Hello! This week we’re talking about breaking up with diet culture.
Diet culture gives us a structure and goals that feel meaningful and achievable. Health! Beauty! Success! Love! Diet culture promises that if we follow its rules, everything will be good. In fact, better than good—PERFECT!
Diet culture gave me a sense of identity and belonging. It gave me purpose and a value system. Those are good things, and they contribute to a meaningful life. But pursuing them through weight loss almost always backfires. Because diet culture is ultimately a losing proposition. Most of us end up worse off when our life goals are focused on weight. I certainly did.
🤔Question: What has diet culture given you? What has it taken away?
Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, defines diet culture as a belief system that “worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue.” I can relate. In my eating disorder, I pursued weight loss with religious fervor. I sought purity in what I ate. I believed that salvation would be mine if I didn’t waver from my daily offerings at the altar of weight loss. But the costs were high. My health, my well-being, my very soul were suffering.
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