Ditch Diet Culture: Getting Started
Diet culture is so ingrained in our everyday lives that ditching it may feel overwhelming. Many of us find comfort in rules and “knowing” what is good or bad for our health, so throwing the rulebook out the window may feel unsettling. How do we get started combating these rules and thoughts that have been a part of our lives for years and years when it feels so scary?
Well, if you’re reading this, you’re probably already working on the first step, which is to start challenging and rejecting diet culture and the diet mentality. You’re exploring ways to change the way you think and feel about food and questioning if your rulebook needs some updating (or perhaps just deleting that rulebook altogether). Keep exploring! Determine what your food rules are. Ask yourself questions like, “What foods have I deemed good or bad?,” “What content related to health and wellbeing am I consuming?,” “How do I view my body?,” and “Why have I tried certain diets or felt a specific way about a certain style of eating in the past?” Becoming more aware of the why behind our food rules, thoughts about our bodies, and the way we think and feel about our health is an important step in this journey.
Start journaling. Write these questions (and more) down in a notebook or in the notes on your phone and start exploring your thoughts and feelings towards diet culture in-depth. Write this down too. When you’re ready, think about and write down how you can start to challenge those thoughts. What would be a radical first step to challenging and breaking a certain food rule that you’ve held onto for years? What if you started to only find things you like about your body when you look in the mirror instead of highlighting all of the parts that “need work”? Challenge yourself to find something. Give yourself the permission to eat that treat on a Tuesday afternoon. Get wild and crazy! Start breaking the rules and note how it feels when you do.
Warning, you may feel out of control when you first break these rules, but overtime, as you give yourself more and more permission to eat without restriction (and without over-exercising), you will start to feel less out of control. Foods that hold power over us, do-so because of the rules and the morality we place on them (when we deem a food “good” or “bad”). When we take these rules and moral codes away, all that’s left is food, totally unbiased, plain old food. Some foods may provide us with comfort, some may continue to trigger certain memories, positive or negative, but the goal is to avoid guilt and shame associated with foods we’ve deemed “bad” for us. By taking the rules away, food loses its power which gives us the space to become more present in the eating experience. We may even find that the foods we used to avoid because they had too much fat or added sugar, aren’t even that tasty.
