My Detox from Diet Culture
TW: This content contains descriptions of disordered eating and diet culture.
For as long as I can remember, I believed — and never questioned — that being thin was good, and being fat was bad. For all of my adult life, I have benefited from thin privilege and the way that society rewards bodies like mine. And yet: not a day of my adult life has gone by that I haven’t looked at my body and let it inform how much I liked myself. As the body positive movement happened around me, I embraced — but I couldn’t apply it to myself. I’ll like myself, I always promised, when I’m thinner.
When I finally decided I wanted to be able to love myself even if I couldn’t lose weight, I turned to my therapist. For the past year, I’d been tracking every calorie I ate in a series of increasingly deranged notes on my phone. I spent 20 minutes calculating before the start of every meal. I was a nightmare to cook with, measuring and weighing every component. And I’d shared it all cheerfully — proudly — with my therapist.
My therapist hadn’t seemed to approve of these methods (or anyway, she’d get suspiciously quiet when they came up). I’d thought this was awfully short-sighted of her. So many fitness influencers on Instagram and podcast hosts I listened to tracked their food! Even more specific macro-tracking is encouraged in online “health and fitness” communities. This was just how you held yourself accountable, I’d thought. Surely I could love myself and still want to lose weight.
But then, this winter, I got hungrier. I thought about food all day, and thought about weight loss all night. My pants got tighter, so I cut out carbs. I weighed myself, and then cried for hours. I didn’t have a magical moment of realization. I just went through the same cycle of shit for the hundred thousandth time, and this time, my body gave up. Not eating when I was hungry felt impossible, and I was always hungry. So I gave up too. I couldn’t lose weight. But I wanted to love myself anyway.
I told my therapist I was done. I was ready to try to eat what my body wanted and needed, and to care more about how eating made me feel than what it made me look like. I knew it wouldn’t be an easy road — but once I’d come to this decision, I honestly thought the hard part was behind me. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Ever since I’ve sworn off diet culture, it’s everywhere I look. Every TV show I watch, every grocery store I walk into, every (well, most) women I talk to mention something — which foods are bad, how much is too much, how they’ll have to “work this off” later. For me, the environment in which this is most pervasive is my office, which is mostly comprised of women. My coworkers are actively outlining their new diet plans, what they can and can’t eat, and how much weight they’re hoping to lose. They’re walking past desserts and saying “keep me away from that!” or turning down gifts of food, explaining, “I don’t want that in my office.” While I’d never given these kinds of comments a second thought when I, too, was trying to lose weight, the constant refrain of ”I shouldn’t” that surrounded food was suddenly impossible for me to ignore.
Women everywhere are expected to be making a good faith effort to be as thin as possible at all times. So when I stopped engaging my own “weight loss journey,” I lost a point of connection with the people around me. Even conversations with my friends and family involve the same assumptions: if there’s a lower-calorie alternative, we want it. If we’re having a big meal, we need to “work it off.” Actively refusing to engage in any aspect of diet culture day-to-day isn’t easy, especially when I’ve trained people to expect it from me.
I’m not yet sure what my life will look like as someone who’s not trying to lose weight, someone who loves herself just as much even if she’s outgrown her smaller clothes. For now, I’ve stopped counting, and tried to get back in touch with what hunger feels like, and how different foods make me feel. I’m not over my body image issues, not by a mile. But I have to remember that even at my thinnest, when I felt I had the most approval from people around me, I still didn’t feel good enough for myself.
I don’t want to keep chasing the approval of others. I want to find out how to earn my own approval, and keep it. Sometimes, that means putting in headphones, changing the channel, and working hard to tune out the noise. I knew I’d have to convince myself someday that diet culture wasn’t the answer; I just never realized how hard diet culture would fight to win me back.
For more tips/tales on shedding diet culture:
Read: The Diet Industrial Complex Got Me, and It Will Never Let Me Go (New York Times)
Listen: “Weight And Health Are Not the Same Thing” (Diet Starts Tomorrow)
Watch: Shrill (Hulu)
Follow: Your Fat Friend (Instagram)
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Louisa Ballhaus is a staff entertainment writer for SheKnows, and previously wrote for Bustle, Betches, and Merry Jane. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @louisabhaus.
Caroline Reedy is a Brooklyn based digital artist, who has been mixing comedy with pastel colors since 2016. Her work is mainly inspired by pop art portraiture, mental health advocacy, and internet culture. She has had her work featured on Overheard New York/LA, Link NYC, and Hello Tittie. Check out her work on her instagram@doot_doodles.
