Do you find yourself gravitating back to diet culture even though you know it’s soul-sucking? Let’s dive into the false sense of safety that diet culture brings and how to uncouple the food and rejection dynamic.
Diet culture creates a psychological container of how to eat and a physical container that is your body.
This creates structure and boundaries within which we eat and do life. We count the calories, the steps, the points in order to stay within the container of diet culture.
Dieting also creates a false sense of felt safety from that container. As humans we all need that felt sense of safety. The issue becomes when something, such as dieting that isn’t beneficial to us, is what is creating that sense of safety.
How are we Affected by the Food & Rejection Dynamic
The physical container that diet culture uses is your body. If we use our body has a means to express our feelings about belonging because of rejection, this is where our food becomes coupled with our rejection.
Many times this is where people say ‘peace out’ to the intuitive eating journey.
The process may have felt great at first but you’ve hit a wall.
There’s no more numbness around bingeing, restricting or over-exercising and you being to feel all that diet culture kept at bay.
The intuitive eating process becomes challenging here when you feel a lot of emotions you may have no felt before or in a long time, you’re maybe not losing weight like you would want to be and the thought comes,…
‘I may as well just go back to dieting.’
Because we know that with dieting ‘X’ equals ‘Y’ OR you are at least giving the appearance of trying to do something with your weight and body.
This is where we learn that our food, body, intuitive eating journey is not a program. It’s your life. This is where we get to grow the capacity and resiliency for long-term growth.
How Do We Move towards Wholeness?
Behavior modification, as seen in dieting, isn’t enough. As humans walking through life with hurts, trauma, rejection, etc., we need a felt sense of safety or we’ll go back to what we’ve known. This is why we see so many people continue to go back to dieting even when they know it’s soul-sucking.
By taking one thing at a time (hunger and fullness work, the negative self-talk, etc.) and you begin to unglue yourself from the emotions, you can begin to see that the emotions aren’t congruent with reality. Food can truly be food. Movement can simply be movement and our emotions don’t need to be wrapped up within them any longer.
Breaking Diet Culture Hierarchy
Diet culture hierarchy says that some bodies are higher (better) and some are less.
That if I don’t eat the right foods or lose the weight then I am somehow inferior.
Don’t believe that lie, friends.
Let’s put in the work, even the hard and unseen work, to walk in true freedom and wholeness that we’re meant to live in.
