It's taken me longer than it should have to start being intentional about my relationship with food. I have never had a diagnosable eating disorder but like many others, I have bought into many of the lies diet culture promotes. I could write a whole post on just the definitions of diet culture, but in a nutshell, it is a set of believes that worships thinness and equates it with health and moral virtue.

My love for food has been in constant battle with all the diet culture tropes I have unwillingly learnt and sadly mastered. My mother's body has carried five children but she finds it difficult to celebrate this because society has always taught her that she is worth more if her body bounces back to what it was before children. Trust me, we don't the time to discuss my strong hatred for bounce-back culture. The first thing my mother and aunties would say to me when I returned home from a semester at university was either "you've lost weight," or "you've gained weight". An experience that is not unique to me or my community in any way but is still incredibly annoying. I don't harbour any negative feelings towards this, I'm just using this to help paint a picture of not only what my personal experience was and also how aware I have been taught to be of essentially the physical space my body takes up. Whether or not I asked for it. I was taught by the media and those around me to be very aware of my current weight but also how the meal I was consuming might affect it. The same can be sad for soooo many other people.

Fatphobia is so ingrained in today's culture that we feel bad when our clothes don't fit us anymore, as if our body's whole job is to exist within the constraints of a dress size. Can we take it back to the days when all pieces of clothing were altered to fit the body and that was accepted? Society ignores the disordered eating behaviours of gym junkies even though we all know a 'workout bro' with an undiagnosed eating disorder. In the same breath, fat people are praised for their eating disorders because apparently anything is acceptable if it makes you less fat. Thanks, I hate it. Also, people in larger bodies are much less likely to receive comprehensive advice from their healthcare practitioners because every problem is chalked up to being a result of their weight. As someone currently existing in a smaller body, I cannot personally speak to all of the experiences of those in larger or fuller bodies but as a tertiary-educated healthcare professional, I remember what I was taught and some of it was problematic. An unhealthy lifestyle can negatively affect your health – obviously – but why is our society more willing to call out or suspect negative health behaviours in larger bodies than in smaller ones? Why are there so many fat women who needed to consult numerous health practitioners before seeing someone who didn't write off their complaints as being a result of their weight? Why don't we believe fat people who say they're struggling with disordered eating?

The messages I internalised during my life are the reason why for so long I tried to play a balancing act with my food. I ate the recommended portion sizes and only that. Even if I was still hungry afterwards. I was so aware of the dangers of an eating disorder that to avoid one, I would ignore my body's fullness cues and eat a meal purely for the sake of ticking off the recommended three a day. Diet culture's alter ego 'the wellness industry' had instilled in me a desire to fuel my body and never make sure it was running on empty. This alone is valid, but we all know how uncomfortable it feels after you've eaten too much. It's widely accepted that ignoring your body's hunger cues is unhealthy but guess what, so is forcing yourself to eat when you're full. No matter what than one internet fitness guru says.

If I ate a larger piece of cake than is 'recommended' I would make sure to eat more 'good' foods to try and balance that out. I bought into the idea of cheat meals, and of detoxing or drinking peppermint tea to promote a flat stomach. No hate against peppermint tea because we all know it's the superior herbal tea, but I should have drunk it because it's delicious and it warms my heart – not to try and achieve the ever-elusive flat stomach. I was 20 years old when I learnt that flat stomachs are so hard to achieve for many women because of the fatty layers that protect our uterus and other reproductive organs. Seriously, read THIS.

When intuitive became trendier and more widely accepted, I didn't entirely buy into it. Granted, I had done no research, I was just sick and tired of listening to more theories on diets and maintaining skinniness or how magical lemon water is. When I started watching Abbey Sharp's videos on YouTube I began to learn more about the concept and how important it can be. This is not an ad or a sponsored post, I'm simply mentioning her because I love to learn, and her videos have been an integral part of me developing a healthier relationship with food.

"Intuitive eating is a non-diet approach to eating that emphasizes internal cues over external diet rules…The focus isn't on scales but instead on promoting health-enhancing behaviours, better body image, and a healthier relationship with food. To help guide eating choices, intuitive eating helps you get back in touch with internal cues, like hunger and fullness, cravings, and how food makes you feel. Intuitive eating also helps chip away at diet rules, like what, how much, and when to eat, so you're better able to respond to your internal cues."

It's essentially the concept of eating when you're hungry, stopping when you're full, not adding the labels 'good', 'bad', 'clean', or 'cheat' onto food and realising that the numbers on the scale don't tell you everything. I have been the exact same weight at my fittest and then during my workout hiatus. Newsflash people, muscle weighs a lot – and how you feel, or the amount of energy you do or don't have will tell you more about your physical health than a scale [in most circumstances].

I don't have as much to say about this as I wish I did, mostly because this isn't my area of expertise, I just wanted to start a conversation. I will, however, take the rest of this blog post to shout out some people who have helped me learn more about diet culture in my journey to unlearn.

THE UNLEARNING

Abbey’s Kitchen | Blog and Youtube Channel

Hannan Neese | Instagram

Maintenance Phase | Podcast

i Weigh with Jameela Jamil | Podcast and Instagram