How did you unlearn diet culture?

harper16 wrote: »

The original post is from April, and the OP hasn't been back on since May.

🤷🏻‍♀️ Still good to think about from time to time. Maybe someone else reading needed to read what’s been said.

I think this post plays into what I consider one of the traps, in pursuing a weight management goal (and a lot of other goals, frankly).

In cartoon extremes, I think people have a choice between thinking of weight management as

(A) An n=1 science fair experiment, one about balancing portions, calories, nutrition, satiation, and one's own behavior/habits. This is an experiment in which we individually completely control or at least materially influence all of the important variables. Change is in our reach, if we reach. (Doesn't mean it's completely easy.)

(B) A dramatic fight between good and evil, with something like "diet culture" or "manipulative food companies" cast as the villain, and the hapless person who's trying to lose weight as a victim of those titanic forces. IMO, this focuses attention on things we can't control, and is on a slippery slope to a sense of victimhood rather than empowerment.

(C) A dramatic battle between competing forces, all of which live inside the head or body of the person who's trying to lose weight. I'm not a big fan of mind/body duality as a concept, so the idea that "my hormones are getting the better of me" (or the like) kind of doesn't make sense. My hormones may be a problem I need to solve, if I can, but my brain and body are all one thing. What I actually do is what I really wanted to do, unless someone has a gun to my head, and to me thinking otherwise is a bit of a dodge. (Making the decisions that are in my best interest can be really, really hard, and it sometimes doesn't happen. Not pretending otherwise. Still was a decision, though, even when I do the suboptimal thing.)

I like case A, personally. It's empowering. It focuses on the things we're most able to control/change, and doesn't waste energy on catastrophizing about things that aren't going to change on a realistic time scale for individual weight loss (such as fast/junk food availability, or our family's attempts to influence us).

I'm not pretending it's always easy to control our own thoughts and behaviors. It can be really tough. It can require professional assistance. It certainly requires *hard* analytic self-assessment, and honesty with oneself, learning about techniques and maybe some science, and exercises some character traits like persistence (which can themselves take work to develop). Thing is, working on mastering our own self - thoughts and behavior - is super powerful, and creates skills that can be deployed in other areas, like personal finance, career progress, education, skills development and more.

I don't like the "overcoming diet culture" frame in the OP, when I think the long-gone OP is really trying to come to terms with taking steps that she knows are the best course. Recognize that we have agency and power, take the wheel, and drive. It's not "overcoming diet culture", it's learning to master one's own thoughts and behavior.

So, I think the penultimate question in the post (which is really 2 questions) is reasonable, and potentially useful:

So my question is, did you have to break out of the low calorie = weight loss mentality and if you did and increased your calorie intake, did you start to gain your weight back again?

The ultimate question, the bonus question is . . . not a helpful frame, IMO.

Bonus question: Was it tough unlearning diet culture to start eating more?

I mostly don't like really old threads being revived, though there are exceptions. This is because some (many) threads from years back include huge amounts of really poorly-reasoned, poorly-evidenced posts, often pages of them at the start of the thread. This one isn't terrible, in that respect.

My inference would be that the average experience level and science-centric-ness of the culture has improved over the years. Some of the 2014ish posts' threads are *really* bad. Even if they recover in lataer posts at the end, a lot of people are going to read the nonsense at the start, and buy it, because the same junk is still being spread by diet-plan marketers, blogs, newsletters, print/video media, and social influencers. Ugh.