What If We Said "No More"?

Diet culture. It exists and instead of being angry at it, I have a different approach.

Accepting it.

Sometimes, accepting something for what it is and softening around it can create an opportunity to see it in a different way.

Diet culture, as we know it, has been with us for decades. It has informed how we eat, think, and dress for several generations. In our desire to lose weight, we have prescribed to a system that has led us into restrictive behaviors creating a victim approach to life, one that is contracting in nature.

It’s one thing to lose weight for health reasons and another to simply want to lose weight. As in my case, that I’ve written about previously, where I needed to be rail thin so I could wear the clothes I wanted as prescribed by the fashion magazines. The diet industry wants us to think being thin is the ultimate goal and we’re bombarded with their messages.

Because there's so much money to be made in the weight loss industry, it’s not going to go away on its own. The messaging will continue to exist because the industry knows we’re agonizing over our weight. It’s an unending cycle. The industry tells us we’re fat. Not in so many words perhaps. Rather, they give us images, show us thin lifestyles, all as demonstrations of the things we aren’t doing that we could be if we were thin. Then they can sell us weight loss programs and products. We lose weight, gain it back, feel worthless, get the messaging that we are worthless unless we’re thin and on and on it goes. It can be blatant or extremely subtle, but the point is to keep you edgy and uncomfortable.

Again, as long as there’s money in it, the game will continue.

What would happen if we didn’t play the game? What would happen if we just stopped? What would happen if we women took ownership of our bodies and said “I’m perfect just as I am” and honored our bodies? The answer is, the diet industry would have no reason to exist.

Honoring our bodies is a mindset that says, “I know what my body needs to be healthy and to function properly” and then doing that.

It doesn’t have to be a movement or a protest. It’s simply taking your body back.

We’re not here on this earth to suffer, we’re not here to be controlled by an industry, but that’s what’s happening when we allow ourselves to think we need to behave in a certain way that is contrary to what we know to be true.

By no longer playing the victim and instead taking control, we can make diet culture obsolete and I believe it can happen in our lifetime.