FUCK YOUR DIET KAREN

WOMEN: We’ve learned that our bodies are wrong and we should be constantly trying to change the way it looks. We’ve learned our body defines who we are and that thinness is the only way to be successful and desirable. We can only obtain happiness through the pursuit of thinness and the size our body determines our social currency. 

Treat yourself with respect, kindness and compassion because dieting is actually disrespecting yourself with cruelty and mental abuse. By saying we cannot accept our bodies until we’re a certain weight or size - we are saying that we cannot be happy and we will never feel contentment with who we are EVEN if we get to our ideal weight or size. 

The problem will never be how much you weigh and what your body size is -the problem will always be how we talk to ourselves and how we value our life based off of societies views of what we should look like.

Society has really fucked women up because essentially it has taught us from a very young age that our job as a woman is to constantly be analyzing how we look and improving on it, so that we can be deemed worthy of having sex with a man. We’ve been taught by culture that in order to be happy we need to be coupled and that in order to get coupled we need to look a certain way for a man to actually find us attractive. Women are constantly objectified by men and we have in turn decided that we will objectify our own bodies by constantly analyzing and nitpicking at the things that we do not find attractive simply because society tells us not to find them attractive! 

"My arms are flabby!"

 "My belly sticks out." 

"My thighs are huge and I have cellulite and rolls!" 

"I am a size 16 and not a size 4!"

We have come a long way with women’s rights and liberation from the dominance of man but we still perpetuate this belief that our purpose on this earth is to make a man happy. And in order to make a man happy we need to look beautiful and sexy and appealing. We spend every single second of every day mirror checking and meal planning and scheduling when we will go to the gym. We come up with all of these diets that we need to try to constantly try to manipulate and distort our bodies- we spend tons of money on clothing and make up and cosmetic surgeries in order to improve how we look so that we can be labeled as attractive. OBVIOUSLY that’s what women were put on earth by God to do was to be attractive sex objects for men!!!! When we realize that this is the myth that we’re buying into, suddenly you feel like "What? I’ve been betrayed my whole life thinking that these were normal thoughts and these were normal behaviors." That is because it was engrained in our upbringing and was constantly perpetuated in society and culture.

Currently society likes to sprinkle the word "health" onto it, but it is still DEEPLY rooted in our fear of being unattractive. Our culture teaches us our purpose is to be desirable not just to be who we are.

Diet culture denies us the ability to exist peacefully in our own bodies because it tells us something is wrong with it. The truth is your body is something you can never change about yourself. 

For most of my life I’ve been encouraged to shrink my body and told that the way I was was not good enough and I’ve spent years struggling to change my size and hating myself for not being thin. In all the time I spent trying to reach societies version of the ideal woman, I was denying myself the ability to love and appreciate the person I truly am.

It’s not peaceful to live your life in restriction and shame. You have to give up your power to a meal plan, you need to ignore your bodies own natural signals, you have to be perfect or close to it- you have to have an ideal way of eating and exercising and meet the ideal of how you should look. This goes against our humanity - it doesn’t allow us to be free, imperfect, self determined people. This is not the experience I want to have anymore. I want to experience my body, experience my life, and experience the world. 

This obsession with losing weight and thinking I’m not acceptable because I’m a certain size interferes with my ability to be human! How can you be happy by obsessing over your food and scrutinizing every day under the lens of how “perfect” or “good” you were based off diet culture rules?

 The work and mental energy it takes to constantly pursue weight loss and maintain it will suck the life out of you. 

Your choice to participate in diet culture is not made in a vacuum - it’s been influenced by others and women are taught that we should control our bodies to be acceptable. It’s woven into the fabric of our society and it’s EVERYWHERE! My seven year old daughter came home last night and told me that her friends mom was on a diet and so she had to go on the diet with her mom but that she snuck a cherry sprite in her water bottle. At seven years old diet culture is already part of the dialogue between girls. 

When I started my "health" journey I said it was about my daughter - about teaching her healthy habits and not letting her grow up obese like I did. And then I WOKE THE FUCK UP and realized I refuse to teach my daughter to hate her body or to control her weight so she is more desirable physically. 

I will not spend the rest of my life being concerned about being fat or worried about what I can I eat and when I can workout. I refuse to be 60 years old still spending tons of time and energy hating my body and controlling it and I refuse to pass that mental and emotional task on to my child. She will see and hear diet culture from her friends and from the media - but she will not see and hear diet culture from her mom. I won't be dieting or weighing myself or discussing my size or labeling anything about my body as bad. I will not be labeling anything I eat or don't eat as bad. I refuse to sell the lie that women's role is to be as thin and beautiful as possible no matter the cost.