Decoding Your History with
Dieting
Dieting and diet culture are everywhere this time of year. If you’ve jumped in headfirst during the holidays in the past, it can be helpful to reflect on if this cycle actually works for you or if it just causes more grief. Diet culture doesn’t just mean going on a diet. It can mean binging through the holidays because you’ve told yourself that you will diet or restrict after they are over. It might mean restricting your food choices now in preparation for the holidays. It might mean massive amounts of guilt after eating certain holiday foods over the next month or so. Regardless of what this might look like for you, my guess is that it hasn’t worked and has actually sucked the joy out of the holiday experience. So, let’s get honest with ourselves. Has dieting really worked for you in the past? If you think that it has, how many different variations of diets have you tried? How long have they worked? If you managed to lose a significant amount of weight and keep it off for more than five years, what have you had to give up in order for this to be intentionally maintained? What would happen to your emotional and mental state if you weren’t intentionally maintaining your weight loss? Let’s be clear; there’s nothing wrong with weight loss. However, when it’s intentional (meaning you have to keep working at it in order to maintain it), it usually comes at a cost to mental, emotional, and physical health around food.
Don’t believe me? Let’s examine your personal history with dieting and diet culture by creating a personal history timeline. There’s no right or wrong way to complete this, but getting up close and personal with your history is essential. This is important for a few reasons: X
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Diet culture has become so normalized that, unless we take time to reflect on how it has shaped us, we might not notice anything wrong. Typically, our interactions with diet culture are made up of hundreds and little moments, and once we can visually account for these, we can see just how inundated we are with these messages. When we reflect on our past, we can identify habits and trends. We can also notice how diets and diet culture have a connection
November 2021
to times of transition or hardship in our lives, a time when we were struggling emotionally or felt unworthy. When we notice these patterns, the hope is that we are less likely to keep repeating them.
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Perhaps most importantly, completing this activity will highlight that restricting our food (dieting) or otherwise engaging with diet culture hasn’t worked. You may have decades of accumulated time logged on the diet roller coaster, depending on how old you are. This realization alone is often enough motivation for people to say, “Let me off.”
So, what should you put on your timeline? Anything you feel is important or can identify as diet culture. They don’t all have to be painful moments. In fact, they may be moments when you initially felt really good about yourself, received attention, excelled in areas of your life, or experienced privileges as a result of how your body or life changed. You might identify indirect, second-hand moments like the first time you heard someone criticize their body or saw an advertisement for a diet pill or plan. Or you might identify direct firsthand moments such as someone commenting on your weight or size or being told that you can’t participate in an activity or social setting because of your weight or size. Big or seemingly small, all these moments matter.
You might just be realizing how harmful something from your past really was. You might even be getting really angry about a situation or certain person. That’s ok and totally normal. Get angry! Don’t push that emotion away or run from it. It will turn into resentment, shame, and fear. We don’t want to internalize anger; we want to understand why we’re feeling it, be compassionate with ourselves as we’re feeling it, and do something with it. How we see anger displayed in our culture is not how we have to display it. You might want to scream and yell - and that’s totally ok. Anger might also mean throwing away all your diet culture stuff (books,
magazines, certain cookbooks, unfollowing social media accounts), writing a letter or having a conversation with someone you can now identify as having harmed you with diet culture, or having a big old cry with yourself or someone you feel safe with. However you are feeling angry or some other emotion, please do yourself a favor and let it surface before you move on.
Our past carries weight. So if you’re feeling heavy after that exercise, it’s completely normal. Make sure you do something to release that weight when you are done. Go for a walk, talk to a friend, drink some tea, or take a bath. Anything that helps comfort you and ground you back into the present moment. We aren’t born hating our bodies. And we certainly aren’t born with the desire to starve ourselves in the name of health. These are learned thoughts and behaviors. Understanding where we’ve come from can help us change our behavior now and in the future. You wouldn’t keep going back to the same mechanic or saloon if they didn’t work, would you? You have the right to question diet culture and say no once and for all. Emily Betros Emily is a licensed clinical social worker, certified health coach, and owner of Reclaiming Health, LLC. She specializes in body image support, eating disorders, anxiety, life transitions, mindfulness, and women's issues. More info: www.reclaiminghealth.net.
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