No, you don’t need to just love yourself more

A post-Valentine's reminder that despite what diet culture says you're enough just the way you are.

Hello readers, I hope you all had a lovely Valentine’s day. I know it’s a made-up commercial holiday, but it’s also a lovely little nudge to celebrate those you care for. This is my love note to you all.

Just a quick reminder, I am looking for people who are interested in sharing their story of quitting diets, and no, you don’t have to be doing everything perfectly. I would love to feature you here in my series Dared to Ditch. Reach out to me at kristi.koeter (at) gmail.com and I can share more details.

Over the holidays, the ghost of Facebook past crept into my feed, a sponsored post from an influencer I used to follow in my hardcore Paleo CrossFit days, and it’s been there ever since. Out of curiosity, I clicked on it. Now, this slim, middle-age white man is pushing a new agenda, promoting discomfort as a virtue and specifically targeting women over 40. His message? If women loved themselves more, they wouldn’t have a weight issue. 

I’m here to count all the ways this kind of messaging is incredibly destructive, not to mention patronizing and sexist.

His core message is that our self-care efforts are worthless because we're inherently "weak" and “comfort-addicted,” succumbing to emotional eating at the first sign of discomfort. According to him, true self-love means rejecting cupcakes, cookies, and junk food. If we only embraced this form of self-love, we wouldn't face weight challenges.

The problem is not a society that prizes thinness. The problem is us. 

We just need to kick our inner voice out of our decision-making.

We just need to stay the course with healthy eating when things get hard.

Rest assured, little ladies, he’s here to save us. 

He has the cure. A course that will knock us out of the comfort zone, with modules on “how comfort addiction hinders self care” and “becoming weakless.” By following his wisdom, you’ll learn “EXACTLY how to navigate temptations to be weak” and “remove your own useless complaints and opinions so you can get out of your own way and do more hard things.”

That’s the gist of his schtick, and here’s where I confess there was a period when I attributed my weight struggles to … no, not a lack of self-love, I would have never bought into that … but to a lack of willpower and discipline. I went through years of eating Paleo and allowing myself to be weighed and measured by my Crossfit coaches. I even embarked on a six-month elimination diet under the guidance of a functional medicine doc, cutting out dairy, wheat, gluten, sugar, and alcohol in a futile quest to determine if a food allergy or bad gut bacteria was to blame for my size. I didn’t lose any weight. Over my years on Paleo, my weight yo-yo’d. I did multiple Whole 30s as resets when my weight crept up. 

I’m too rational a person to believe that my weight “problem” was from a lack of love, but there are plenty of people who are so desperate to lose weight that they will try anything—even this man’s nonsense.

Though he positions himself against the diet industry, his approach is deeply embedded within it, marked by patronizing and sexist undertones. It’s dangerous on a number of levels.

By equating the consumption of certain foods with a lack of self-love and discipline, it feeds right into the old-school diet narrative (pre-Ozempic) that “poor” dietary choices are personal failings. 

By reducing body size to a matter of self-love, or willpower, it overlooks the scientific consensus that weight regulation—like many aspects of our health and wellbeing—are not solely within individual control. 

By suggesting that any form of comfort-seeking through food is a failure, it invalidates the complex and deeply human relationship we have with eating. Food is not just fuel; it is a source of joy, a part of cultural identity, and a means of connection and celebration. 

His perspective fails to recognize that emotional eating can be a normal part of a balanced life and that seeking comfort in food does not inherently signal weakness or a lack of self-discipline. Further, it doesn't acknowledge that some of our so-called emotional eating is a physiological reaction to restriction, to years spent pursuing a size not natural to us.

Finally, it overlooks the importance of addressing the root causes of emotional eating, such as stress, anxiety, or depression, through legitimate treatment modalities—we just need to stop being so weak.

But the biggest failing of his message is that it completely ignores the societal pressure to be thin, which is the root of unrealistic body image standards, negative self-image, and often the cause of disordered eating to begin with.

If we didn’t live in a society that prized thinness over everything else and instead accepted that bodies come in a diverse range of sizes, most of us wouldn’t be pursuing intentional weight loss to begin with. There wouldn’t be a need for his “discomfort program.”

I’m here to call BS. Self-compassion isn’t about loving yourself more to fit a certain mold. It's about recognizing your inherent worth, unrelated to what you eat or body size. You are enough, just as you are, without the need for external validation or adherence to a prescribed standard size.

Now, it’s your turn. I’d love to hear what you think about this topic. Did I miss anything?Are there are additional points I should have considered?