Part 2: Breaking Free From Diet Cult-ure
A “diet” is defined as: the kinds of food that a person, animal, or community habitually eats. Alternatively, and more relevant to our discussion, “a special course of food to which one restricts oneself, either to lose weight or for medical reasons”. Notice the verbiage: restrict oneself. Diets are infamous for the classic judgment of foods. This food is “bad”, this food is “good”. These foods are “unhealthy”, these foods are “healthy”. This may sound reminiscent of what we discussed about diets using cult tactics. In this context, however, let’s dive into how these diet philosophies affect you. The diet cult mentality removes your personal autonomy, your personal intuition built into the self-regulating organism that is your body. It is based entirely on convincing you that you don’t know what your body needs, assumes you can’t listen to your body when it prompts you for a certain food, and concludes that you need somebody to tell you (and sell you) what you need to achieve personal wellness. This narrative robs you of the ability to trust yourself and trust your body. It creates a perceived dependency on the diet industry to tell you (and sell you) what is right for you to eat to achieve that ever elusive “perfect body”.
My personal philosophy is not to commit yourself to a restrictive and reductionist diet, but rather to listen to the cues and prompts of your body for foods. Now, while this is easier said than done, the ultimate goal is to reclaim your human intuition of dietary needs, to connect with and be in tune with your body and what it truly needs. Your body is an unbelievably powerful organism, and if we truly think about everything that it is capable of, everything it does inherently and instinctively, we are left awestruck and in true wonder. So, as it pertains to our bodies understanding the fuel, nutrients, and life force they need, wouldn’t it make sense that our bodies would have intuitions and instincts as well? Connecting to these instincts, what we refer to as interoception, and understanding the difference between wants (emotional cues) and needs, and cultivating this ability is how I believe we can truly step off the hamster wheel of diet cult-ure.
In part 3 I will cover the emotional components of eating, talk about my opinion of the ever popular “Intuitive Eating” program as well as some other practices and how we can use these tools as forces for breaking free of diet cult-ure!
