Beware: Diet Culture Loves to Make the Rounds at New Year’s

It’s here, right on schedule, encouraging us to “eat better” and “exercise more”

Trigger warning: This article addresses particularly toxic incarnations of diet culture and how it manifests around the holidays. This is a vulnerable time for many, so please skip it if you feel it might stir up discomfort.

Can you guess what my New Year’s resolution is this year? Okay, that’s a trick question, because I don’t set resolutions.

But if I did, and you guessed that my resolution was to lose weight, you’d likely be right. This is still one of the most common resolutions, chosen by 48% of survey respondents in 2019, with “exercise more” and “eat healthier” up there in the top categories (both of which are almost always just spin for “lose weight”).

At least half of my female friends have chosen “lose ten pounds” as their resolution this year, and frankly, I’m more stunned than ever by this because we’re still in the middle of a pandemic that is limiting access to their gyms and creating increased stress that makes it really hard to avoid emotional eating or even get up the energy to work out every day.

Year after year, I wonder why diet resolutions are still so prevalent around this time — apparently, no matter the circumstances.

Diet Culture is strong and insidious. It creeps into everything. It forced the women of my generation to always count calories, mentally calculating whether or not they could keep that number low enough to lose weight, or at the very least, to maintain where they were.

Gen Xers grew up in a time when plain rice cakes were the trendiest snack food on the market, when every refrigerator was decorated with “inspirational” photos of thin models so we could have a visual reminder that “nothing tastes as good as thin feels” (which is absolute bullshit, by the way), when rites of passage handed down from mother to daughter included welcoming them into the club of constant self-criticism around their imperfect bodies.

Though we came a long way in recent years, mostly (though not resoundingly enough) denouncing diets as ineffective and often dangerous, Diet Culture was smart enough to pivot.

It is still alive and well. Today, it’s called “wellness.” Pretty savvy, huh?

Now, it’s all about becoming a strong, emotionally balanced yogi, eating well, working out more, finally getting control of our health.

But don’t be deceived. Almost all of this is Diet Culture. Do enough oms and sun salutations and you can look like the woman behind Boho Beautiful! Eat more cleanly and you’ll end up swapping jeans with Ani Phyo!

And have you noticed those “What I Eat in a Day” videos on YouTube? They often have hundreds of thousands of views and are almost always posted by incredibly thin women in their early 20s. These videos feature organic fruits from local farmer’s markets, fish and chicken, chia seeds, green smoothies, and affiliate-linked vitamin supplements.

It drives me absolutely mad that these videos are so popular. They are Diet Culture wearing a disguise — and not even a good disguise. And somehow, we’re still buying into it.

You wanna know what I eat in a day? An egg, broccoli, and toast with lots of real butter for breakfast. Tea with too much honey and sugary soy creamer midmorning. Lunch is often something like a heaping bowl of noodles and veggies or a really big burrito. And dinner is something like tofu, zucchini, and rice, or a huge bowl of Thai coconut soup, or lasagna or…

And don’t forget the giant cookie (or two) that I eat every single day. Which is sometimes substituted with a giant piece of carrot cake, or a huge cupcake, or half a chocolate bar or… Yes, there is always, always dessert.

And do you wanna know how I use chia seeds in my kitchen? I use them as an egg substitute in my cookies when I want to eat spoonfuls of raw batter.

I spent most of my life obsessed with my weight to the point of abject suffering. I struggled with eating disorders for about two decades. And every New Year, I was going to change. I was going to finally lose the weight. I was going to make it happen.

Why, though? There’s nothing medically wrong with me (at least so far as my weight is concerned). I am 5’7” and for the last ten years (since I stopped weighing myself and stopped dieting), I have weighed (according to my medical charts) between 145 and 155. Sure, this is twenty pounds more than I’d like to weigh, but my weight is not causing me any physical problems, and it is relatively effortless to maintain it. I don’t have to give up butter or cookies or return to my old habits of exercising for six hours a day.

So why was I trying to lose the weight? Because our society is unforgiving about our appearance — women’s especially. It teaches us to hate ourselves if we don’t look like a model. It even teaches us to believe that we will be happier if we do.

What’s the endgame here? Well, if we’re unhappy with our weight and we believe we’ll finally find relief when we’re thin, we’ll keep paying for gym memberships, diet programs, low-calorie pre-packaged foods, workout clothing that’s supposed to magically shape our waistlines as we wear them, home exercise gadgets… The list goes on.

Diet Culture needs us to hate our bodies the way they are because our constant attempts to improve ourselves translates into million-dollar profits.

I am determined to break free from Diet Culture, but make no mistake: I’m still working on it. I don’t love my body. On the contrary, there are days when I’m convinced that no one will ever have sex with me again because my body is so misshapen, scarred, ugly, fat.

And don’t even get me started on my ass.

But I learned a lot from all those years of eating disorders. There are things about my body that I just can’t change without subjecting myself to torture. How much is that tight, tiny ass worth to me?

The answer, I found, is: not enough to make myself spend ten more minutes on a workout when I could be reading or spending time with a loved one, not enough to deprive myself of that dark chocolate marzipan confection, not enough to do an extra set of leg lifts.

And frankly, I’m pissed that Diet Culture is still trying to strangle the women I love so much, making them believe that they aren’t good enough or sexy enough as they are now. Making them continue to strive toward losing weight, to spend their precious mental energy on a goal that isn’t attainable for all of us.

What if the way we are is just the way our bodies were meant to be? I don’t think I’m meant to be a size 6. I’m a 10 and I probably always will be. Yes, part of me wants to “succeed” at Diet Culture and get down to that 6, but again — why? Because I’m not good enough, lovable enough, sexy enough as I am now? Why should I let my weight affect my worth or feelings of worthiness? Because people with a vested financial interest in seeing me thinner want me to tie my weight to my worth?

Well, fuck that.

If I have any resolutions or goals this year, those would include making bigger strides in loving my body exactly the way it is. Right now, with the extra 10–20 pounds I’m carrying. With my fleshy middle section, my scarred and pudgy hips, and my humongous ass.

I am sickened by the amount of energy, time, and joy Diet Culture has stolen from me and I don’t want to give it anything more. It’ll be a process, but I am determined.

And I don’t want it to steal another moment from any other person on this planet — especially women.

That is my purpose in writing this — not to criticize women who set health goals as New Year’s resolutions or who dislike the way their bodies look or who count calories and weigh themselves every day. The last thing they need is more criticism.

No, I’m criticizing Diet Culture. I’m condemning a system that makes it impossible for a woman to feel good about herself unless she meets certain physical standards. I’m shaming a society that profits off of psychologically tormenting women.

I long for the day when sharing our insecurities about our bodies isn’t a thing anymore, because we love what we see in the mirror so much. I long for the day when resolutions aren’t about our weight anymore. I long for the day when we are able to find feelings of sexiness at almost any day of our cycle.

I long for the day when we are free of all this.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

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