Defining and Defying Diet-Culture

And welcome to Good Body Notes!

Hi there.

Welcome to the very first issue of Good Body Notes. I’m glad you’re here; I am glad to have a space where we can dig deeper into the firmament of peaceful relationships with food and body. And I’m pretty giddy to be able to do so without the pressure to perform an out-of-character jig to woo social media algorithms.

My goal is that this newsletter cultivates a space of curiosity and compassion; that, through learning about your body, and food, and beliefs, and values, and self, you experience the Lord’s everpresent peace—a peace that He offers in and through your good body.

Along the way, we’ll likely need to weed out destructive narratives fed to us by our culture—a culture that views bodies as objects to consume and our appearance as a barometer of worth. As it turns out, the gospel of diet culture is quite different from the Word of God.

Through this newsletter we’ll explore a host of topics, like breaking down the latest “health” trends, exploring how to help your kids foster a healthy relationship with food, learning gentle nutrition practices, reflecting on beautiful writing from saints, poets, and scientists, and addressing your top questions through Q&A posts.

It’s going to be great. So, grab a satisfying snack, settle in, and let’s get started.


Defining, and Defying, Diet-Culture

If you’ve come into contact with my work at any point prior to reading this newsletter, you’ve likely heard me bemoan the harms of diet culture. I reference it a lot. Like, a lot a lot. And while there are multiple factors at play here, put simply, I speak about it so much because it is just so dang prevalent, pervasive, and problematic.

In her book, Anti-Diet, Christy Harrison, Registered Dietitian and journalist, aptly defines 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”.

Yikes.

Diet culture is a cultural phenomenon with roots deeply embedded in our history (breaking down this history could be an entire note–or 7–in itself! I recommend reading the previously mentioned book if you’re interested in learning more about these roots). It’s so ubiquitous, that until your eyes are opened to it, you may not have even recognized how overwhelming present it is.

But it is present everywhere.

It is present in the movies we watched growing up, in which our beloved princesses created an impossibly narrow representation of beauty. And in the way that those in larger bodies were consistently cast as the horrendous villain, the punchline of the joke, or just not represented as existing at all.

It’s present in the ways our culture assumes you can simply glance at the size of someone’s body to measure just how healthy they are. And It’s evidenced in the way we applaud the loss of pounds in response to traumas like cancer, COVID, or clinical depression: “I mean, I nearly died, but at least I lost the weight, right?”.

It’s present in sly food marketing that touts empty yet toxic claims like, “GUILT FREE”, “skinny latte”, and “smart choice”.

And It’s present in the ways you’ve grown up hearing the women around you–the women you’ve loved, trusted, and looked up to–cursing themselves as they look with disgust in the mirror, passing on the birthday cake because they’re, “being good today”, and endlessly pursuing to “better” their body, and thereby, in some erroneous math equation, magnify their worth.

And maybe it's also present in the way you think and speak about your own body?
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The fact that diet culture messaging is so rampant in our society is sad, but it isn’t surprising.

The diet industry is a $72 billion industry that cashes in on the insecurity of you, me, our parents and kids, and everyone in between.1

As an added benefit to the pockets filled by others’ body dissatisfaction, many “customers” of the diet industry will become lifetime patrons. This isn’t because of the outstanding services and desirable results, though. In fact, the vast majority of diets will fail. And yet, fueled by shame and the intention to “do better this time”, most people will continue to try again. And again. And again.

But, contrary to what Jenny Craig would have you believe, the problem isn’t you and your lack of willpower. Nor is it the roughly 95 - 98% of others who “fail” at their diets.2,3,4,5 The problem is a system that profits off your failure and insecurities. The problem is the magic pills sold to finally “teach you how to eat” (or more accurately, how to stop eating), but all the while implement barrier after barrier to you actually being able to eat in a way that is peaceful, balanced, nourishing, and pleasurable. The problem is a culture that has taught you to subconsciously believe that the way to earn and prove your worth is through manipulating the size, shape, function, or health of your body.
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We could–and eventually will–dive deep into the way diet culture clashes with the inherent truths of God. There’s an ocean of harm there to traverse. But you should also know that, whether you look through the lens of Christianity or not, dieting and/or following a rigid “lifestyle plan” is not actually helpful for your health.2,6,7,8,9,10 And there is an ever-growing mound of research to prove it.

Obsessing over what you eat, how you move, and how your body looks is bad for you.

It leads to a plethora of unwanted and wide-reaching symptoms, like:
- Losing your ability to notice and honor hunger and fullness cues
- Distorting natural hormone levels, like increasing ghrelin (the “hungry” hormone) and decreasing leptin (the “fullness” hormone)
-  Increased taste and reward stimulation with “forbidden foods” (leading to those, “out of control” experiences),
- Disruption to blood sugar stability
- Perpetrating chaotic eating patterns (for all of the reasons above, plus more)
- Weakened immunity
- Development of gastrointestinal conditions
- Fertility complications
- Chronic fatigue
- Heightened anxiety, and lower capacity to regulate anxiety
- Initiation of fat storage as your body fights to protect you from perceived famine
- Weight cycling, which substantially increases the risk of developing conditions such as heart disease, cancer, and others.

This list is far from exhaustive, and it hardly touches on the damage it causes to your mental health, much less spiritual health.

What I see both in the research, and anecdotally in my practice as a Registered Dietitian, is that internalizing the messages of diet-culture wrecks havoc not only on you physically, but especially on you mentally and emotionally. The overwhelming presence of diet culture in our communities is why 75-90% of women report being dissatisfied with their bodies—a phenomenon so normalized that women’s negative relationships with their bodies were coined as, “normative discontent” by researchers in the 1980s.11 That is, the discontentment women experience with their bodies is so statistically prevalent, that it is now simply expected as a part of the female human experience.

And that breaks my heart.

Because I don’t believe we were intentionally designed and woven into existence for the purpose of moving through life dismayed and distracted by the appearance of our bodies.

I believe we were made to experience life through our good bodies, not to observe and measure the goodness of our bodies as they move through life. And yet, for most of us, living the narrative of diet culture is all we know.

But, part of the indescribable joy of my job is being able to tell people that there is another way.

There is a way to heal your understanding of food so that you can celebrate the gift that it is, while also finding the harmonious groove between nourishment and pleasure.

There is a way to accept and make peace with your today body, while also cultivating a life that is values-driven and health-promoting.
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Sometimes, when people are first exposed to my anti-diet approach, they mistakenly believe that I am also anti-health—that must I reject all basic principles of nutrition, ignore the correlations between lifestyle behaviors and physical wellness, or see no benefit in creating health goals at all.

But that isn’t the case. I do value health. My company is built around my effort to support my clients in reaching their individual health goals. And as a dietitian, a lot of that does involve being curious about their eating patterns, and what gentle shifts might support improved health. But a life-changing lesson I’ve learned is that health is so much more dynamic than the size of our pants, the food that we eat, or the exercise routine we follow.

We are not machines to program or projects to perfect. We are Imago Dei. We are complex, and diverse, and vast.

And when we reject diet culture, we create space to reflect on and identify areas in our life that would benefit from change. We can make shifts in our behaviors and lifestyle patterns that are honoring and life-giving, fueled by compassionate curiosity rather than shame and fear.

I believe that the anti-venom for the toxicity of diet culture is not more will-power and boot-strap pulling, but rather more rest, and permission, and peace. Resting in the reality that we do not have to earn our worth or prove the goodness of our bodies. Giving ourselves permission to trust our God and the bodies He lovingly designed as our earthly homes. And rooting ourselves in the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding (Phil 4:6).

“Okay Shelby, that’s poetic and all, but what does that actually look like in this body-obsessed world?”, you say.

Thanks for asking, dear Reader. *smiles coyly*

I created a whole newsletter to talk about it. There are a lot of layers; there is a lot to say. And in the coming months, I am looking forward to kneeling in the dirt and slowly nurturing that garden of food and body peace with you.

For now, I’ll leave you with a few seeds to hold:

What does it look like to defy diet culture?
- It looks like acknowledging that body diversity is natural, expected, and I believe, extraordinarily beautiful

- It looks like accepting that you probably have less supremacy over the size, shape, and even health of your body than you’ve been taught to believe

- It looks like considering the reality that what you eat and how you move is one small piece of the greater picture of health

- It looks like committing to rebuilding trust with your God-given body

- And one more food-focused point in the name of my “Nutrition Expert” credentials—
It looks like unashamedly feeding your body—feeding it enough, and feeding it often.


More to come, friends.

Resources:

Feeding Humans: Exploring Intuitive Eating, Part 1

This Podcast episode offers more context to the question, “If we don’t diet, what DO we do?” The host is a registered dietitian and certified as an eating disorder specialist. Her podcast often looks through the lens of how behaviors with food impact kids, but the information is still prevalent and focused mostly on an adult listener in this episode.


Nutrition Bite:

Finding yourself feeling out of control with snacks at night? It’s likely that you are not eating enough and/or are eating too rigidly earlier in the day. Clients often describe this experience to me as, “I am so good during the day, but then when I am home at night I have NO control and eat so badly.”

For one, the types of food you eat are morally neutral (kale is no more ‘good’ than cake). And secondly, restrictive eating breeds chaotic eating (restriction = limiting the amount of food OR limiting food categories). The cure isn’t more willpower. It’s more peace and permission with food.  Rather than trying to limit how much or what foods you are eating earlier in the day, try to focus instead on honoring hunger cues and eating rhythmically (eating every 3-4 hours works well for many). This helps stabilize blood sugar levels and hunger hormones that contribute to those “out of control” experiences with food when restrictive patterns are at play.


On my Mind:

These words by poet David Gate:

Whenever we divide our bodies
Into what we like about them
And what we don’t
We mutilate ourselves
You are not an inventory
of body parts
In two columns of pros
& cons
Your body is not a project
With a to-do list
of improvements
& alterations
You are a whole being—
A poem
Whose every single word
Makes meaning


Business Insider:

Good Body Nutrition recently launched a line of merchandise that promotes the heart of our mission–body peace. We launched the products at the recent FemCatholic conference in Nashville, and it was an immense joy to meet and share our mission with women from all over the country! If you were there, please say “Hi” in the comments!

Following the conference launch, you can now find our products for sale at https://www.etsy.com/shop/goodbodynutrition

We would love for you to consider our products as stocking stuffers and Christmas gifts for those in your life that would benefit from a message of body peace.