It all started with a diet

So, what is the harm in dieting? As we know, diets (have I mentioned I really do not like this word) are a temporary fix for short term weight loss. Most individuals experience gaining the weight they lost back, plus some. Sound familiar? This continued nonsense of losing weight and gaining it back is referred to as “weight cycling”. Weight cycling is linked to different health outcomes such as increased inflammation, hypertension, insulin resistance, decreased cardiovascular outcomes, and dyslipidemia. Not to mention, dieting can lead to disordered eating and move straight to an eating disorder which can become life-threating.

Okay, enough of the health lesson. I want to talk more about the stuff we DON’T talk about with weight cycling, emotions!! The diet industry is good at creating ways to loss weight short term. If the industry was good creating a diet for long-term weight loss, there wouldn’t be a need for the industry, right? RIGHT! When the diet fails and the weight comes back, the diet industry does a remarkable job at making you feel like a failure and blaming yourself for not keeping the weight off. But who is there for you when you want to lose weight again? That’s right, the diet industry with open pockets ready to convince you of your weak-willed failures and need to try another diet. It is a battle that feels like an emotional roller-coaster.

Speaking of the emotional roller coaster, in those brief times when weight loss is occurring, you start to hear praise and approval from friends, family, doctors, and even strangers. You might wear a smaller clothing size and sit with confidence without covering yourself with your purse or arms. Why is this? It’s because we’ve been brainwashed to see body manipulation as a good thing and even an accomplishment. Cue the “before” and “after” photo celebrating all the ways we adapted to the fatphobic world with anti-fat diet culture talk. But what happens when that after photo starts looking like your before photo? We jump on the emotional roller coaster again and blame ourselves for being “failures”. Now, all those compliments and praise about weight loss is now an insult as our friends, family, doctors, and even strangers think we were better when we were in a smaller body.

Here is the part where diet culture creeps back in. Although we’ve been on the dieting emotional roller coaster more times than we’d like to admit and know that there isn’t a chance of success this time around, we just keep seeking the validation that was given to us for that short period of time when we were smaller than we are now.

So lets stop being part of the cycle for you and your loved ones in our lives. Let’s celebrate YOU at all sizes and validate that you are better than diet culture. Diet culture is harmful physically and emotionally to our bodies and the only way to win is to not play at all.