Thanksgiving: Taking the Toxic Diet Culture out of the Holiday

Trigger Warning: Mention of food, body image, and eating disorders.

“The diet starts tomorrow!” 

When I was young, Thanksgiving meant waking up to watch the parade on T.V., making hand turkeys out of paint in class, and stuffing my face with mashed potatoes because I was too picky to eat anything else at the table. My parents would comment on how much I could eat, and I’d feel a sense of pride; I was tall and strong like the adults in my life, and one day I may even be as strong as they are.

I mourn the days when food was merely something that helped you grow and become strong.

I was in fourth grade when my best friend’s mom taught me that food consumption was something to be ashamed of. Looking back, she had an undiagnosed eating disorder, and I empathize with the pain she was going through. But at that age, you follow what the adults in your life do, because they’re older than you and therefore they must know what’s best. Thus, candy and junk food became replaced with carrot sticks and seaweed chips, and, much to my parents’ dismay, I consistently turned down sugary drinks at restaurants because it was bad to “drink your calories,” a message I had heard many times. At such a young age, my relationship with food was already compromised.

Each successive year, all of the fun of Thanksgiving turned into guilt, and I started picking up on adults at the table making problematic comments, disguised as jokes; “It’s good I went to the gym earlier today!” “I didn’t eat all day to make up for this!”  These remarks perpetuated the idea that food was something that needed to be earned because gaining weight reflected failure. Having not done anything that day to “deserve” the meal in front of me, I couldn’t help but feel like I was doing something wrong. 

A holiday that was once created to celebrate family, togetherness, and—let’s be honest, a far-fetched, fabricated lie about the Pilgrims coming to America and totally not committing mass genocide— has become intertwined with a toxic mentality about food and body image. The messages put out by society surrounding this holiday almost always promote disordered eating habits, such as restricting, binging, compulsory exercise before or after a meal, demonizing certain food types, labeling foods as “good” and “bad”, and, on top of that, sometimes these messages are even delivered to you by your own family, right as you’re about to fill your plate.

It is remarkable how much we, as a society, fail to understand about eating disorders. Due to this lack of education, people often tread the line between so-called “healthy” habits and disordered eating, and these toxic behaviors and mentalities become normalized, even romanticized. So many people struggle with eating disorders that don’t even know it because they’re so seldom discussed. 

My experience this Thanksgiving was a lot better than years past because I was able to recognize that the triggering presumptions put out by the people around me are mostly bullsh*t and come from a lack of education on their end, rather than a reflection of my own personal failure. While uncomfortable thoughts of guilt and disappointment in myself still come over me when I eat a meal that I label in my head as “too much”, I’ve found myself improving my ability to redirect my thought patterns, and realizing that these negative feelings are simply a product of a society plagued by diet-culture. However, sometimes it is difficult to escape that overwhelming pattern of thoughts, and for those who can’t seem to break out of this spiral, here are some things that you can remind yourself of:

1. Food is not something that needs to be earned.
2. There is no such thing as “good” or “bad” foods. All of them in moderation provide you with what your body needs. 
3. Calories are units of energy, not units of worth.
4. You are allowed to take up space. 
5. Although it can be difficult, be easy on yourself and take care of yourself.

I can only hope that in the future, eating disorders will be taken more seriously and be less often labeled as “healthy eating habits,” and that this holiday can remove itself from its encouragement of disordered behaviors. 

• empowerment
• food
• fuck diet culture
• mental health