women and men fall victim to the bullshit lies the media and diet industry has sold us all these years so that together we can change the legacy we leave for the next generation. Can you tell I’m passionate about this? Let’s dive in!
In this episode, we’ll chat about:
Shocking truths about the diet industry and why most diets fail
Ways to approach health and wellness beyond weight loss
Tips for beginning to breaking free from diet culture
When you think about your body, what comes up for you?
The words I used to say to myself looking at my reflection in the mirror were horrible, negative, hateful things I would never dare say to a friend or someone I loved.
They sounded like, “You’re so gross. You’re a fat ugly pig. Nobody could love you like this. How did you let yourself get like this?”
I thought my body was a problem - flawed, ugly, and broken.
How old were you when you first felt shame or embarrassment about your body?
Looking back, I think I was around four or five years old. It was around the time I started going to school that I became hyper-aware of my size. I knew I was bigger than the other kids, I couldn’t wear the same size clothes as my friends, and I didn’t look anything like the barbies I was playing with or the girls I saw on TV.
Not only that, but all the women in my life were constantly talking about their own bodies and going on diets to “fix the problem,” something I then internalized about my own body. If they felt shame about their bumps, folds, and flab then surely I should feel ashamed of mine too.
When I talk about it now, my mother feels terrible, thinking that my body image issues were her fault. But it’s not. My parents have always done their best to love and support me the best way they knew how, but they themselves were conditioned by the culture they were raised in too - namely, diet culture.
IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT - IT’S DIET CULTURE
The diet industry is worth $72 billion dollars in the US alone and it has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, from the media we consume, to the clothes we wear, to the foods we buy, and the language that we use.
Three out of four women admit to having unhealthy thoughts and behaviors related to food or their bodies. The diet industry preys on and perpetuates these body insecurities by convincing us that our bodies are problems to be solved and it has created loyal, returning customers while continuing to sell something that doesn’t work.
We are conditioned to believe that we are not enough and around every corner, we are being sold a product claiming to be the solution. Diet culture is EVERYWHERE - words and images illuminated on TV screens and cellphones, plastered on billboards and magazines, and even labels covering the packages of food throughout the store. “Burn fat fast, lose 20 pounds in 3 days, shed the weight, melt away the cellulite, drop the pounds, skinny this, skinny that...” and the list goes on.
And what’s worse? These “solutions” don’t solve anything. 95% of diets fail and most people regain their lost weight within 1-5 years. In fact, most of the time they just make the problem worse, with 1 in 4 occasional dieters developing full-blown eating disorders.
WHY MOST DIETS FAIL
I’m just going to say it, diets are bullshit. If they actually worked, we wouldn’t find ourselves yo-yo-ing from one diet to the next. Yet, time and time again we find ourselves coming back to them thinking maybe we just haven’t found the right one yet.
So friend, let me tell you WHY diets keep failing you.
Remember back to the THINK-FEEL-DO Cycle we talked about in Episode 3 of the podcast? To sum it up, our circumstances can’t affect us until we have a THOUGHT about them. Those thoughts determine how we FEEL. How we feel then influences the actions we DO or don’t take to create our results.
Traditional diets tell us that if our circumstance is being overweight, all we need to DO is eat these things or do these things and the result will be weight loss. It it was that easy, we wouldn’t have tried and failed 1,000 times. So what’s missing?
The diet industry is selling you an action - DO this. I think most of us know, at least at some basic level, what to DO to take care of our bodies. What traditional diets are missing is the THINKING and FEELING piece. What we really need is a new mindset.
Traditional dieting never asked us, how do you THINK about your body? How do those thoughts make you FEEL? When you feel that way, what do you DO?
WHAT DIET CULTURE TAUGHT ME
I want to share three things that dieting taught me to think a feel.
The first thing dieting taught me to feel was deep SHAME.
It taught me to view my body as a problem to be solved and around every corner there was a solution. It told me that health and beauty looked a certain way and anything less than that made me unworthy. So, I spent nearly every waking moment of my day desperately wanting or actively trying to change myself to fit the mold, an impossible standard to achieve.
The second thing dieting taught me to feel was DISTRUST.
Just take a moment to think about all the silly rules you’ve learned over the years about dieting and healthy eating.
Eat this, not that.
Bananas are superfoods one day, and the next day they are full of sugar and poisonous.
Eat three meals a day, wait actually eat six.
Wait, actually you should be fasting for 16 hours.
But don’t miss breakfast because it’s the most important meal of the day.
Stay away from carbs, and fats, and sugars and the list goes on.
We are constantly fed mixed messages about what are “good” foods and “bad” foods and the rules of healthy eating are always changing. The more information we consume, the more confused and frustrated we become, forgetting all the while how to simply tune into our bodies and trust our own hunger and intuition, something that came so much easier to us before diet culture sank its claws into our brains.
The second thing dieting taught me was RESTRICTION.
I was taught that in order to have the health and body that I wanted, I needed to restrict and sacrifice things I enjoyed. Restriction, however, is counterproductive, often only creating more disordered eating and unhealthy relationships with food.
Think about it… when we are hungry and restrict food, our bodies don’t know that it’s our choice to restrict in the name of “health.” All it knows is that food is not available to honor our hunger, so in turn, food must be scarce, as though we are in a famine.
So, when do finally allow ourselves to eat those foods, we overindulge. It’s our body’s way of preparing for the next famine, which if we’ve been yo-yo dieting all our lives, is probably right around the corner after the shame sets in for having “fallen off the wagon.”
It becomes a harmful and vicious cycle. Restrict, binge, feel shame, restrict, binge, feel shame, repeat.
HOW TO BREAK FREE FROM DIET CULTURE
Awareness of our thoughts and beliefs about our bodies and recognizing that many are a product of the diet culture we were raised in is the first step. Remember, it’s not your fault.
So where do we go from here? How do we finally break free?
It has to start by changing the conversation, internally and externally. Begin making peace with your body by rooting yourself in gratitude, not judgment.
Answer this: Without losing a single pound or changing anything about my body, what do I appreciate about it right now as it is?
Write it down on a sticky note and slap it on your mirror for a daily reminder as you begin to change the narrative about your body.
Once we are rooted in gratitude, we can start showing up to care for ourselves well from a place of love, rather than approaching health from a place of punishment. When we are in partnership with our bodies instead of at war with them, we can create a healthy lifestyle we love and don’t want to escape from by finding ways to enjoy the process.
Eat foods you love that also makes your body feel good. Find forms of movement that feel joyful, not punishing. Celebrate your wins, big and small to create an environment of encouragement, not shame.
Speaking of shame… give yourself permission to break up with the scale if you have to.
A scale is simply a neutral tool that collects data, that’s it. It can’t affect us until we have a THOUGHT about it. That being said, many of us have a lot of emotions surrounding it. If getting on the scale negatively affects your emotional well-being, it’s okay to find other ways to measure progress in your health.
NON-SCALE MEASURES OF HEALTH
Diet culture has taught us to put our worth into our bodies and our mass. It’s convinced us that to be loved, to be happy, and to be worthy means to be thin, or curvy in all the right ways.
But the truth is that what we want most - love, connection, belonging, confidence, freedom, joy - are available to us right now in the body that we’re in and all forms we’ll ever be. It’s time to take back our health and focus on the things that matter.
Let’s start celebrating other things besides just weight loss and appearance. Here are some ideas for measures of health that aren’t dependent on the scale.
Building Strength
Consistency of Healthy Habits
Quality of Sleep
Proper Hydration
Increased Self-Confidence
Improved mood and mental health
Stronger relationships
Improved blood work and labs
A good test of whether your lifestyle changes are for your health or if they are rooted in diet culture, ask yourself this, “If I knew that making these choices would increase my health but wouldn’t help me lose weight, would I continue doing them?”
If the answer is no, it’s time to think and do something different.
Remember, we’re not going to do this perfectly. We’ll still find our old self-shaming, diet culture-ridden thoughts pop up in our heads. We’ll still have days when we don’t honor our bodies and minds the way we deserve. Make sure to give yourself grace for your humanness.
IMAGINE A NEW LEGACY
It breaks my heart to think that my young nieces are around the same age as I was when I first felt deep shame about my body. I know that I inherited my body beliefs from the culture I was raised in and the messages I heard around me, and I for dang sure don’t want to leave the same legacy of shame that was passed down to me to the next generation.
I imagine a new legacy.
A legacy of body acceptance - where we learned to accept our bodies through all their changes, cared for them well from a place of love, and embraced life without self-shame holding us back.
A legacy of diverse beauty - where beauty was seen and celebrated in ourselves and others of all shapes, sizes, colors, and abilities, where and we normalized normal bodies, not just the “ideal” we currently see portrayed in media.
A legacy that celebrated more than just bodies - where we knew that, while our bodies deserve to be loved and accepted, we as humans are so much more than just physical beings and our worth transcends these bodies that are merely the homes to our souls.
I’ll admit, I’m still breaking free from diet culture myself, and it may be something I’m always working to untether myself from. But I believe deep in my heart that the way we change the legacy for the next generation is to heal ourselves first.
So, I’m committed to loving and respecting my body through all its changes. I may not like my body all the time, I may still have negative thoughts pop up from time to time, but I’m rewriting the story for myself instead of reading diet culture’s scripts and friend, I invite you to do the same.
Let’s break free together.
Interested in joining a community of women breaking free of self-shame and diet culture to create a healthy life they love from the inside out? Join the waitlist to be the first to know when the doors open for Climb and let’s change the legacy together.
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