Why Deciding Not to Participate in Diet Culture is an Act of Rebellion

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This post is coming to you from Oregon, where I’m work vacationing with my husband and two of our kids.

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When I first started intuitive eating, I thought I would be addressing my “food issues.” Specifically, I thought I had an issue with food and that my problem was that I ate too much and too much of the wrong foods. Boy, was I wrong about that.

I was following the standard diet rhetoric that tells us the only acceptable standard of beauty is thin. Of course I followed many “wellness” and “healthy lifestyle” diets without ever truly seeing a change in how I looked or felt. At my thinnest, I was wired and tired, and jittery at night. I was constantly running numbers in my head. If I just don’t eat this or only eat this for the next X number of days, I will finally reach my magical goal weight. I couldn’t turn off the voice in my head that said this still isn’t enough. It was a losing battle, because I was starving, and the other dominating thought going through my head was I need food.

Now that I’ve been in the thick of intuitive eating for 10 months, I see that my eating isn’t the problem. Yes, I am still addressing my disordered eating behavior, but I now see it for what it is—a response to a society that equates pursuing thinness as the highest form of virtue.

Before I stopped dieting, not being able to achieve that thinness—despite my ultra strict adherence to it—created a kind of cognitive dissonance and a sense of personal failure and shame. Why, despite following all the rules and exercising more often and intensely than 90 percent of the planet, couldn’t I achieve the body size I envisioned for myself? (This is why I relate so strongly to ultra-endurance mountain biker Alexandera Houchin, who has talked openly about her own struggles to accept her body.)

My disordered behavior was a response to restriction, more specifically the cycle of binging and restriction. Once that goes away, i.e. once you listen to your hunger and satiation cues, you stop routinely overeating. Yes, that’s an oversimplification. For many of us, we have emotional reasons we’re eating the way we do, and they absolutely have to be addressed. Once they are, the “scariness” of eating goes away. It’s quite liberating. 

As I write this, I just finished a challah French toast with blueberry compote, whipped cream and two chicken apple sausages at a hotel in Portland. By finished I mean, I ate as much as I wanted and left the rest. This meal—well, actually the chicken apple sausage—inspired this post. Because in my hardcore paleo days, it was a mainstay of my diet. 

Now, on the face of it, there is nothing wrong with chicken apple sausage. First of all, it's delicious. But for years on the paleo diet, it was one of a handful of my “safe foods.” That entire diet, and its accompanying Whole 30s, was ruled by restriction and promoted by my CrossFit box, which pushed extreme dieting more than any other gym, class or coach I ever had. And I wanted to look like so many of the coaches leading those brutal workouts, so I drank the Kool Aid for a long time. 

But I digress. 

I began a coaching and mentorship study this week with Isabel Foxen Duke, a diet recovery coach and leader within the anti-diet space, and so far, it’s been like pulling back the curtain on my experience with intuitive eating. Yes, there are challenges initially in following the tenets of this anti-diet approach, but getting rid of your old food rules and learning to enjoy food again is the easiest part of moving to an anti-diet approach. The biggest reason detoxing from dieting is so hard is because we’re living under multiple systems of oppression when it comes to our bodies, and doing this training has made one thing crystal clear:

Deciding to not diet or participate in diet culture is an act of rebellion. 

I didn’t know this when I started intuitive eating.

Now to be clear, you don’t have to become an activist just because you stop dieting. But because of how strongly controlling our bodies is drilled into us by society, especially us women, not doing it automatically makes us outliers. Whether you want to actively, loudly participate in the rebellion is an individual choice, but activism has been part of my DNA since my early teen years and is what drew me to journalism. Standing up for what I believe in, advocating for those who can’t advocate for themselves, this is something that drives me.

The seeds for what I’ll do with this newfound knowledge are just now taking shape, and I’m excited by what comes next. 

When I started this journey, I thought I had a “me” issue, but the more I learn, the more I understand it’s not really about me at all. It’s about “we,” and we as a collective, have the power to shake systems and change narratives. 

For those of you still being ruled by food, freedom is possible. It’s never too late. My two favorite places to start are by reading Intuitive Eating by Ellen Resch and Evelyn Tribole and the The F*ck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy by

Caroline Dooner

, who is here on Substack. And if you just want to find food freedom, and not join the activists, that is a worthy pursuit. Just by shifting your relationship with food, you influence those around you. 

Although I don’t see myself as having “food issues” now, I still struggle with food from time to time—I’m still early in my recovery after all. The diet voice is still in my head sometimes. Like this breakfast. When presented with a choice of breakfast options, that voice was there, trying to guide me in the more “healthy options.” In intuitive eating, we call that the food police talking. And, yes, I am mindful of nutrition, but I am still at a point in my recovery where it’s more important to challenge the food police first and give myself permission to eat the food, whatever it is, guilt-free. Fortunately, I’m in a much better place now to make a choice and not regret or punish myself for it. This is progress, not perfection, and there is no punishment for this. 

Cheers!

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