Diet culture promotes the detrimental idea that health can be evaluated using weight and physical appearance, and places a moral code on food that results in shame when eating is done “wrong.” There’s nothing necessarily bad about wanting to be healthier, but generally speaking, a restrictive diet will not help long-term (unless you have a medical reason like, for instance, an allergy).
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Diets are based on what you don’t have, because of this there is no way to win a diet. Sadly, in the midst of a diet, we tend to dwell on the things we lack, in this case, either a desirable weight or desirable foods. However, this is a faulty narrative. When we eliminate the idea of weight loss as a way to better ourselves, we can free ourselves from destructive thought patterns about food that hurt us in the long-run.
Diets are designed for you to fail. The diet industry is worth around $70.3 billion dollars. They are designed so that dieters will eventually fail, and then try the newest fad diet. The concept is that dieters will return over and over. Diet culture produces a cycle of shame to force us to spend on a made up problem. Diets are a perverse contradiction based on guilt to separate you from your money.
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Calories are simply a unit of energy for your body to use, not a moral code to live your life by. There is no need to place a moral code on food; food is not good or bad it just is. Getting rid of this fallacious dichotomous thinking can promote body acceptance. Food is full of things you need to live daily life. All your body knows about food is the macronutrients it breaks down into. I’ll admit that some are more efficient than others but none of them are bad— we need all of them to live a healthy balanced life.
Many of us start diets to gain a sense of control in our lives and avoid other issues. Food and weight at first glance appear to be a factor we can control in our lives. However, this is counterintuitive, the more we try to control these factors the more we realize we do not have much control over them, and end up more stressed than we started out as. Dieting is linked to lower self-compassion, which in turn is linked to psychological wellbeing. While you might look “better” (i.e. thinner) on the outside you’re hurting your mental health by dieting. Life is short, eat food that makes you feel good.
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When I first started listening to my body’s cravings, I ate a lot of candy and packaged foods. Once I realized that I could have them whenever I wanted, they became less alluring. Now, I eat whatever I feel like having. This has resulted in me eating more vegetables than before, because I feel my best when I do. I enjoy my life more, and find only pleasure when I eat what I used to consider “bad” foods, instead of getting caught in a cycle of guilt and shame afterward. In fact, dieters had more frequent and harder to resist food cravings than non-dieters.
Listening to your body will help you find peace with food. There is no battle to be won when it comes to food. Eating based on the cues that your body gives you is the most sustainable way to live a happier life. It may take some time to learn to listen to what your body is trying to tell you, but the payoff is worth it.