1 ditch the diet

Even if you’re not familiar with the term “diet culture,” I have no doubt that you’re familiar with the signs and symptoms, and the punishment they entail. Diet culture is a set of beliefs and norms that permeate through society, playing on our emotions around food and convincing us that we need to transform our bodies into something more “acceptable”—and that if we don’t, we’re failures.

Here’s an example. When Beyoncé steps on a scale in her YouTube video promoting her twenty-two-day diet, she says to the camera, “This is every woman’s worst nightmare,” referring to either her weight gain, stepping on the scale, or both. Beyoncé’s comment and the crazy, restrictive twenty-two-day diet she subsequently puts herself on are the perfect illustration of what diet culture is all about: Being fat is the worst thing that can possibly happen to us. Our “worst nightmare.” Thanks, Beyoncé, but no. Gaining weight shouldn’t be anyone’s nightmare.

Diet culture tells us that if we gain weight, we need to fix ourselves with a punishing, restrictive plan to shed the weight, no matter the cost, because being fat is unacceptable. Fat is bad. Gaining weight is wrong. Stepping on the scale is scary. Martyring ourselves by starving is a badge of honor. The focus is only on how our body looks physically, with the sole desired outcome being an “acceptable” number on the scale, whatever that even means.

So, we do it, again and again and again. We eliminate foods that are harmless and healthy, such as dairy, wheat, and fruit. We talk about nothing with our friends except for what diet we’re following and how it’s working (or not). We show our kids that Mommy can’t eat toast for breakfast, because toast isn’t “good for us,” and we snap at our partners because we’re so fucking hungry we could actually gnaw our arm off. We turn down dinner dates with friends and that once-yearly pretzel at the baseball game and we feel like shit for eating some of our own birthday cake. All in the name of being thin and conforming to what diet culture says we should be.

Diet culture wants us to believe that we can’t trust ourselves when it comes to food, which creates the perfect environment for us to think that we need diets, restrictive eating plans (don’t cheat!) with specific instructions that will keep our bodies under control. The illusion that diets control our urges is just that: an illusion. In reality, willpower and control are no match for our innate drive to eat, especially when we are restricting food.

Diet culture sells an illusion. It sets out to convince us that we will only find happiness, achieve wellness, or be deemed beautiful if we’re thin and young. Don’t fit the mold? If so, diet culture wants you to believe that means you won’t be a success in any aspect of your life. In other words, diet culture promotes the false idea that the only way to be worthy is to be thin.

This illusion of diet culture is something I see every day in my practice and in the world. It affects not only our food choices, but how we perceive ourselves and others. We weaponize the word “fat” when it relates to bodies, making it into an insult, when in reality, it’s just a descriptive word. Calling someone fat is horrific. But calling someone thin is a compliment. This is because diet culture grabs us when we’re young and tells us that fatter equals lesser and thinner equals better. And we’re scared like hell of being lesser, so we’ll do just about anything to be—and stay—thin.

We become convinced that all of our problems will suddenly vaporize when we fit into a size four, and that’s a very compelling belief for anyone struggling with their weight. There’s just one problem with this: It’s all fatphobic bullshit. But people buy into it. There are many, many people with bodies of all shapes and sizes who are healthy and fit. The belief that weight loss is the only option because if you’re not thin, you’re not worthy, is a symptom of diet culture.

But here’s the honest truth: All body colors, shapes, and sizes are beautiful, and no matter what you weigh or who you are, YOU ARE WORTHY. And here’s something else: If you’re a bigger person, you don’t have to lose weight. Not everyone who isn’t a size 0 wants to lose weight, needs to lose weight, or should lose weight. And screw diet culture for assuming all of that, too.

The funny (not funny ha-ha, funny weird) thing about diet culture is that it also has infiltrated the way we see aging. I think we’d all agree that aging is a natural process, but for some reason, we are so fucking afraid to get old. And even more than that, we are so afraid to look old. Diet culture has moved the needle on what it means to look your age, and put it in a place that’s crazy and unrealistic for most women.

The perfect example is Jennifer Lopez, who is over fifty. When she performed with Shakira at the Super Bowl in 2019, people couldn’t stop talking about how amazing she looked. This is now the standard to which women are being held as they age. Jennifer Aniston is another example. Thin, toned, and with the collagen matrix of a sixteen-year-old. But these women aren’t the norm. And while I am so glad that women over fifty are taking up their space in the world—space that they deserve to occupy and always have—these celebrities are also increasing the pressure on normal women to look a certain way as they age. Where women over fifty were previously and unacceptably “invisible,” the expectations are now at the other end of the spectrum, which is equally unfair. Thanks, diet culture. You suck.

The one thing that I do wish all women had that these celebrities have, is confidence and pride in how we look. Women are so used to focusing on what we perceive to be wrong with our bodies that we rarely focus on what we love about them. It’s as though it’s more socially acceptable to sit around and bitch with our friends about how fat our thighs look than it is to celebrate how strong and beautiful we are. It’s fucked up that we aren’t comfortable with feeling proud about our bodies. We’re more comfortable with berating them. This has got to change.

In my work as a dietitian and food writer, I see that something is really wrong about the way we treat our bodies and how confused we are about food. Over the years, I became attuned to the colossal problem our culture has with eating and with the psychological, physical, and emotional abuse so many of us are putting ourselves through because we believe in magic fixes.

I’ve known plenty of people who rejected eating as a pleasurable activity in favor of the view that “food is fuel.” They felt shame for finding happiness in food. Sound familiar? They forced themselves to be regimented and strict about eating and felt proud of themselves when they achieved that. Even though they loved food, they tried their hardest to hate it, or at least be indifferent to it. That way, it wouldn’t hurt as much when they turned down the things they loved to eat and ate only the things they thought they should.

They believed that eating the right foods and looking the right way would help them feel better about their life and about themselves.

Spoiler alert #1: It never worked for them.

Spoiler alert #2: It’s not likely to work for you either.

Call it a clash of values. Society’s idea of the right body and the right diet may not be congruent with your personal beliefs about your body or about food. And trying to fit the mold that other people have created for diets and bodies will result in a tug-of-war that can last a lifetime, if you don’t let that rope go and live your own truth.

I’ll show you.

CASE STUDY: THE CHRONIC DIETER

Let me introduce you to Lisa. Because so many of us have been negatively influenced by diet culture, there’s a little bit of her in all of us. Think of Lisa as a kind of composite client—a little like you, a little like me, a little like all of us who’ve struggled with fad diets, weight loss, and an obsession with being thin. In my practice, I see women like Lisa every day.

Lisa’s unhappy with her weight. Why? She had kids and gained weight, then life got busy with two little ones, which didn’t leave her much time to work out. Lisa sits in front of me on the couch in my office.

“Abby, I’m frustrated as hell,” she says. “I keep dieting, but I’m fat and nothing works. I feel like a failure.”

“What diets have you tried?” I ask her.

“Well, I’ve tried Weight Watchers, Paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, keto plus intermittent fasting… oh, and some weird meal replacement shakes and supplements someone on my Facebook page was selling.”

“I’m sorry to hear none of those worked for you, but I’m not terribly surprised,” I say.

“I just don’t know what to eat anymore. It’s so confusing and contradictory. One day, it’s fasting. Then it’s don’t eat carbs. Next it’s don’t eat beans. Or avoid milk. I just want to know what to do. That’s why I’m here. But I have to tell you: I hate diets. I never want to diet again!”

As Lisa tells me more about her various regimens, she has trouble keeping all the rules straight. But even after saying she never wants to be on a diet again, she reverts to diet-speak several times in our session, saying things like “I was bad last week with my eating” and “I have no willpower, I’m so weak” and “I feel like such a pig.”

These are all things I’ve heard thousands of times over the years. Not just from clients either: from friends, family, men, teenage girls, and even at one point in my life, from myself. Even though these words are so familiar, they still set off alarm bells in my head. If you could describe the negative impact of diet culture in phrases, these are them. Honestly, when someone starts berating themself because of what they’ve eaten or describes themself as a pig, it makes me feel really sad. Who the fuck says? You think you’re a farm animal known for gluttony because you ate an extra piece of cake? Come on.

As I look at Lisa sitting in front of me, I see that she probably isn’t what would be considered clinically overweight, but she is obsessed with the number on her scale. Like many people I’ve met, she’s always either on a diet or off one. When she’s off, she lets herself eat whatever she wants, always knowing that she is going to “repent for her sins” by going on another diet as soon as possible. It’s feast or famine. The result? She’s lost and regained the same twenty pounds over and over again for eight years.

Like most of my clients who are chronic dieters, her mood suffers when she doesn’t eat or when she’s upset about eating too much, which affects her relationships with her husband and children. Her compulsive dieting cripples her sense of self-worth. More than anything, she wants to learn how to eat normally and live her best life, but the diets out there don’t teach that sort of stuff. She also wants to “transform” her body to a pre-baby one, right down to her skinny jeans and carefree attitude. Lisa’s insecurities, like her aging, postpartum body and her life as a mom, are a real concern for her, as they are for many women.

“What you’re feeling is normal, and all too common,” I say. “Your body is changing, which can be weird and concerning, but you deserve to be content with your body, with the food you choose, and with eating in general.”

“That’s what I want. But how?”

“By changing your relationship with food. It shouldn’t be a source of guilt and pain. By really understanding that food is supposed to nourish you and help you thrive. It’s going to be a process, but we’ll get there, step-by-step.”

Over and over in my practice, I’ve worked with people like Lisa whose relationship to food was broken and their health and wellness—both physical and emotional—were very much at stake. My goal has always been to bust through the many mythologies around diet culture and help my clients learn to love food, live healthier, and be truly well—inside and out.

The first step is working through their perception of themselves and their body, and figuring out where those perceptions originated. We also do a lot of work around their feelings about food and eating: Often, narratives that we learn in childhood affect those feelings, and I show clients how to flip those narratives to serve them instead of hurt them. This is something we’ll be doing in the next chapter.

THE TRUTH ABOUT WEIGHT LOSS

Let me clarify where I stand on intentional weight loss because there are groups who advocate for the end of diet culture—way to go! I totally agree—but some also believe that we should stop trying to lose weight because it harms us physically and emotionally and we’ll just gain everything back anyhow. And that’s where my beliefs diverge with theirs.

While diet culture sucks, I do believe that there’s such a thing as healthy weight loss, but from behavioral change, not from dieting. In other words, intentional weight loss doesn’t need to be intertwined with diets and diet culture, nor is our only choice for weight loss either antidiet or restrictive diet. You can reject diet culture and still lose weight in a healthy manner. Weight loss does not have to involve restriction or punishment, which harms your relationship with food and your body. I don’t believe—and this is important—in shaming someone for wanting to lose weight if it’s for the right reasons, not because diet culture tells them to.

My friend Yoni Freedhoff, obesity physician extraordinaire, just completed a study that showed that people are more likely to lose weight and keep it off if they enjoy their eating habits. I mean, that’s pretty obvious, right? If you hate something, you’re more likely to give up on it. Human nature, and all.

Restrictive diets aren’t that effective in the long run; most research that puts subjects on diets reveals that weight loss is tough and often short-lived. Although research subjects may be highly motivated to lose weight (which is probably why they sign up for the study in the first place), most studies don’t allow them personalized recommendations or a focus on food quality rather than calories. Researchers often put participants on very low-calorie or very low-carb plans and don’t necessarily address the emotional components of a person’s relationship with food, which goes back years and years. Instead, they get a prescribed diet and then check in every once in a while. Great for short-term weight loss, not at all great for long-term behavioral change.

Just because something is a challenge doesn’t mean you should give up and not do it, if it’s something you want. But long-term weight loss can be tough, most definitely, for good reason: Aside from going on restrictive diets that are impossible to stick to, research shows that a good part of our weight is genetically determined, like the color of our eyes. I mean, colored contacts exist, but other than that, it’s impossible to override genetics to change your eye color. Why attempt to do it with our weight?

Doing a deep dive into your feelings around weight and yourself is important work that we all need to do. Maybe it’s not your weight you need to fix, but your relationship with food and your body.

A COMFORTABLE WEIGHT

If your goal is weight loss, ending up at a weight that you’re comfortable at is more important than a specific number on the scale. A comfortable weight doesn’t mean starving yourself, killing yourself at the gym, or feeling like you need to restrict your calories. It doesn’t mean that you turn everything you put into your mouth into a number, either calories or macros, and have a running tally of what you’ve eaten in your head. That’s not comfortable. At. All.

We all have a comfortable weight. You might not like yours because diet culture has convinced you that it should be a size four or that your body should look like an eighteen-year-old’s when you’re forty-five. This is insane and completely unrealistic. Repeat after me: It’s not worth it to starve myself and lose joy from my life in order to fit diet culture’s definition of what I should look like. Take it from me—it’s more important to live your best life than to be constantly pissed about not fitting into a size six.

So, be realistic with your expectations for your body. Don’t set number goals, because you have no idea how your body will respond to changes you make to your diet and lifestyle. Don’t try to be the weight you were when you were twenty-five, if you’re several decades older than that. Weight gain as we age is normal. Release the vise grip that you have on a certain number or “look” for your body. If you feel like you need to lose weight, what you should be aiming for is a comfortable or happy weight that you can maintain without much effort. One that feels natural to you because it’s simple to maintain with small changes that are easy.

The secret to maintaining a comfortable weight for the long-term is:

In short, the path to achieving and maintaining a comfortable weight is understanding your relationship around food and eating, coupled with behavioral change, accurate information about food, and a solid understanding of how your body works. The goal of this book is to equip you with all that.

So, what if you think diet culture sucks, but you still feel like you’re not at a comfortable weight for you? The desire to lose weight is not always influenced by diet culture, despite what some people believe. Some of you might be doing it for health reasons. Or, you’ve recently put on weight from less-than-ideal eating habits. That’s okay.

But if you’re a chronic dieter, always looking for a way to lose weight, chances are you’re not just doing it because you just want to drop a few pounds. It’s tough to find someone who continually punishes themself without an underlying reason, so if you have one, you’re going to find out what it is (and neutralize it) in the coming chapters.

If you’re wondering if you’ve been influenced by diet culture, here are some diet-related behaviors that you might recognize:

Here’s the thing: These thoughts and behaviors are very real, and they make you feel extremely shitty. They’re symptoms of a culture that sells you a dream but will only lead you around and around the shame circle as you chase the myth of thinness.

And the worst part? Even if you lose weight because of your deprivation, it’s a diet culture bait and switch: You’ll still be the same person with the same problems. You’ll just be thinner. Diet culture tells us that we’ll be a different, happier person if we can push through and lose weight, but that’s all bullshit. Submit to diet culture’s charms, and you’ll be miserable AF because your issues will still be there, plus you’ll be starving and isolated.

When you become conscious of the harm diet culture causes, you can begin to embrace a new and healthier paradigm.

watch out:

for “wellness.”

Once the concept of dieting was starting to overstay its welcome, the wellness industry moved right in to claim its space. How convenient! Weight Watchers became WW, claiming that its primary focus was shifting to “wellness.” Goop was born (I rue the day). Wellness exploded into a $4.5 trillion industry with some beneficial offerings (employee wellness programs) and many scams (IV vitamin drips, celery juice, diet companies masquerading as wellness programs).1

The one consistent thing about the wellness industry is that it promotes the concept of thinness as the apex of health. This is completely false: A person can be thin and desperately unhealthy both physically and emotionally. In other words, more often than not, wellness is just another word for “diet.”

Instead of being inclusive—because we would all agree that wellness in its purest form should be available to everyone on earth—it’s disgustingly exclusive with its forty-dollar reformer classes and nine-dollar grass-fed butter that has no evidence to support using it over the regular stuff, thank you very much. Most wellness companies don’t really care about you; they care about making money. #Truth.

And we can’t talk about money and wellness without talking about wellness influencers. Hop onto Instagram, and you’ll find #fitspo posts of impossibly thin people drinking green juice and spouting “inspirational” messages such as “sweat is fat crying.” While they might look healthy, if you’re following influencers for nutrition information, you’re probably getting only half of the story—the other half being that many health influencers are not at all healthy emotionally or physically after subjecting themselves to extreme eating and exercise habits.

Having spent time in that world, I can corroborate that assertion. Social media is a cesspool of terrible nutrition and body messages.2 Much of what you see posted by professional influencers on social media is curated, meaning it’s fake. It’s edited, shot, and reshot, one photo in a hundred that they chose because it’s perfect. It’s paid for, Photoshopped, and worst of all, it’s a fairy tale meant to sell you something. It’s not real life.

But that doesn’t stop us from looking to social media influencers for nutrition and health information, even though very few give accurate information on those topics.3 So, needless to say, if you’re getting the majority of your facts on social media, you might want to reconsider your sources.

Let’s not forget the impact that seeing the so-called perfect lives of influencers has on the rest of us: Research has shown that people who spend time on Instagram have a lower body image and are most at risk for anxiety, depression, and eating disorders.4, 5 Instagram influencers and food bloggers push “clean eating” in the guise of health, but let’s face it: Long-term fasts and “cleanses” are unnecessary and are bound to cause rebound eating… which of course, we blame on ourselves and our lack of willpower.

If you’re following people on social media who make you feel like shit about yourself or your diet, it’s time to unfollow them. I promise you, you won’t regret it.

For someone who is a chronic dieter and/or has fraught relationships with food and their body, making peace with eating can seem like an impossible goal. I know how it feels, because I’ve been there. I understand how terrifying it can be to imagine letting go of the “rules” to end up floating untethered in a world awash with donuts, chips, steak, and every type of food you’ve been told you shouldn’t be eating. It involves breaking the habit of dieting and restricting food. It’s like moving into a new universe where food and eating can be enjoyable and fun, not a source of shame. It’s giving diet culture the finger and walking away. Those changes can be very scary and very daunting.

If you’re a chronic dieter, this fear is your story. It has likely consumed years of your life and has had an exorbitant cost on your social, emotional, financial, and physical health. It has become an addiction of sorts, a habit you can’t seem to break. Unfortunately, diet culture will always exist, but that doesn’t mean it has to control you. It’s time for you to be free.

In the chapters that follow, I’m going to teach you how to reexamine your relationship with food, let go of your diet forever, and embrace a whole new outlook on yourself, what you eat, and why.

So, ask yourself right now: “Am I ready to let go of my dieting behavior?”

Maybe your answer is yes, maybe it’s a no. Either way, I’ll be here to guide you. Ready for more? Keep reading.