Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating

by Christy Harrison

These racist beliefs influenced our gender norms as well, including the definitions of what it means to “look male,” “look female,” and “look androgynous.” Because thinness was deemed “more evolved” (given its supposed association with masculinity and whiteness), men with lots of fat on their bodies began to be seen as both less masculine and less morally upstanding. And whereas fatness or curviness was seemingly associated with femininity, the idea that larger bodies were inferior eventually translated to the idea that even women shouldn’t be “too” fat or curvy.

Today these racist beauty ideals still affect not only cisgender people but those elsewhere on the gender spectrum. As nonbinary trans psychologist and activist Sand Chang puts it, “The ideals that we have for what trans bodies are supposed to look like are based on white, skinny, model-looking people, and it really excludes folks who are fat, disabled, and people of color. There are so many ways in which these dominant norms and dominant representations of trans identity don’t leave room for the vast majority of us”—including nonbinary people who don’t quite match society’s idea of what it means to “look” nonbinary.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, insurance companies started using a measure called the Quetelet index—later rebranded as the body mass index, or BMI, which is how we know it today—to categorize people as “normal weight,” “overweight,” and “underweight,” with “normal” being considered ideal. There were (and still are) many problems with that equation: for one, it was developed in the 1830s by a Belgian astronomer named Adolphe Quetelet as a way to test whether the laws of probability could be applied to human beings at the population level. It was created as a statistical exercise, not a medical instrument, and was never intended for clinical use. Quetelet also developed his equation using an exclusively white, European population—the people in his environment—which means that it doesn’t account for differences in average body size in other ethnic groups.40

None of these flaws stopped the insurance companies from using the Quetelet index, though. In 1899 the president of the Association of Life Insurance Medical Directors of America presented some preliminary data from several insurance companies, stating that “from our mortality records the overweights are clearly less desirable than either the normal or the underweights.”41 These records were based almost exclusively on wealthy white men, but modern-day data from much larger, more representative samples shows that “the overweights” actually have the lowest mortality risk of any group on the BMI chart.42 The BMI is also notoriously imprecise; it can’t tell you anything about a person’s body composition, nor can it accurately predict their health outcomes. Indeed, many researchers over the years have recommended that BMI be discarded as an outdated and ineffective tool for measuring health.43

“The more you diet, the worse it gets” and “To hell with the weight. The scale is to the dieter what the roulette wheel is to a chronic gambler. Get away from that mentality. Get away from the obsession with body image.”

In 1998 millions of Americans became “overweight” and “obese” literally overnight. It wasn’t because they had epically binged before going to bed—contrary to what diet culture would have you believe, a binge won’t make you suddenly larger. It was something much more bureaucratic: The National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. federal agency in charge of setting the official BMI categories for American guidelines, released a report changing its thresholds for what it considered “overweight” and “obese.” People suddenly moved into new, higher BMI categories without having gained any weight whatsoever, simply because the cutoffs had changed.

Another extremely important factor that never gets discussed in relation to the “obesity epidemic” is dieting; as we’ll discuss in Chapter 3, intentional weight-loss efforts have been shown to cause long-term weight gain for up to two-thirds of the people who embark on them. So if the national average weight was creeping up over the years, it’s a good bet that dieting was at least partly responsible for the increase.

As we’ll discuss in Chapter 9, no good scientific evidence exists that eating so-called “processed” (or “highly palatable”) food causes significant weight gain or poor health outcomes. But as you’ll see in Chapter 3, there is strong evidence that intentional weight-loss efforts result in long-term weight gain for a large percentage of people.

As you can see from this quick trip through the history of diet culture, it’s very much a system of oppression, with its roots in racist, sexist beliefs about food and bodies. Over time, those roots have become increasingly obscured by the ever-changing, ever-subtler, and seemingly benign ways that diet culture shows up in the world. Although some of that obscuring occurs simply because diet culture has become the default point of view in Western society—the water we’ve all been swimming in since birth, without realizing it—there are other, more nefarious reasons why it can be hard to recognize diet culture for the Life Thief it really is. In fact concealing diet culture’s true roots is a deliberate move that the diet industry uses to keep itself afloat, as you’re about to see.

She promptly told Liz about the findings of the 2005 study (Liz hadn’t started that phase of the research yet), which showed that “obesity” is actually associated with a lower mortality risk than “underweight” and roughly equal to that of “normal weight.”

What all the definitions have in common is a fixation on dietary purity and categorizing food in terms of virtue and vice: clean vs. dirty, real vs. fake, whole vs. processed, and pure vs. contaminated.

Looking at clean eating with an awareness of diet culture, though, we can see that it is definitely a diet—just by another name. Though in some cases overt mentions of weight loss have been dropped from the discourse about clean eating, it’s obvious from early iterations such as Reno’s books that weight loss was the point from the start. Now the weight-stigmatizing language tends to be subtler, more coded:

Of course, there are plenty of overtly diet-y manifestations of clean eating as well: JJ Smith, a nutritionist and author of multiple books about green-smoothie cleanses, touts clean eating as part of her “breakthrough permanent weight loss solution” (when in reality no diet can create permanent weight loss for the overwhelming majority of people, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 3); the authors of the book Clean Cuisine promise “hunger-free weight loss” (nope, not a thing); and Tosca Reno’s Eat-Clean Diet® brand is still hawking weight loss and still going strong, now with a registered trademark and a host of new cleanses and programs (which, like all diets, are backed up by NO sound scientific evidence of long-term “success”).

There’s nothing wrong with those things in and of themselves—we all need a value system, an identity, and a community. The problem is that in the case of clean eating and other modern manifestations of diet culture, the belief system often takes over your life and prevents you from developing your own identity and values outside food and eating. It shrinks your life by making you more and more fixated on food and exercise, at the expense of other things you truly care about. Clean eating isn’t alone in that. With all forms of diet culture, the message is that you can’t trust yourself and that you have to follow its rules in order to be saved—and the longer and harder you try to adhere to it, the more it crowds out other areas of your life.

By the way, the diet-culture forest eventually swallows up even those forms of disordered eating that develop in response to individual factors such as trauma, self-esteem issues, and other life circumstances. Disordered-eating behaviors don’t exist in a vacuum. If you start eating to soothe yourself after experiencing trauma, for example, you’re not doing that in a culture of “Do what you gotta do to get through the day, and also let me help you process your trauma.” No, you’re doing it in a culture of “OMG YOU’RE EATING SO MUCH, YOU’RE GONNA GAIN WEIGHT AND THAT’S ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE—YOU NEED TO LOSE WEIGHT, STAT! (And PS, trauma? What are you even talking about? Just suck it up and move on!)”

Instead of watching cartoons, having adventures with friends, and just being a kid, she was devoting her downtime to shrinking her body.

She never tried a sixty-sixth diet; instead, she was eventually able to make peace with her body and learn to nourish herself without dieting. But she lost untold hours of her childhood and adolescence to counting calories and points, prepping restrictive meals, and scouring menus for diet-approved options.

If you’ve been on even one diet, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about. Diet culture takes up an enormous amount of time, whether it’s spent on “official” dieting programs such as the ones Guest-Jelley tried, or on more subtle things like trying on a million outfits in the morning and making yourself late for work because you “feel fat” in everything you own. Aside from the fact that fat is not a feeling, do you really think any of us would worry about trying to look thin in our clothes if it weren’t for the primacy placed on thinness since the late 1800s? Diet culture has created this ritual that now seems like a normal part of getting dressed in the morning for countless women and trans folks, as well as for a growing number of men. And you can bet that none of us would be using the word fat as a synonym for unattractive if it weren’t for diet culture.

We also sure as hell would not be exercising for the purposes of weight loss or body shaping—another way that diet culture subtly sucks away your time. Sure, it can be great for your overall well-being to move your body in ways that feel good, and some forms of movement are fun in their own right. But let’s be real: shrinking and “sculpting” are major motivations for many people who exercise, and diet culture is to blame. Too many of us have gritted our teeth through workout classes and personal-training sessions we hated, all with the goal of changing our size and shape (or perhaps maintaining them, if we were already at a place that diet culture deemed “acceptable”). Think of all the ways you could’ve spent that time, from doing a less-...

Her astonished conclusion, after weeks of research: no diet has been shown to be effective over the long term for more than a tiny percentage of the population. As she puts it, “Weight loss does not meet the criteria for evidence-based medicine.”

A robust body of evidence shows that intentional weight-loss efforts don’t work; with a failure rate that many researchers agree is north of 95 percent, they’re a waste of time.

within three years the overwhelming majority have regained all the weight they lost—and often more.10 And a large-scale 2015 study of more than 278,000 people found that within five years, the proportion of people who’ve regained all their lost weight (or more) is somewhere between 95 and 98 percent—right

But when it comes to weight-loss programs, we blame ourselves, again and again, rather than blaming the shoddy product that doesn’t do what it’s advertised to do. And that’s how diet culture retains its power over us.

being at a higher weight hasn’t been shown to cause health problems (although it may be associated with some negative health outcomes), and weight stigma is likely a bigger risk to your well-being than weight itself. Despite what diet culture has told us, there’s nothing wrong with being at a higher weight.

“Weight loss doesn’t heal people from their internalized weight stigma. Bad body image is not cured by weight loss.”

If you’re bingeing in response to a diet, here’s what I want you to know: Your body is not broken. You are not broken. You haven’t irreparably damaged your hunger-and-fullness sensors. Your body is just trying to protect you. This is a natural, predictable, automatic response to famine—and that’s what diets are. It’s not you. It’s not a defect.

as when you heal your relationship with food, you may have some longer-term, unintentional changes in weight—but we don’t know exactly what those changes will be. Some people’s weight set ranges fall on the high end of the spectrum—the “overweight” and “obese” categories on the BMI chart—and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that: size diversity is a real thing, and people’s body sizes are as heterogeneous as our height, hair and skin color, shoe size, and pretty much any other human characteristic you can think of.

In the same way, inflammation has been found to be associated with a number of different health conditions, but it hasn’t been shown to cause them per se. Here are a few things that may be underlying causes of inflammation, according to a large body of research (see if you can spot the commonalities): lower social class, being divorced or separated from a partner, not having a job, being in financial trouble, having a greater number of negative interactions with other people, having people close to you struggle with their health, and being treated with disrespect or verbally threatened because of your race or your weight.27 In other words, having bad shit happen to you—especially experiences of social injustice—is a risk factor for both increased inflammation and chronic disease. Another risk factor for chronic inflammation is weight cycling—repeatedly losing and regaining weight, which is what almost inevitably happens when people embark on weight-loss efforts. And when the true cause of inflammation is psychological distress, injustice, and yo-yo dieting, is eating more kale really going to help?

life to dieting and the disordered pursuit of wellness, we must have compassion—and that includes compassion for ourselves. We all want to be happy, accepted, and loved, which is what diet culture promises we’ll achieve through thinness and “perfect” eating. We all want to avoid disease and live long, fulfilling lives. We all want to feel good in our bodies.

I now know dozens of colleagues who admit they went into careers in nutrition, personal training, or some other aspect of health and wellness because of their own issues with food; in so doing, they closed the door on career options that might have been more lucrative and fulfilling. (Not to mention less potentially harmful to their mental and physical health; working in the health-and-wellness field when you have your own issues is risky, both for yourself and for your clients.) For many of us, diet culture captured our imaginations at moments when our careers were malleable. We may have had bigger dreams, or other things we wanted to do, but we got waylaid by the Life Thief.

In her book The Body Is Not an Apology, Sonya Renee Taylor distinguishes between “best-interest buying,” which reflects a commitment to radical self-love, and “detriment buying,” which is driven by the feeling that you’re flawed or not good enough as you are. The difference between these two types of spending is in the motivation behind them. The same product could be an example of best-interest buying for one person and detriment buying for another, depending on the intentions and beliefs each person has about the purchase.

any money that people in larger bodies spend on medical care is attributed to their size—even if they’re going to the doctor for a condition that thin people also get, like, say, the flu. The condition might have no connection to body size, yet still it gets blamed on “obesity.” What’s more, estimates of the “cost of obesity” omit a wide array of confounding variables that could explain the association between body size and health outcomes, including a history of yo-yo dieting, the toll of weight stigma, and access to high-quality and nondiscriminatory medical care.15 All of these factors are independently associated with adverse health outcomes,

she developed disconcerting new symptoms: severe fatigue, persistent body aches, and a scary moment when she couldn’t lift her arms. Yet over the two-year period when she was trying to get help for these symptoms, every doctor she saw blamed the issues on her weight. “I would get diagnosed fat,”

body image is a much stronger predictor of health than body size.

The larger the difference between someone’s current weight and their perceived “ideal” weight, the researchers found, the more mental- and physical-health problems they’d had in the past month—regardless of their actual BMI.

Gaudiani sees the overwhelming evidence of weight stigma in her field and doesn’t hold back: “Doctors keep touting this so-called ‘obesity epidemic,’ and as with so many systems of oppression, I’m pretty convinced we’re the ones who caused it.” By focusing on weight and telling people to shrink their bodies, physicians stigmatize people in a way that does real harm.

found that those with the greatest degree of weight cycling had a 53 percent higher risk of death from all causes, and a 14 percent greater risk of heart attack and stroke, than those whose weight stayed stable—no matter their body size.19 The reasons for the association between weight cycling and poor health outcomes are still being investigated. One likely explanation is that weight cycling leads to fluctuations in blood pressure, heart rate, nervous-system activity, kidney-filtration rate, blood sugar, and blood lipids—all known cardiovascular risk factors.

weight bias kept anyone from recognizing the disordered behaviors when Millner’s body was larger.

I’ve always lived in a smaller body, yet weight bias kept me too from being diagnosed when I was in the depths of my disorder. When I mentioned my disordered-eating behaviors to my therapist at the time and told her some of my loved ones were concerned I might have an eating disorder, she said that couldn’t possibly be the case—I wasn’t thin enough. She used the phrase You’re not a slight person, which says a lot about how subjective the process of diagnosing an eating disorder can be. It also shows how many clinicians, caught up in looking for what they imagine to be physical signs that someone is struggling, miss the bigger picture: you can’t tell from the outside whether someone is engaging in disordered eating.

there is no proven long-term way to shrink people’s bodies, including by surgical alteration.

“building strength is something that works at all sizes, whereas weight loss is something that works for almost no one. If you think your current body size is the problem, dieting gives you a 66 percent chance to make that ‘problem’ a bigger problem.” It simply is not evidence-based medicine to say that people “need to lose weight” for any health reasons, because we have no safe, sustainable method of producing weight loss.

All the autonomy and agency we were born with when it comes to food—knowing when we were hungry and telling the world about it, eating what looked good and being excited to try new things, losing interest in food when we’d had enough, moving our bodies whenever we felt like it and resting when we needed to—got taken away as we were indoctrinated into diet culture.

Under normal circumstances (not dieting), people respond to difficult emotions by losing their appetite. For nondieters, a lack of interest in food is a common symptom of grief, depression, and anxiety, among other negative emotions. This makes sense from a biological standpoint: in the short term, our ability to respond to something bad happening is more important for our survival than eating is. In those situations, we’re programmed to stop thinking about food and start dealing with the matter at hand. Eventually, once we’ve recovered from the initial emotional blow (or, in our ancestors’ case, eluded that angry lion), we start thinking about food again. With chronic dieters, though, something contrary happens: negative emotions provoke an increased appetite and desire to eat.9 Dieters develop the response opposite to what we see in intuitive eaters. Psychologists believe this is because for dieters, eating is under conscious cognitive control (as opposed to intuitive eaters, who take their eating cues from their bodies and exert no cognitive effort to control their intake), and negative emotions disrupt and deplete that cognitive control. Once the inhibition is gone, the appetite that was being suppressed emerges in a big way, like Roger Rabbit bursting through a brick wall. Negative emotions inadvertently break down the barriers that were holding dieters back from their true desire to eat.

If we can pull back from diet culture and stop letting it control us, we’ll see that there’s no reason to demonize the practice of eating to soothe emotions—and that when we truly heal from dieting and deprivation, we likely won’t “eat our feelings” as much anymore.

Intuitive eating is the body’s default mode. It’s the way we were born to eat. It’s our birthright—regardless of body size, race, ethnicity, gender identity, or nationality. Except in some rare congenital conditions that can alter babies’ appetites, we all basically had the whole hunger thing on lock from the time we left the womb. We made noise when we were hungry to let people know we needed food, and we didn’t feel the tiniest bit of shame about it. We demanded to have our needs met. We knew those needs were valid and didn’t second-guess them; we never asked ourselves whether or not we were “really” hungry. We owned our hunger. No one had to teach us how to do that.

The second key to getting back to the default mode of intuitive eating is to help your body trust that you won’t be depriving it anymore. Having enough food—and not “just enough,” but really an abundance, as much as you want—is essential for recovery from diet culture. Being able to eat as many different kinds of food as you like, in whatever amounts you need to feel completely satisfied, allows your body to trust you again.

For most people, though, bingeing starts precisely because of restriction—it’s the Restriction Pendulum at work again, where bingeing is a natural response to dieting or “watching it” or “eating clean” or “being healthy” or whatever you want to call it. The pendulum has to swing back because you’ve been physically and psychologically deprived of food. When you’re skimping on portions, restricting certain foods, berating yourself for what and how much you eat, and living under a regime of deprivation, the body’s natural response is to eat as much as it can at any opportunity. Even if you feel like you’re eating “too much,” it’s actually because you’re not allowing yourself (both physically and mentally) to have enough.

The reason people eat to the point of discomfort is not because they’re weak or greedy or emotionally broken; it’s because they don’t have enough, and because they don’t trust that food will always be there when they want it. We can’t stop at the point of fullness when we don’t know how to honor our hunger—how to respond to it when it first pipes up rather than letting it build to a screaming emergency, or letting it scream for so long that its voice eventually becomes inaudible. In fact, when we aren’t heeding our hunger signals (because of diet culture or any other reason), our bodies are programmed to start pumping out more and more of the hormones and neurotransmitters that drive us to eat—and that process virtually guarantees we’ll feel out of control with food.2 Moreover, we can’t learn to use things other than food to cope with our feelings if those feelings are largely driven by needing food. Granted, once we release the restrictive thoughts and behaviors, we may also see that we need to develop some additional coping skills. But we can’t know that for sure until we’ve recovered from the trauma of deprivation, which makes anyone reach for food to cope.

Focusing primarily on fullness and emotional eating instead of on eating enough keeps you stuck in diet culture—and therefore at war with food and your body. Diet culture demonizes eating emotionally and eating to the point of discomfort because it tells us these things will make us fat, and that fat is bad. If we accept that premise and try to address fullness and emotional eating without first making sure we have enough, we keep ourselves stuck under the Life Thief’s thumb. We won’t be able to solve our perceived eating problems because we’re still caught up in the mind-set that created them.

Down the line, once you’ve truly healed from whatever level of deprivation you’ve experienced, you’ll be able to trust your body’s signals of hunger and fullness. Early on, though, the most important thing is simply to focus on breaking free from all forms of restriction, and learning to notice the ways your body might be telling you it needs food. The solution to wonky or absent hunger cues is showing your body that it won’t be deprived anymore; that means eating consistent meals and snacks, even if you don’t feel hungry. For people with active eating disorders, it also means working with an eating-disorder-savvy treatment team, including a psychotherapist and dietitian, who can support you through the process. Slowly, you’ll start to rebuild that trust with your body. And eventually you’ll get back to being able to recognize and honor your hunger the way you were born doing.