Dear Diet Culture:
I know we broke up a long time ago, but I’m still mad.
You lied to me. Viciously. Purposely. You told me that in order to be enough, likeable, loved, that I had to be super thin or have a perfect body. Diet culture, you intentionally made me believe that by ignoring my hunger signals and my body’s needs I would attain this perfection. Pumping me full of the idea that carbs are bad and sugar is addictive, I marched to your dictates for decades.
I believed your lies.
I was so controlled by you that I held prejudices against people in larger bodies because that’s what you said to believe. Thinking that you were there to teach me the right way, I counted calories, denied myself my favorite foods for years, and obsessed over eradicating every last bit of cellulite from my rear end.
Breaking up with you was excruciating.
The science showed me that you were there and had been lying to me for decades, but your messages were still in my head. Every step forward with Intuitive Eating I could feel you pulling me back to the beliefs that carbs would make me fat or that I wasn’t a good person at a higher dress size. It took years and plenty of therapy to let go of your messages in my head.
Now
Now I watch bright young minds being pumped full of the same diet culture lies. Many of them become my clients trying to find a way to break free of your lies, too. The once funny, loving, curious minds of young teens corrupted by your ways turn hardened, bitter, hopeless by submitting to your demands. It breaks my heart, and spurs me on to keep doing the work that I do in hopes that some day fewer young minds will be corrupted.
This January, when so many people will be pulled toward diets, I offer you this final letter of emancipation. I am mostly free. Your messages only pop in my head occasionally, and now I know exactly what they are. They mean that I am stressed or tired or that something emotional is going on with me. Because, now I never believe your lies.
Now, I choose freedom. Freedom to eat cake, like my body, exercise for the pure joy of it, and ignore diets forever. I’m never looking back, you creep.
Sincerely and forever,
Erin Wesley
