I Was a Dieter in Disguise. How About You?

After years of jumping from one diet to the next, Valerie hit rock bottom. 

Fed up with the weight-loss roller coaster and obsessing over every morsel she ate, she swore off dieting forever. 

Yet, months after quitting, she still shuns carbs, avoids snacking and seconds, never eats after 6:30 p.m., and runs an extra mile whenever she has dessert.

Valerie is a pseudo-dieter.

She genuinely believes she’s given up dieting, yet she continues to engage in dieting behaviors. 

As a result, she still experiences many of the side effects of dieting, including thinking about food all the time, struggling with intense cravings, feeling out of control with her “trigger foods” (i.e., ice cream and chips), and feeling frustrated, guilty and ashamed when she thinks she’s eaten badly.

Deeply Ingrained
As seen with Valerie, the diet mentality can be so deeply ingrained—or hidden under the guise of “health," "wellness,” "lifestyle" or “biohacking”—that you may not realize you're actually pseudo-dieting and that your restrictive eating behaviors are making you vulnerable to the same physical and psychological damage dieting causes. 

Falling into the pseudo-dieting trap is completely understandable given how prevalent and seductive our diet and wellness cultures are.

Here are some more examples of pseudo-dieting:

• Restricting your eating to include only “clean,” “whole” or “unprocessed” foods.

• Switching from calorie counting to macro counting for weight loss.

• Limiting carb or fat grams regardless of what you want or what your body needs.

• Determining what you deserve to eat based on what you ate earlier or if you exercised, rather than your hunger level.

• Compensating for eating certain foods by doing extra exercise, skipping your next meal or eating less tomorrow.

• Attempting to manage your weight with detoxes and cleanses.

• Allowing yourself to only eat at certain times of the day despite your hunger level.

• Becoming vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, etc. for the purpose of losing weight.

• Bringing your own food to parties so you aren’t tempted to eat anything else.

• Weighing and measuring your food to limit how much of it you eat.

Do you see yourself in any of these behaviors? I certainly do. My own journey included years of pseudo-dieting. Unbeknownst to me, I was a dieter in disguise!

A Dieter in Disguise
After I stopped focusing on calories in/calories out, I became obsessed with only eating “clean” foods. I also unnecessarily cut out gluten and dairy. I never considered any of this dieting. 

Instead, I claimed my restrictions were all in the name of wellness even though secretly my goal was weight loss. I mean, come on. If I thought eliminating gluten and dairy could possibly lead to weight gain, I would never have done it.

As Christy Harrison, the author of Anti-Diet and The Wellness Trap says, "If it involves restricting how you eat, demonizes certain food and is centered around the size of your body, it’s a diet."

Same Adverse Outcomes
Looking back, I can see how my pseudo-dieting resulted in the same adverse outcomes as my more official calorie-counting dieting. 

I still adhered to rigid food rules, fixated on food, skipped social events out of fear of eating “bad” foods, binged on sweets when I let myself have them, got angry at myself when I felt I ate poorly, overexercised to make up for my eating, and so on.

Releasing the Diet Mentality
Just like bona fide dieting, pseudo-dieting can disconnect you from your body inhibiting your ability to hear and honor the messages it’s sending you. 

And, as was the case with Valerie and me, all restrictive eating, no matter what it’s called, leaves you vulnerable to the pitfalls of dieting, from binge eating and weight cycling to food preoccupation and social withdrawal.

Escaping the dieting roller coaster and experiencing true food freedom requires letting go of your diet mentality and relearning how to nourish your body based on its internal cues versus external rules—that is, eat intuitively.

As pseudo-dieting behaviors can be quite subtle and disentangling from our pervasive, insidious diet culture can be very difficult (but not impossible!), it can be helpful to get support from an Intuitive Eating counselor, therapist, dietician or nutritionist so you can truly let go of dieting in all its various forms once and for all.

My Summer Reading List

I’m an avid reader and love losing myself in a good book. 

My reading list is long, and I usually have three different books going at any given moment so I can easily turn to whichever one I’m in the mood for.

Following are a few books regarding diet and wellness cultures, disordered eating, anti-fat bias, body liberation and more that I’m excited to dive into this summer. Perhaps you will be, too.

Please note, I’ve provided links to Amazon but also encourage folks to buy from their favorite independent bookseller or to check out books from their local library.

Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture
Virginia Sole-Smith
This New York Times best seller "exposes the daily onslaught of fatphobia and body shaming that kids face" and offers strategies for navigating our harmful diet culture and weight-stigmatizing world.

Whether or not you have kids, if you’re desiring anti-diet, fat-positive content, I recommend checking out this book as well as Sole-Smith's Burnt Toast newsletter, podcast and online community.

The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation and Dubious Diagnosis and Find Your True Well-Being
Christy Harrison
When I had an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating, I rarely questioned anything I heard and read. If I had been taught, by resources such as this book, to view diet and wellness content through a more critical lens (e.g., Is this fad evidence-based? How solid is the research behind this claim?), I would have saved myself a lot of time, money and unnecessary suffering.

I'm also a big fan of Harrison's first book, Anti-Diet, and recommend it as a great place to start if you're new to this world. 

The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom
Chrissy King
Through a combination of memoir, cultural analysis, exercises and prompts, King guides her readers on an exploration of how racism intersects with the diet, wellness and fitness industries and urges us to aim for body liberation instead of body positivity.

What’s Eating Us: Women, Food, and the Epidemic of Body Anxiety
Cole Kazdin 
Weaving together her personal story with investigative reporting, Kazdin examines how disordered eating has become both normalized and encouraged in our appearance-obsessed, weight-stigmatizing culture and how our flawed treatment systems can hinder recovery.

Recent Reads
I want to also mention two books I’ve recently read that I also recommend: Weightless and Reclaiming Body Trust.

Virtual Book Club, Anyone?
I relish talking to others about the books we’re reading and am considering starting a virtual book club to discuss important works like these. If this sounds like something you'd like to participate in, I’d love to hear from you.

Note: In alliance with the fat-acceptance community, I use fat as a neutral descriptor.

A Birthday Party Wrapped in Diet Culture

What role does diet culture play in your life?

From the bakery line, dinner table and workplace to classrooms, doctors’ offices, TV shows and social media, diet culture is everywhere.

It has become so prevalent, normalized and accepted that it’s easy to not see it or question its impact, including the harm it can cause.

It’s completely understandable if you’re not quite sure what diet culture is. It’s a term a lot of people are unfamiliar with. However, once you understand what it means, you start to see it everywhere, including in your own life.

Diet Culture Defined
So what exactly is diet culture?

In her book, Anti-Diet, Christy Harrison sums up diet culture as:

“A system of beliefs that...

• equates thinness, muscularity, and particular body shapes with health and moral virtue;

• promotes weight loss and body reshaping as a means of attaining higher status;

• demonizes certain foods and food groups while elevating others; and

• oppresses people who don’t match its supposed picture of ‘health.’”

Wrapped in Diet Culture
Harrison goes on to give examples of diet culture, including skipping a birthday party because you’re afraid you’ll have to eat cake.

To further illustrate what diet culture looks like, let’s expand on this birthday party scenario.

Imagine it’s your nephew’s tenth birthday. You don’t want to attend his party because you don’t like how you look and you’re afraid you’ll lose control with the food that’s served.

You decide to go regardless because you love your family and value spending time with them.

On your way there, you listen to one of your favorite podcasts, which is sponsored by a weight-loss program that promises fast results and a detox tea endorsed by a celebrity.

When you arrive, you overhear your mom congratulating a cousin on her recent weight loss because diet culture has taught us to applaud weight loss as if it's someone’s greatest life achievement.

You reflect on how your cousin might feel if she gains the weight back, which inevitably happens to the majority of dieters. You know this all too well having “failed” countless diets over the years.

To avoid any comments your mom might make regarding the weight you’ve gained during one of the most traumatic years of our lives, you head right to the snack table. Once there, you’re relieved to discover a platter of crudité as carrot sticks and bell pepper strips are on your current diet’s green-light list.

While putting some veggies on a plate, your aunt praises you for being such a healthy eater, which is understandable as diet culture has trained us to put healthy eaters on a pedestal.

She goes on to say how bad she is because of all the chips and crackers she’s been snacking on. It’s hard to pay attention to her because you’re distracted with thoughts about how you can sneak some chocolate candy when no one is looking.

As you nibble on your crudité, you scan the bookshelf and observe how many of the diet books you also own. You laugh to yourself as you reflect on how we once believed eating fat was the worst thing we could possibly do. How misguided we all were!

Everyone gathers around when it’s time to cut the cake. You notice your eight-year-old niece is jumping up and down and clapping her hands with excited anticipation, likely because her parents rarely allow sweets in their house because, well you know, sugar is poison.

As cake slices are being distributed, your brother declines a piece because he’s not eating carbs, your mom asks for just a sliver because she’s watching her figure, and your uncle announces while accepting a slice that today is his cheat day.

A neighbor chimes in exclaiming how sinfully good the cake is. She then admits she will need to make up for eating it by working out extra hard later. Many of the guests laugh and nod in agreement.

Meanwhile, you graciously take a piece of cake and then hide it in the trashcan when no one is around because you’re afraid that once you start eating it you’ll never stop.

Leaving the kitchen, you spot your niece quietly slip off to her bedroom with another plate of cake. You see yourself in her as you, too, started sneaking food when you were young to avoid getting in trouble for eating the foods you loved. You understood that eating those "bad" foods made you a bad kid, so of course you didn't want to get caught.

As the party wraps us, your sister-in-law attempts to send the leftover cake and snacks home with everyone because she doesn’t trust herself with all that food in the house, well, except for the raw vegetables.

Some family members talk about getting dinner after the party but your sister declines because she doesn’t eat after 6 p.m. You pass as well because you don’t want to be tempted to eat anything that’s off-plan, especially after being so good all day.

On the way home, exhausted from being so hyper-vigilant about your eating, you stop to pick up a salad because it sounds more appealing than the meal-replacement shake you’re supposed to have for dinner. You end up ordering pizza, breadsticks and a brownie because, understandably, you feel deprived and unsatisfied. While it all tastes delicious the experience is tainted by feelings of guilt and shame. You get angry with yourself for your lack of willpower and self-discipline.

In bed that night you scroll through Instagram looking at before-and-after photos, clean eating tips and bikini-body workouts while promising yourself that tomorrow you’ll get back on track.

Diet Culture's Harmful Impact
While everyone at the party meant well—after all, we all swim in this same toxic stew—most people don’t understand how damaging diet culture can be. The amount of harm and unnecessary suffering it causes is vast, from food fears and body mistrust to weight stigma and eating disorders.

More than anything, it keeps you from focusing on more meaningful, fulfilling things and participating fully in life.

You Can Opt Out
I believe in body autonomy, including the right to diet and eat however you want. However, if engaging with diet culture isn’t working for you, you can opt out.

Although diet culture is pervasive, you can minimize your participation in it, from unfollowing diet-culture accounts on social media and setting boundaries regarding diet and weight talk to reclaiming your ability to eat intuitively and embracing body diversity.

I think you’ll discover, as both my clients and I have, that by opting out of diet culture, you will feel like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders—and you’ll no longer be afraid of birthday parties.

For a deeper dive into diet culture, I highly recommend reading Anti-Diet. For a shorter read, check out this article. Both of these are great resources to share with friends and family members. If you want support with recovering from diet culture, I’m here for you.