You may be aware of all the negative impacts of dieting and staying away from programs like Weight Watchers or Beach Body which is great! But today is a good day to dig deeper and ask yourself, even if I’m not on a ‘diet’ how much are my food choices influenced by diet culture?
In other words, how much does the focus and value our culture has on weight, shape, and size over health and well-being impact your day to day life ~ especially your food choices? Considering how ingrained diet culture is, it would be almost impossible not to be impacted to some extent. This makes awareness even more important, so let’s take this Day of No Diets as an opportunity to consider how we are navigating not just diets, but diet culture.
What are the signs of diet culture? Here are some possible indicators you may be under the influence:
-You have lots of rules around food.
-If you break/don’t follow a rule you feel like you’ve failed.
-You think of food in terms of good/bad or clean(which is called moralizing food).
-When you eat food in your ‘bad’ category you feel like you’ve been bad and you berate yourself.
-You sometimes exercise as punishment for eating certain foods.
-Thinking/worrying about food takes up a high percentage of your mind space and emotional energy.
-Weight loss is a motivating factor in your food and wellness choices.
Don’t be hard on yourself if you see yourself reflected in the above statements. Resisting diet culture can be hard because it is everywhere! Calorie counts on menus, diet talk in the lunch room, talk of ‘cleanses’ and ‘clean eating’ is everywhere, not to mention advertising and social media promoting the thin ideal.
The irony is diet culture has been shown to be one of the biggest contributors to unhealthy behaviours. I’m not just talking about restrictive diets and eating disorders, but diet culture also contributes to a state of mind that can lead to problematic emotional eating, binge cycling, etc. You see, it is the ‘all or nothing’ mentality of diet culture that gets us in trouble. If I haven’t been ‘good’, i.e. perfect in my food choices, then I’ve been bad. With no shades of gray in between. Which is a really unhelpful state of mind to help us make healthy choices in our lives.
Have you heard of the “last supper eating” phenomenon? This is when our dissatisfaction with how we look and/or general unhappiness in our day to day life is prompting us to ‘take control’ to find a new diet or program that will help us to finally get it together. As we start to have these thoughts, to make these plans, we start to realize that soon the foods (and even whole food groups) that we love are about to be axed so we panic and decide to have a last hurrah binge. Now, an occasional binge is not a big deal and our body can adjust and cope, but for some people, the binge and diet cycle is one that is regularly repeated leading to psychological distress and often a fluctuating body weight that is much more harmful to our health than living in a body that is larger.
Resisting diet culture helps us to step away from all of this. It is not an easy road to take, but one that is well worth it. We can reclaim the wisdom of our bodies to guide us in our food choices. And luckily there are many resources out there to help us. If you would like to resist diet culture, do some reading about Mindful or Intuitive Eating (but watch out for anyone selling any of these as a path to weight loss!) and see if you resonate with these approaches. Learn to practice gentle nutrition, a way of acknowledging the benefit of including health-supporting food into our diets without falling into the diet culture trap.
My work with clients is to support them in reclaiming body sovereignty through cultivating self-compassion, mindfulness and discernment, all valuable tools in resisting diet culture. Check out my Reclaiming Body Sovereignty Workbook for a guide in doing this work.
Resisting diet culture is challenging, but worth the effort. You will find a way forward to a healthy relationship with food and feel good in your body.
Vive la résistance!