How to untangle yourself from a world obsessed with Diet Culture

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“We are neurologically wired to enjoy food and to want to eat when we see others eat. We’re supposed to connect food with love and caring… Yet our culture pathologizes the idea the food is love. We’re just supposed to eat to survive… Sharing meals is probably our best way to bond and connect, other than sex. It doesn’t make you an addict to miss that. It makes you human.” — Lisa DuBreuil, an eating disorder social worker in the outpatient psychiatry program at Massachusetts General Hospital, an excerpt of her interview in Virginia Sole-Smith’s The Eating Instinct.

I recently attended Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera’s annual Women in Food event and was invited to participate in a roundtable on “Corpo e Cibo”, Body and Food. I feel like we barely had a chance to scratch the surface but I was so grateful that it was a topic that was focussed on at such an important event — and it was evidently a topic that needs to be talked about more!

Diet culture is so ingrained in Western culture in the most insidious ways. I’ve long been anti-diet, I think probably my whole life. I’ve actively avoided diets, even though I grew up as a “chubby child” and adolescent, even when I was teased at school about my body. I loved food, but I also loved sports as a teenager, especially when my body suddenly went through puberty and I naturally lost the “puppy fat”, training on the varsity basketball team every day (surprise! No I am not tall, but I was the starting shooting guard and although rebounding was not my forte, three pointers were!). I didn’t even know until very recently there was a name for it and when I realised there was, I felt I had found home. Anti-diet speaks to me so strongly.

If you’ve been around long enough you may have heard me talk about it when I got some hateful, hurtful comments about my daughter’s body, as she helped me in the kitchen.

On feeding people

Or maybe it was this post about debunking sugar myths and more diet culture rubbish that caught your eye and led you here.

Yet, I’ve had to do a deep dive and still found there are still ways I can unpack diet culture, especially (as a food writer) getting used to neutral language around food — something I didn’t think too much about in the early days of my food writing career. On this, I loved fellow cookbook author Julia Turshen’s talk at the Culinary Institute of America on diet culture and fatphobia. In a short amount of time she covers everything from working in food in a diet free culture, debunking BMI (oh wow does this 200 year old white mathematican’s theory need to get thrown out already) and how marketing and diet culture creepily get into our daily routines, anti-fat bias, eating disorders, language (the word “healthy” and why it’s complicated - while here this link is to Julia’s newsletter, highly recommended and also this one, Julia on how writing a cookbook helped her break free of diet culture, from Bon Appetit) and more.

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A post shared by Julia Turshen (@turshen)

Diet culture is so ingrained that if you don’t stop to think about it for just a moment you could go on thinking this is the way things are, the way things have to be — I feel this probably goes over many generations, but particularly as a child of the 80s and teenager of the 90s where a waif like figure was idolised (so, so far from what my body could ever look like). I got away unscathed, I would say, but I think I am one of the lucky ones that grew up in a house where my mother never tried to put me on a diet, no one close to me ever commented on my body or made me feel like the way I looked was “wrong” and I just grew up loving and appreciating food, enjoying it wherever we went as we traveled around Asia, especially Japan, and moving to China, where I was called “pang” (胖, fat) as a compliment.

Ridding myself of any of this anti-fatness and diet culture feels more important than ever now that I am raising two young girls — one who avoided food anxiously for so long and one who has a bigger body, like I did as a child.

My husband and I encourage having a good relationship with food. We have done this with our anxious eater, the daughter who had issues eating and being relaxed about food or trying new things. We always wanted to make sure everyone felt comfortable around the table and ate how they felt. Then we continued doing this for our perfectly "normal" (also a bit picky really, what 4 year old isn’t?) eater who happens to have a bigger body and who I want to make sure grows up in an environment free of diet culture and without guilt.

What I want for my children is for them both to grow into women who love and respect their bodies, treat themselves well, and have a good relationship themselves, which means having also a good relationship with food — it is a challenge in this intricately and tightly woven diet-obsessed, guilt-ridden world.

This means, for me, that first of all they are not afraid of food. That they don't need to count calories or run them off. That food is fun, that they can be creative with it, that they learn about their heritage and culture through it, about history and traditions. I will have more on this in a follow up post with some really easy things that you can do to similarly have fun with food. That they don't always have to eat it if they don't want to, that they can always eat it if they want to, that they are relaxed around it, know where it comes from, learn how to cook it, and possibly enjoy doing so, especially when they can then share it with people they love.

It sounds like a lot of work and it is — extracting yourself from years, decades of diet culture coming at you from every direction is the first thing. But there really are only gains to doing this and getting this out of your life. Diet culture serves no one except the companies laughing all the way to the bank. 

Re-connecting with your body, listening to your body and its cues and re-learning to trust your body will also help understand how important it is that kids follow and listen to their bodies — kids are so much better at it than us. Have you ever been forced to eat something you absolutely didn't feel like eating (possibly one of the worst things ever) or denied food when you felt hungry or thirsty (ditto)? Imagine actually doing this to yourself, or your children, it's what happens every time you make your child eat everything on their plate or tell yourself not to eat something because its "bad."

Try to get away from the "good" and "bad" narrative around food and demonizing random ingredients. Food is just food. It is neutral. Call ice cream ice cream. Describe it, it is sweet, it is cold. But it's not "bad", it won't make you a bad person or a bad parent, just as much as eating broccoli isn't going to turn you into a good person.

My nine year old came to me, confused, one night when we were visiting friends, a bowl of vanilla ice cream — her favourite and it’s hard to come by in Italy — in hand. "Is this bad?" she asked with a fear in her face as if she had just eaten something poisonous. I knew someone had just told her it was bad for her.

“Let's see,” I said. “What is ice cream made of?"

“Milk,” she said, “And cream,” I added, “eggs and sugar. Is there anything wrong with these ingredients? No, these are all perfectly fine ingredients.”

Also, it is her very favourite flavour and we can only find it when we go back to Australia — she had waited 3 of her 9 years to taste it again — I’m going to let her eat it whenever she wants! End of story.

When I began to learn more about diet culture and spot it everywhere, I could see how “innocently” it comes into conversations, into blog posts, recipe headnotes, and more. It comes to you through perfect strangers on the street (a random old man in Florence once joked of my one year old, who had some delicious leg rolls, “lady, she’s a bit malnutritioned!”), from well-meaning (and perhaps not even) relatives and friends, teachers and basically anyone around you — and it might not even be about you or your kids, it might be that they are talking about their own bodies.

What do you do? I love Laura Thomas’ recent post from her newsletter Can I have another snack? on how to set boundaries around diet talk and her own strategy, which I cannot wait to use, which is simply to say loudly, “Who called the food police?!” Brilliant.

And Oona Hanson, an educator who runs Parenting without Diet Culture, reminds us of this — a hot topic during our Roundtable at Women in Food:

oona_hanson

A post shared by Oona Miller Hanson (@oona_hanson)

I wanted to share some more resources here for anyone else interested in a journey free themselves of diet culture and some books that I have read recently (inspired by this post from Gwen @dieticians4teachers): How to Raise an Intuitive Eater by Sumner Brooks and Amee Severson, Body Happy Kids (a brilliant one to start with or if you want to share this with your children) and Virginia Sole-Smith’s The Eating Instinct (I also cannot wait to get my hands on her latest book, Fat Talk! It’s a book for parents on anti-fat bias. You should subscribe to her newsletter, Burnt Toast, too).

This paragraph from Virginia’s opening chapter of The Eating Instinct I think just really gets to the heart of what so many people have trouble with,

“Food is supposed to sustain and nurture us. Eating well, any doctor will tell you, is the most important thing you can do to take care of yourself. Feeding well, any human will tell you, is the most important job a mother has, especially in the first months of her child’s life. But right now, in America, we no longer think of food as sustenance or nourishment. For many of us, food feels dangerous. We fear it. We regret it. And we categorize everything we eat as good or bad, with the “bad” list always growing longer. No meat, no dairy, no gluten — and goodness, no sugar. Everything has too much sugar, salt, fat; too many calories, processed ingredients, toxins. As a result, we are all too much, our bodies taking up too much space in our clothes and in the world. Food has become a heavy issue, loaded with metaphorical meaning and the physical weight of our obesity crisis. And for parents, food is a double burden, because we must feed our children even while most of us are still struggling to feed ourselves.”

I’d love to hear more from you and have a conversation here about diet culture, how it’s affected you or what you cook or how you eat, or have you got some other helpful links to newsletters or perhaps podcasts (which reminds me, Maintenance Phase (“Wellness and weight loss debunked and decoded” is another good one!). Also just how do you find joy in connecting with food? Coming up is a post with some simple, fun suggestions on how you can find joy in food with your children (note it doesn’t even necessarily involve eating!)