Dear Diet Culture Letter: Recovery is Messy

Dear Diet Culture,

It’s me, Sunday.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much you suck, especially right now. You see, 2020 has been a really tough year so far and things generally keep getting worse. But, you may already be aware of this because after all, you are the culture that we exist in.

You expect perfection and have no grace.

You offer promises, during a particularly vulnerable and trying time in history, that losing weight will mean that dreams will come true if only a person can afford a program or join a “lifestyle” group or cut down on their food intake or count their “macros.” It’s nonsense, but it sells.

You dangle “wellness” in front of people so that they are distracted while you advertise that love, happiness, fulfillment and purpose is just around the corner as soon as they “commit.”

Currently, when people desperately need grace, compassion, love, energy, power, presence and connection, you are busy trying to take that away from them, offering them in exchange a different body or life. You offer no space for messiness or for learning.

You tell people that they need to fight and pay for the acquisition of that which they were born deserving of: love and connection.

Your promises of feeling better, looking better and being better because of a change in body size or a change diet is absurd, but pervasive. You have taught people to think, “if only I can be/think/look/move/eat/etc. like that, then I would feel/have/be loved/etc. the way I desire.”

You appeal to people’s most vulnerable parts of what it means to be human and then capitalize on it, making tons of profit.

Diet Culture, you demand that people shrink themselves physically, emotionally and spiritually. You don’t all them to show up fully in this life, messy bits and all. And I am not going to accept it, not even during a global pandemic, a civil rights movement, and a very important upcoming presidential election.

Sincerely,

Sunday, aka your most friendly non-diet Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that practicing vulnerability and messiness in a world and (diet) culture that tells you that you don’t matter and that the only way to matter is to shrink yourself, your ideas, your values and your thoughts, is an act of COURAGE. You are needed, stay with us.