The next Getting Full Live will be on August 18th at 5:30 pm. I’ll be walking through some ways to get more comfortable being in your body and noticing your body’s cues. It will be recorded and sent out for paid subscribers within the week.
August: Tuesday, August 18th at 5:30 pm CST, Getting Comfortable with Body Awareness
September: Tuesday, September 15th at 5:30 pm CST, Mindful Meal
October: Friday, October 23rd at 10 am CST, If Candy feels SpOoKy
Paid subscribers will receive the email link to the live event a couple of days before it happens. Remember that this is a perk for paid and comped subscribers, so if you haven’t made the plunge yet, there’s no time like the present. The overview is always free to all, but to watch it live or see the full recording, you do need to be a paid subscriber. Thank you for your support!
Good Morning! While I’m on maternity leave, I have a couple of posts from the archives scheduled out for you. This one is from way back in 2024, but it feels just as relevant to the world today. You’ll get one more post in August from the archives, and then I’ll be officially back on my normal posting schedule. The archive is accessible to any paid subscriber, so if that’s you, go check it out! There are some good pieces from way back when only 50 of you were subscribing to this newsletter.
This is for the person who has been working through their relationship with food, their body image struggles, and their ability to move their body kindly, only to find that the rest of the world didn’t do that work alongside them. It can be lonely to be in recovery, or when you’re in a better place with yourself, without the rest of your people joining you. It can feel a bit freaky when you have opened your eyes to the realities of body shame, only to find that the people you love are still chasing self-acceptance at the end of a Botox needle or new wellness routine.
Body discrimination, or anti-fat bias by another name, is rampant today. So, when we decide to take a step out of that cesspool of self-hatred and low self-esteem to be a kinder human to ourselves and others it can feel surprisingly isolating.
When a person is in a diet mindset and their self-worth is rooted in their body being small and “healthy”, they soak in the messaging that their worth is connected to the aesthetics of their body. And that thought isn’t perceived as concerning. After doing the work of recovery and growing in self-love, it can feel like diet culture is magnified.
All of a sudden, we see diet culture in regular conversations with friends or coworkers, it shows up on TV, the celebrities we used to love are less impressive when they consistently make fat jokes on their podcast. It can feel incredibly isolating to be able to see through the discriminatory conversations about a person’s body - it can also bring up shame, guilt, and sadness to remember the way you used to feel about bodies.
It’s common for people to ask me how to deal with all of the diet-y bullshit that they are suddenly so profoundly aware of after working their way through recovery for a while. It usually happens around the time when recovery is starting to take shape, their urges and disordered thoughts are quieter and less alluring, and they are better able to stay afloat in the diet culture waters. These moments are so cool because, wow, what a journey it is to go from feeling trapped in the nonsensical aesthetic values of the patriarchy to seeing your own true value and worth outside of your looks.
It also reminds me that while the loneliness can be so real, more people are questioning the standards of beauty/self-worth every day. And, in the future, it might feel a bit less lonely to allow an existence at peace with body diversity, aging, growth, and change.
I believe that resilience to diet culture requires community. We need to find our spaces online and in person where body acceptance is normal. It could just be with your therapist or dietitian, it could be with a fat activism group, or, if you’re lucky, it could be with your friends and family. Diet culture stems from a desire for belonging. From the belief that looking a certain way or achieving a certain health-related aesthetic will increase your social capital. Divesting from diet culture doesn’t mean you are all suddenly okay with lacking community. So, we need to find it in new spaces.
A core belief in my practice as a dietitian is that body image work is never about changing your body to be more “likeable”. Body image work, at its core, is self-worth work. Rather than hyper-focusing on how to like what you see in the mirror, we focus on how to feel more aligned with your own values and ethics.
You can’t diet your way into a positive self-image. While it feels a bit obvious when you are on the other side of the journey, it is unfortunately not a common way to think about body image. You wouldn’t believe (or maybe you would…) the number of humans who have been recommended exercise videos or diets by their providers to “improve” their body image - and it drives me crazy when this happens.
The idea that our sense of self will be healthier if we just change how we look to meet a discriminatory body ideal is absolutely wild. There isn’t an -ism that exists outside of the context of body judgment (sexism, racism, classism, and on and on). To insinuate that the solution to your own self-judgement is to change your body is inherently discriminatory. This isn’t to say that any and all body change is rooted in discrimination - people get sick, change routines, and start new hobbies - but it is to say that body change can’t be the solution to a problem as profound as discrimination.
This is also where it gets extremely complicated. Depending on how many -isms you experience based on skin color, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, etc., the more protective it will feel to have some version of bodily control. There is reasonableness in the desire to fit into a particular aesthetic to feel more acceptable in a culture that discriminates against bodies. Unfortunately, it typically doesn’t result in the outcome of improved self-acceptance. Meeting the expectations of a discriminatory culture is protective, but it isn’t liberating. There is inherent safety in conforming to societal standards, but we aren’t able to liberate ourselves from those standards while actively participating in them.
All this to say, this piece is for the person who has recovered in spite of it all. Who has chosen to challenge themselves to live outside of the expectations they believed they had to meet in order to be acceptable.
This is for the person who hears the diet culture in what used to just feel like friendly workplace conversation, dinner table chatting, or well-meaning advice.
If you have started the process of reclaiming your own self-worth, I’m proud of you, and I hope you find a community that can understand the challenges and frustrations that exist through this process.
If you are new to this journey, I really do believe it is worth the time and effort.
If you are struggling to believe that you could feel okay accepting yourself as you are, I hope you can give in a bit to the kindness of loving even a few aspects of your authentic self.
We all deserve to feel at home in our bodies. I wish it weren’t so hard & I also believe that although it is hard, it is possible to exist in the world with neutral, if not positive, feelings toward ourselves.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.