Your Story Is My Story Is Our Story

It's not a coincidence that all of our diet stories sound so similar.

Everywhere I turn this week, I’ve been reading people’s diet stories. Some of them are submissions people have shared with me for my new feature called Dared to Ditch. Others have been on other people’s Substacks, many of which don’t even have diet as their focus. (Side note: If you only read one more thing this week it should be

Anastasia Selby

’s essay “You Have Such a Pretty Face” in

The Unpublishable

.)

Diet culture touches all of our lives in some way, especially us women. And it’s heavily intersected with society’s ideals of beauty. We can quit diets, but as much as we want to, we can’t fully opt out of diet culture. It intersects so many areas of our lives, and unfortunately if you find yourself living outside the lines of what constitutes acceptable, there are real consequences:

Improper medical care, misdiagnoses for legitimate illnesses and diseases, discrimination in the workplace or at school, higher costs for goods and services, and poorer treatment virtually everywhere in the world. 

These consequences also extend to our children.

A fellow Substacker shared with me this week that she wanted to include her diet story but felt like it overlapped too much with the first one I published. I’ve been thinking a lot about that, because I’ve related to every diet story I’ve read this week. This is not a coincidence. If you grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, you remember the fat-free movement, Snackwell’s, Oprah’s first big weight loss, heroin chic, the rise of the supermodel and the rise of the booty. Those of us who grew up in the same era have similar stories because we were influenced by the same diets. While individual details vary, the general themes of our diet stories do not. 

These are collectively all of our stories. The overlap and similarity should be a wakeup call—if we all feel we’re not good enough because we’re not thin enough, not pretty enough, not whatever enough, it can’t really just be all on us. If we all collectively have the same experiences, it tells us these experiences aren’t as individual as we’ve been led to believe. Often, however, we’ve carried so much shame and taken personal blame for these experiences. This is the trap of diet culture. The blame is shifted not from the collective but to the individual. If it’s only you and your personal problem, then the solution rests solely on you. You’re just not dieting hard enough, exercising hard enough, working hard enough. It’s your fault, and you deserve society’s shame. 

Earlier this year, I was part of a women’s multi-author book about the bumpy roads to our biggest successes, and what struck me when I first read the other women’s chapters was how many of them mentioned not feeling good enough. The details and the things that shaped us were all different, but feeling not enough was a thread running throughout. Until that point, I really thought I was alone in my struggle. On the first day I met those women who would be my fellow co-authors, we did something pretty amazing—we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable. On that Zoom session, all of us strangers shed tears as we introduced ourselves and talked about why we were here to write our chapters. That vulnerability showed up in the writing, too. Their stories became my stories.

When we can see these stories as shared experiences, they become less shameful. We can take a step back and see that they’re not really about us. 

I already referenced Brene Brown this week, but in Daring Greatly she identified 12 major shame categories that emerged from her research. Guess what was number one for women? It’s how we look.

“After all of the consciousness-raising and critical awareness, we still feel the most shame about not being thin, young, and beautiful enough,” she writes. 

But why do we feel this way? Brene answers that question early on in the book. Scarcity, our not good enoughism, thrives in shame-prone cultures deeply steeped in comparison and fractured by disengagement. We’re so busy comparing and falling short of everyone else and seeing it as our own personal failing that we’re not able to see that it’s not just us. It’s all of us.

Many of us don’t like the way diet culture makes us feel, but we also don’t feel we have any power to change things. Changing culture takes a critical mass. It takes those of us who have the ability to do so to stand up. It also takes compassion for those of us who can't stand up, for those of us who aren’t yet ready to stand up and for those of us who feel their self-worth depends on maintaining the current balance of power. 

This is why our collective testimony is so important. It’s often the only way to make change, especially when there is a gross inequality in the balance of power. 

Back in my teens, I did advocacy work for Amnesty international, overseeing the high school and college chapters in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I carried with me to college a story I had clipped out of a ‘zine. The story was about someone whose car ran out of gas, and they were stuck on the side of a road somewhere. The driver got out of the car, put the car in neutral and attempted to push it, but it wouldn’t move. Along came someone else walking along, and they joined the driver. Together they put their hands to the bumper, but again the car wouldn’t budge. A few more people joined and still nothing happened. And then a little girl walking her dog came by, and she joined the group behind the car with all the other people, and the car started to roll.

That was such a powerful story for me, because it illustrated how one person can make a difference. And we don’t know when our collective efforts will be the push that changes someone else’s mind. This is why we need to keep telling our stories.

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Share Your Story of Ditching Diets

If you’ve found freedom from dieting, I’d love to share your story so that it may inspire someone else…or simply make them feel less alone. Comment below or reach out at at kristik @ substack.com.

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