Is It Just Me Or... Does Anyone Else Miss Something about Diet Culture?

If you read the title of this newsletter and thought oh no, Megan’s soul has been possessed by the spirit of Sylvester Graham, 19th Century diet guru and inventor of the wholewheat cracker, allow me to reassure you: there are lots of things that I don’t miss about diet culture in the slightest. To name a few:

• I don’t miss jumping on a hunk of metal every morning and allowing whatever number pops up to dictate my mood for the rest of that entire day (also, my bathroom feels a lot more calming without the looming presence of inevitable disappointment in the corner).

• I don’t miss conversations about how to trick yourself into believing you’ve eaten dessert when actually you’ve eaten some weird fat free whipped cheese with lemon juice and Splenda.

• I don’t miss turning down actual real life events and opportunities to make memories because I’m so worried there won’t be anything on-plan on the menu, or I might not be able to squeeze enough sit-ups into the day if I go.

• I don’t miss dieting. Like, at all.

But sometimes, on days when life feels especially overwhelming or confusing, when I just can’t figure it out and I’m filled with seemingly unmanageable emotions… I miss the simplicity of dieting being the answer.

When I was younger you could hand me any situation, and I would be able to twist reality into the narrative that my body was the problem, and dieting was the solution. It was quite impressive, really. Almost magician level stuff.

Haven’t yet found the love of my life to adore and cherish me for all of eternity? Obviously because there’s bumps on my thighs.

Terrified at the prospect of deciding what to do with my life? Where to live? What to study? How to make a living? Well, it’ll all become clear 25lbs down.

Have a deep, gnawing feeling that something is missing and it makes you so sad that you can’t sleep at night? Nothing washboard abs can’t fix.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we live in a world that provides very real, tangible rewards for playing by the rules of diet culture. The closer you get towards the beauty standard the higher chance you’ll be represented, celebrated, seen as desirable. Hell, even just treated with baseline respect and granted bodily safety (a right that often isn’t afforded to fat, trans, disabled, non-white or older bodies).

There really is a buffet of privileges that the beauty standard promises to those who are willing to play the game (dieting doesn’t deliver on them long-term for the majority of players, but that’s another story). However, that isn’t what I’m talking about here. Because diet culture doesn’t stop at selling us those rewards.

Diet culture doesn’t say “Hey! If you lost a few dress sizes people might be nicer to you and you’d see yourself represented in traditional media!” Diet culture says “Hey! If you lost a few dress sizes everything will fall into place and you’ll be living the life of your dreams!”. Diet culture sells the carefully crafted illusion that there is one simple answer to everything. And that’s what makes it so fucking seductive.

A lot of life… is just plain overwhelming. It’s filled with uncertainty and injustice and really complex shit that nobody fully knows the answers to. Selling people an impossibly beautiful, simple illusion as the answer to all of it is genius. And even though I never hit the jackpot back when I was playing the game, I still had the unwavering belief that I would someday. There was comfort in that.

It is okay to miss the comfort of an illusion, but it’s short-sighted to give your life to it. We do ourselves a disservice when we outsource the answers to our seemingly unmanageable emotions from places that only ever wanted to profit from us.

There have been times in recent years that I’ve tried to turn other things into the simple, one-stop solution for all of the big difficult stuff: people, productivity, numbers on social media. And in a lot of ways, I’m still looking for that thing. That answer for when everything feels like too much. I just don’t believe I’m going to find it at the bottom of a bowl of Special K. And I really fucking hate quark.

Maybe the trick isn’t having an answer. Maybe it’s learning how to sit in the not-knowing. Letting life be messy and overwhelming and complicated without needing an illusion to pour it all into. It’s less comfortable, but it feels a lot more honest.

I was never meant to have washboard abs anyway.

Questions for the comment section: what do you really not miss about diet culture? Is there anything you do miss? Do you relate to letting go of the illusion? Is it just me? Lmk!