Food freedom: Release dieting and embrace deep nourishment
It’s time to detox from patriarchy’s hold on women through wellness culture.
The beginning: Diet culture indoctrination
Trigger warning: fatphobia and eating disorder mentions
Read if: you’ve ever struggled with your body size and dieting or if you know a teenager who is.
I’ve struggled with food and body image since I was about 13 years old. I grew up in Sweden and studied at a private school from 4th to 9th grade in a program that incorporated dance and drama into its curriculum (emphasis on the drama).
Imagine 27 girls and 3 boys in front of a big mirror several times a week. Next, imagine that the majority of the girls are petite or in thinner bodies and you are 5’11. Also, imagine having a mom who weighs herself daily and makes constant comments about her belly fat. Who brings sandwiches without butter for a snack and who openly feels like fat bodies are less good than thin bodies. (This is not to blame my mother, but to describe my experience as a teen.)
Sprinkle in consuming magazines and TV shows that only show able-bodied, mostly white, thin, hetero love stories, but above all DIET messages, and you have set the stage for a 15-year-old girl with an unhealthy obsession with maintaining a specific number on the scale — ME.
By the time I was 19, weight and my body size took up the majority of my thoughts and focus.
Food was the first thought in the morning and the last at night (I didn’t eat too much - Good Girl. I ate too much - Bad Girl, I start again tomorrow!). I counted calories, obsessed about how many cashews to have for my snack, worked out to get rid of fat, power-walked at 5:30 am, popped diet pills, binge ate when drunk (Ah, the white Swedish Kebob sauce), and ate lettuce-wrapped burgers because carbs were the devil, weighed myself every morning, and dreamed about a flat stomach WITHOUT a natural curve at the bottom.
I had these kinds of thoughts often ⬇️
The breakthrough: Eating psychology opened my eyes to changing my relationship with food
In 2009 I became a Holistic Health Coach, while I was still struggling with disordered eating and food obsession but was lucky to meet my husband who accepted me as I was and I began eating more food and being less obsessed with thinness. Turned out I was eating too little, so I was in starvation mode all the time, and my body held on to weight, so I actually lost weight by eating more. I was in HEAVEN.
In 2012 I became an Eating Psychology Coach and learned about the side of food that’s not so much about what we eat as how we relate and THINK and FEEL about food. My mind was blown. I dove headfirst into the practices of slowing down and healing my RELATIONSHIP with food. In the company of like-minded women, I made some serious headway. Through my two pregnancies, I was fortunate enough to have enough tools and supportive beliefs to not get triggered and develop body image issues and dieting triggers during pregnancy, which happens to some women. (But I also advocated for myself by not always weighing myself at the midwife’s office and rejecting some diet mentality projected on me by my second midwife.)
Me, pregnant with my first child in 2015.
Before the pandemic, for the most part, I felt I had achieved a pretty healthy and stable way of being with food. I had my healthy foods 80% of the time, ate mostly what I wanted the other 20% of the time, was “gluten-free”, worked out 3 times a week, incorporated lots of healthy fats, and did a cleanse spring and summer that would take off whatever extra pounds that had snuck up on me — As you can see, I thought I was freaking set.
The breaking point: Allowing fat to exist and accepting myself instead of dieting
Then the mother-f pandemic rolled around. I moved across the country. All my habits were out the window. I was bored. I was stressed. I had anxiety. And I gained weight.
Gone was the woman who thought she had moved past all disordered eating. I had fat. On my body. And that was no good.
(Disclaimer: I’m still in a body size where I get most all thin privileges. I am here to share my story of overcoming fatphobia and diet culture brainwashing.)
So I did the only reasonable thing I could think of, I called my bestie Soshy Adelstein who’s an expert on expelling diet CULTure from your mind and how to make peace with food.
I decided to do the unthinkable. Instead of just making sure I lost the weight by just doing what I know how to do: diet. I decided to heal the root of my pain directly. So after 9 years of knowing her and thinking I din’t need her work, I enrolled in Soshy’s 6-week group coaching program called Food Freedom Camp.
I’m in week 2 now and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry because it’s allowed me to finally understand the injustice that has been done to me, and IS being done to women and – most importantly – to teenage girls every damn day.
I escaped the most serious expressions of diet culture, anorexia, and bulimia by a hair. But some of my friends were not as “lucky”. While I believe you can heal from your eating disorder, I know by experience, reading formal research, and from old friends who suffered from disordered eating that it’s common for stressful times (like a pandemic) to trigger old challenges with food and body image even if you’ve had periods where it’s been less of an issue.
The trap: Social media’s impact on mental health
But I honestly don’t know where I’d be right now if I’d grown up a teenage girl in today’s age of social media. And I fear for the mental wellbeing of our girls. We know teenage girls are more susceptible to mood disorders like anxiety and depression as well as eating disorders*. And social media is making this much, much worse. I speak weekly with mothers who are trying to help their self-harming teenage girls.
Image from Ms. Magazine article of @TheBirdsPapaya on IG
(*As far as eating disorders go, it’s far more complex than it being a cultural phenomenon, research shows it’s a complex problem of biological, psychological, and cultural factors. See the article at the bottom.)
When it comes to teen mental health, it’s the same as with climate change, we are not heading toward the iceberg, we’ve already hit it and are trying not to sink. Something HAS to change.
I’ve been feeling overwhelmed with all the problems we’re facing as a world of traumatized humans, and I know I can’t do it all. And certainly not on my own.
But here’s what I do know: Women are incredible sources of resources, love, power, resilience, joy, strength, and pure potential.
And any change I want to see in the world has to start with me.
I am so proud of myself for finally being brave enough to get the support I need to face my own:
Fatphobia
Mental and physical deprivation of myself and my body’s hunger
Internalized diet culture beliefs
Ways I’ve given away my power to food by labeling it “good” or “bad”
I wish from the bottom of my heart that every woman alive could go through this program. In it, Soshy weaves together the fabric of WHY we’re having to endure the torture of living in a diet culture (which of course hits women of color hardest), HOW to detoxify from it, and how to RECLAIM our bodies’ innate wisdom and intuition.
In short, I am learning to TRUST being in a body and being a human that needs food and gets hungry.
Wonderful human, as you’re reading this, are you getting that feeling in your bones that this is so much bigger than shedding a few pounds? (Over and over again.)
The truth is the $20B+/year diet industry that is fueling diet culture wants us to believe that it’s just concerned for our health… When in reality it wants to OWN us. Make us obsess about our bodies while it consumes our money, time, self-worth, and mind. It’s the ultimate vampire.
Since my teenage years, the diet industry has sneakily rebranded itself as “Wellness culture”. And appears as innocent as a spirulina and cacao-infused kale smoothie but is as deceptive as a carob peanut butter cup.
I did not want to face it.
I wanted it to be true that I could transcend my aging, mortal body by consuming only the healthy “good” foods and staying away from the packaged “bad” foods and it would somehow protect me. It would ensure that my body stayed slim so I would not slide down the metaphorical totem pole and above all – it would keep me “safe”.
But now I do. Why? Because I am hellbent on setting myself free from any patriarchal influences on my life. I am taking back my power from diet culture, food moralizing (good/bad), and fatphobia — and I want to invite you to come with me.
If this is of interest to you I recommend this article from Ms. Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
“Diet culture forces individuals, notably women, to center their lives around their physical appearance. It additionally promotes an unachievable physical appearance while offering a vast array of products—paradoxically promoting the idea that one can achieve the unachievable. In conclusion: It is one, big, patriarchal scam.”
So, I gotta ask… Are you wanting to set yourself free from diet culture and the diet cycle?
I would love to hear from you about how this landed for you, write me any time!
In the meantime I want you to know: You are not alone. It’s NOT your fault. You can take your power back (even though it will hurt). You can feel safe with ALL foods again. And you can nourish your body instead of controlling it.
All my love,
Karna 💜
Note: This article is NOT meant to tell women what to do. If a woman decides she wants to diet, be a bodybuilder, a marathon runner, WHATEVER, I support that decision.
Body Positive Accounts on IG
@SoshyAdelstein
@Uncomfortable_Bliss
@TheFriendINeverWanted
@FitFatAndAllThat
@DietitianAnna
Article excerpts of interest for this article:
Eating disorders: Why are girls more affected?
“It’s tempting to see it just as a cultural phenomenon or a socio-cultural phenomenon, but I think when we get to it and we really have the tools to understand it, we’re going to see that it’s a complex interaction between the biology of being female, the biology of being female at puberty, as people go through that phase of life, and the cultural factors.
We do know that objectification of women and premature or early sexualization of women is a risk factor for psychiatric illness in girls and women, so I think that’s going on in eating disorders. It’s undoubtedly true that there is a culture that promotes a thin body ideal which does get internalized and we can see that as girls who are somehow “falling prey” to the culture. One way we’ve discounted eating disorders and minimized them is to say, “Oh, those girls are sort of weak, they gave into the culture somehow.” But it’s a potent factor. It’s not like the culture is outside of our heads. If you grow up in a culture it ends up being the way we evaluate ourselves, and it has a direct influence on that, and there’s a lot of research that shows that internalization of the thin body ideal is a real potent risk factor for developing an eating disorder.
I think for a clinician, even more importantly, it shapes the recovery environment for our patients. If you’re a woman who’s recovering from an eating disorder, you’re recovering in an environment that’s basically telling you that you’re wrong to get better. If your goal is to gain weight, and you’re living in a culture that is massively promoting the exact opposite, it takes a lot of wherewithal to swim against that. Managing the recovery environment is a potent factor in eating disorders treatment.”
The Unplug Collective explores how diet culture is rooted in anti-blackness
“But what became very clear is that in our research, especially the BMI, and we've done a post on this, but the BMI is something that's used by doctors that originally was not meant to be used by doctors. It was actually made by a white astronomer who decided that the white European people that he sampled at the time were representative of the entire population. And so, he made up these rigid categories of underweight, ‘overweight’…But he made up these arbitrary categories and put these weight kinds of spectrums on those categories. And we're seeing now that four out of five Black women actually are considered ‘overweight’ by the BMI. It’s very clear that, based on the standards of the BMI and the colonial standards and…just the ways in which women are told that we need to look, it doesn't necessarily line up with the ways that Black women's bodies naturally…some black women's bodies naturally sit, where their set point actually sits. So, that's another entire concept, which is weight set point theory, which is also something we're exploring. And a lot of these ideas are countered and hidden by the diet industry, because the diet industry is one of the highest grossing industries there is.”
Mood disorders and teenage girls
“Anxiety and depression occur in both genders, but by the teenage years, girls are much more at risk than boys. Before puberty, the prevalence of mood disorders is about the same in boys and girls—3 to 5 percent. But by mid-adolescence girls are more than twice as likely to be diagnosed with a mood disorder as boys, with the prevalence at adult levels, 14 to 20 percent.”
Whistleblower's testimony has resurfaced Facebook's Instagram problem
"The choices being made inside of Facebook are disastrous for our children, for our public safety, for privacy and for our democracy. And that is why we must demand Facebook changes," Among the documents released are studies showing that Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012, negatively affects young users' mental health, particularly young girls. According to one Facebook study leaked by Haugen, 13.5% of U.K. teen girls said Instagram worsens suicidal thoughts. Another leaked study found 17% of teen girls say their eating disorders got worse after Instagram use.”
If you liked this post share it with a friend! I’m eternally grateful for your support.