I am not against diets because diets don't work.
I am not against diets because they are a waste of time, money and life energy.
Yes, all of that is true. But there is something deeper that I have been exploring in the past year: I am critical of diet culture because I believe it is doing incredible harm to us, both individually and collectively.
Diet culture tells us that we can't trust our own bodies...that we can't know what's best for ourselves, so we must trust and believe in someone else. It demands perfection...in how we eat, exercise, and explore our bodies. It convinces us that losing weight is our life's work. It uses words and images to convince us that our value as HUMAN BEINGS lies primarily in our bodies.
Diet culture uses the fear of fatness to reinforce the hierarchy of bodies.
And for people who are chronically marginalized because of their race, gender, ability, or sexuality, our cultural obsession with weight can make things more difficult.
I certainly can't and won't speak for everyone, but as a woman of color, I know first-hand what it's like to be reminded where I fit in the hierarchy. And it's not at the top.
I know what it's like to be told that there is something better and more worthy out there and that I should spend my whole life striving for it.
These messages can lead to significant self-denial and invalidation . And in my experience, dieting just adds another layer to the not-good-enough narrative. It joins the chorus of external voices telling me there is something fundamentally wrong with my body.
It's painful and exhausting. And it has nothing to do with health and well-being. It all feels like an attack on our humanity. And it feels manipulative and exploitative and unfair and immoral.
We all deserve to know what it's like to be an imperfect, embodied, self-determined human being whose worth is not determined by the body we have.
Melissa Toler , translated by Marina Fateeva especially for the Association of Doctors and Psychologists "ED: Therapy and Prevention"
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