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In working with some professionals recently, I kept bumping up against the same problem. I’m interested in changing my habits in order to change my body, but I’m not at all interested in partaking in diet culture. I’m anti-diet! I’m practicing intuitive eating! I pursue movement for enjoyment and not for calorie-burning! How can I change my habits but also maintain my values and honor and respect myself as I am? How can I accept that I want my body to be different, but also believe that it’s OK if it doesn’t change?
I’m caught in this middle place between fearing continuous weight gain and wanting to uphold my values around food being neutral and not sliding into diet culture mindset.
I realized: when I gain weight, I tend to react with guilt and shame. It goes like this: I step on the scale, and see that I’ve gained another pound or two over the last month or so. I think, “gee, I’d better do something different so this doesn’t keep happening. I know I eat a too many sugary foods and drink probably a little too much wine, I think I could cut back on those things without hurting myself.” So I try to. Maybe it works for a while, I stop gaining, even lose a pound or two, and the shame subsides. I miss my sugar and my wine.
I start to worry that I’ve cut them out for the wrong reasons. If my body wants them, if they serve a purpose for me, and my health is not in any imminent danger because I eat or drink them, then why shouldn’t I have them? I restricted myself because of guilt. Because sugar and wine are “bad,” or at best, “unnecessary.”
I don’t think that guilt or shame is a “right feeling,” or a “right purpose” for me to base decisions on. I put on my anti-diet hat and think, “I can have whatever I want, so I should have it! No diets for me!”
And the cycle begins again.
If someone offers me dessert, I take it! I never turn down a tasty morsel. Saying no is dieting! Restricting myself is bad! Eat everything! And the weight gain returns.
It’s as though diet culture, seeing that it hasn’t ensnared me fully with its overt messaging, has decided to employ reverse psychology on me. “If I can’t make her believe in me, I can at least drive her crazy trying to fight against me!”
Diet culture and anti-diet culture seem to be perfectly at odds with each other. Black and white. Either you’re OK with dieting and always trying the latest thing, or you must never mention any kind of eating plan or number on a scale EVER. Either you’re orthorexic or you’re living life at the whim of your tongue.
I’d really prefer a middle way.
So many anti-diet books and blogs and practitioners recommend really understanding your behavior, being mindful of what you’re doing and why. I thought I was doing that! I thought I was appreciating my food and eating it because it tasted good. Clearly though I was still putting judgment on some of the foods I was eating. But when I started to let go of the idea that eating sugar is bad, drinking wine is bad, and looked at why I might actually be eating or drinking, I found a lot of things that aren’t laziness or gluttony, things that aren’t moral failings or a lack of willpower.
Loneliness. Dissatisfaction. Isolation. Anxiety. Anger. Hopelessness. Ennui. Exhaustion. Being unfulfilled.
Those are feelings I’ve felt 犀利士
in the last two years, not infrequently. When someone else is feeling any of those difficult emotions, I want only to care for them, to help them feel better, to be with them and let them know they’re not alone. But I don’t allow myself the same grace that I afford others. I am in control of my feelings. I don’t need anything to counteract them!
A little sugar is a little hit of dopamine, something nice that feels good. A boost. A reward. A glass of wine helps me to let the tension out of my shoulders and hug my people, helps me cry when I need it.
Really understanding that I have those emotional needs, recognizing them and the fact that it feels good to assuage them, without attaching guilt? That’s an unlock.
I have come so far since the days of bingeing on candy when I was alone after school. I gently chide my friends and family when they refer to food in a non-neutral way. I proudly exercise in public and proclaim on a t-shirt that “I work out because I love my body, not because I hate it.” But there’s a lot I’m still discovering that lurks down there in the dark corners of my subconscious. Guilt and shame run strong and deep, even when my conscious mind is working hard against them.
So this is what I’m working on: removing guilt from food. Guilt is the thing I was reacting to – one way or another. I restricted out of guilt. I reacted against my restricting because I could see the guilt and I didn’t want it to be controlling me and the way I was eating.
Without guilt, food is just food. I can eat it or not, for whatever reason. I don’t have to say no, but I can if I want to. I trust myself and honor myself enough to look for “right” reasons and “wrong” reasons.
I’m not the first to write these ideas, I’m sure. I bet I’ve even read them from other minds. But finding them within myself and seeing them as my own truths is a personal epiphany, somehow. And just one more rung on the ladder to climb.
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