How I broke up with diet culture

Building a new identity and breaking free from diet culture

Hello! I originally posted this early last year, and it was so popular that I wanted to re-share it with a few little updates for you.

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. 

When I was stuck in diet culture, I believed there was a “right” way and a “wrong” way to be. And I believed that if I behaved the right way, I would achieve my dreams of acceptance, love, and self-worth. I believed that my body was my path to happiness. But it never worked. I was never thin enough, never happy enough. There was always more work to be done.

I read all the diet books and fitness magazines. I spent endless hours planning and tracking every morsel. I did things like order dressing on the side and then dip my fork in a tiny quantity of salad dressing before I ate each bite of lettuce.

I was a good soldier in the diet culture army. I was fighting an epic battle against my genes, desperate to escape my grandmother’s body. I longed to look like a Victoria’s Secret model. (Truth: I had a vision board with photos from the catalog as “motivation.”)

🤔Question: What rules have you followed to be a “good soldier” in the weight war?

To break out of diet culture, I needed a new rally cry. I needed a new goal, a new passion. A new thing to do with the hours I had been spending monitoring, planning, and tracking my food. 

So day by day, week by week, and eventually month by month and year by year, I stepped into new goals. I replaced diet culture with new, non-diet goals, hobbies, and passions. They replaced the structure and purpose that diet culture had given me.

I’m not gonna lie. Freedom from diet culture had consequences. Diet culture gave me identity and belonging, purpose and values. I felt bereft without all my food rules and weight-loss goals. I had to rebuild an identity without those things. I had to find a whole new way of being.