Breaking Up With Diet Culture

How many of you went on your first diet before graduating from high school? Before junior high? I was on a diet before I’d finished elementary school, so when I talk to clients about body image issues, difficult relationships with food, and the ubiquity of diet culture, I come to these topics with experience. In fact, my longest running relationship is my relationship to dieting. 

Diet culture is a phrase we use to describe a system of beliefs, attitudes and expectations that prize thinness, a skinny appearance, and small body shapes especially for women and girls. It’s a culture in every sense of the word: it tells us what to believe about ourselves and others, it judges between good and bad, it teaches us to worship certain types of people and look down upon others, and it equates not just health but even personal worth with our ability to be loyal to its tenets. 

Diet culture is a phrase we use to describe a system of beliefs, attitudes and expectations that prize thinness, a skinny appearance, and small body shapes especially for women and girls.

- Lindsay Love

If all of that sounds familiar - and if it sounds like something you are ready to unpack and break away from in your own life - then set a notification, because that process is exactly what I’ll be focusing on in my blog for the next few months as we approach the holiday season and the most holy day in the diet culture calendar, January 1, when millions of women and girls the world over recommit themselves to its damaging doctrine. 

In the meantime, I’ll share two suggestions: 

• Starting now, release the guilt. As people steeped in diet culture, even admitting you’ve been consumed by it may cause you to feel guilty. Don’t. We are all impacted by the world around us. What’s so pernicious about diet culture is that unlike most cultural traditions, it has the same controlling grasp on us regardless of race, ethnicity or religious affiliation. It’s literally impossible to escape being touched by it.

• Consider meeting with a therapist. For most of us, it’s going to take far more than a really fantastic blog or an affirming set of Instagram follows to truly break free from a set of beliefs and attitudes that has been with us as long as we can remember. I worked with a therapist myself and can tell you - there is no substitute for personalized, expert guidance on your healing journey. 

Next month, I’ll get into some of the beliefs I had to deprogram myself from and the ideas I’m focusing on now that I finally decided to break up with diet culture.