Quit Your Diet: Choosing Wellbeing Over "Wellness" in 2019
It’s January and people are dieting. Here's the thing—diet culture is out to get us and it’s wearing a seductive new disguise: “wellness”.
If you're dieting right now please hear me: You are not bad for being on a diet. The last thing I want to do is heap shame on to shame; all of us are trying to get through the day reckoning with society's expectations of what a body should look like. I do, however, want to issue a giant “fuck you” to paradigms and institutions that celebrate thin bodies while punishing fat bodies, especially in the name of being healthy and “well”.
So, what is diet culture? Christy Harrison, an anti-diet dietitian, has a useful working definition:
“Diet culture is a system of beliefs that:
Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue
Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status
Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others
Oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of ‘health’”
Though activists have been speaking out against diet culture for decades, we’re fortunate to be experiencing a renaissance in how we all think about food, health, and our bodies. The fact is, body size does not determine health outcomes. It’s dieting that’s harmful to our health. Dieting is the precursor to most eating disorders, leads to weight cycling, and perpetuates weight stigma.
Irrespective of the health impacts of dieting, a person’s health status should not determine their value! The biggest problem with diet culture is that it reinforces fatphobia, sexism, and white supremacy. The solution to being fat isn’t to try to become thin--it’s to change our culture.
In another time, making a statement against dieting on a food blog would not feel as necessary. I’m unpacking it here because there’s a disturbing trend of dieting in the name of “wellness”. While many diets continue to be sold overtly for the purpose of weight loss, some have gone covert. Weight Watchers, for example, recently rebranded as “WW”, with the tagline “wellness that works”. The name might be different, but the goal is the same: lose weight. Although this shift from weight loss to “wellness” seems to invoke body positivity, it actually serves to marginalize fat bodies even further. Here, thinness is not simply a means to attain beauty and status, it’s also the key to health and moral virtue.
So, as a straight-sized white woman writing about food on the internet, it’s necessary to come out and say that this is not a blog about dieting (or “wellness” or “real food” or whatever’s next). The wellness strain of diet culture touts the health benefits of cooking from scratch, baking with whole grains, and using natural fermentation. This is the kind of food that I love to cook, eat, and share, but I want to be careful not to assign it moral virtue or magical health properties. Since I’m swimming in diet culture along with everyone else, I know I have blind spots and will likely mess up. But my intention is to make this a space that is free of fatphobia. I am here to celebrate food.
Like many people, my relationship to food is tangled up with my body image. That’s meant that, at times, it’s been pretty complicated. In moments when I’ve felt pressure to conform to the thin ideal, I’ve launched into cycles of restriction and rebellion that left me preoccupied with my food choices, disconnected with my body, and full of shame. For me, one of the worst side effects of this cycle was that it sapped the joy out of eating.
This time last year, I found myself at a crossroads. Friends and co-workers were taking up diets, my jeans were getting snug, and I was planning a wedding. All the signs pointed to a diet, but I made a firm commitment not to do it. Instead, I filled my “feed” with body positive content and my plate with whatever I wanted to eat. (And I got jeans that fit.) There have been some hard moments, but for the most part it meant that my year was more full of love, meaning, and fun.
a really good summer picnic
Food is just food. It is not morally good or bad- we are not better people if we eat some foods and not others.
But, of course, food is also more than food. Food nourishes our bodies, evokes memories, facilitates celebration, and connects us to friends, family, and place.
Here’s to a peaceful relationship with food this January.
Sometime I’ll post a recipe. For now, a recipe for Your Body Positive Feed:
