How Does Being Pissed Off at Diet Culture Impact Your Health?

I first realized I had a challenging relationship with food back in 2012-2013. Before that, I thought everything I did to diet and exercise was "normal".

When I started to consider that maybe I had a disordered relationship with food, I found Intuitive Eating. This lead me down a path toward body positivity, body acceptance, Health at Every Size, and fat activism.

It all began with recognizing and rejecting diet culture.

Specifically, rejecting diet mentality is principle one in the Intuitive Eating paradigm.

It was very important and necessary for me to understand the history behind how our world views bodies and how diet culture has influenced bodies through time.

It was eye-opening to see how I viewed food and how someone without a diet mentality would view food. It made a lot of sense.

What I learned helped me to have more compassion for myself and for everyone else who struggles with food and body issues.

But then something else happened.

For several years, I got stuck in a paradigm of defensive anger toward diet culture.

This anger was part of my healing. However, this shift was meant to be a stepping stone, not the final destination.

The anger was necessary so I could stop beating myself up and blaming myself for what my body had experienced.

It was necessary so I could see how I had been manipulating myself to try to meet other people's expectations.

It was necessary so I could let go of what other people thought and I could turn inward to learn more about myself.

But something was bugging me.

Two things actually.

One, I still didn't feel good in my body. And two, I was still blaming something else for my experience. I moved from blaming myself, to blaming the world, but I was still playing the blame game.

To work on feeling better in my body, I kept exploring topics around healing our relationship with food and body. I looked at the issue from every possible angle I could imagine.

I looked at it physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

I listened to Doctors talk about our bodies, fitness professionals, body-positive activists, energy healers, and more. They all had great points to make.

I started to realize that while diet culture is incredibly flawed, the desire to want to have more vitality and feel good in my body was normal and natural.

I no longer see wanting to be fit as "healthism" and it's not internalized fatphobia to have concerns about my weight.

I get to choose what is good for my wellness.

While studying healing modalities I also realized I have a real desire to truly understand how our bodies work and what impacts our health and vitality.

I learned about mind-body medicine and the body's incredible ability to heal itself.

I learned about duality and unity consciousness. I learned about energy and trusting my intuition.

I also learned about presence and the "now moment" and how my egoic patterns were impacting my choices.

I was feeling freer emotionally and spiritually, but not yet physically. What still needed to happen?

That's when I realized that while moving into non-diet culture was illuminating, I was still allowing the energy of blame to move through my body.

You can't have a reaction to something without that energy moving through your body first. If you are angry with someone, the energy of anger moves through you first.

If I wanted to stay mad at diet culture and continue to blame it for my experience, that is the energy that would be moving through my body.

That would take my power away and leave me feeling helpless about my own health care.

As any energy worker knows, the vibration of shame, blame, or helplessness is not very high. Staying in that energy was not serving me.

Intuitive eating and the non-diet world are very helpful because they are stepping stones closer to a world of acceptance and allowing. Those are positive energies that I did want to experience in my body.

But I also wanted to let go of anger and stop blaming diet culture for my experiences. I don't want to fear a scale and let it have power over me. I want to own the scale no matter what it says.

I started to take stock of my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. I started to take 100% responsibility for my choices.

I took my power back and knew that forgiveness and letting go was the best way to support my body's healing.

I started to see with love how everything I had done up until that point was an attempt to take the best care of my body that I knew how.

I was trying to take care of myself when I was dieting and I was trying to take care of myself when I left dieting and embraced a non-diet paradigm.

In the end, what serves me best is not belonging to any particular paradigm or external belief system.

I am creating my own belief system with what I know is possible for me.

I am making the choices that work for me whether they seem "diety" or whether they fit the non-diet paradigm. It's not what I do, but the energy with which I do things that matters.

The past is the past. What is important now is how I want to live in my future. If I keep looking back to figure out what happened or make meaning out of my past, I'm going to keep creating the same present-moment experience.

It's only by letting go of the past and making changes in the now that I create a new future for myself. A future filled with vitality, strength, and infinite possibilities.

That's what feels good to me - making conscious choices from the energy of compassion and joy. And this is what makes my body stronger in the end.

What energy is creating your reality?