“New year, new you.” “How to lose those nagging 15 pounds.” “Lose weight, look great, and feel healthy.”

     Anytime I open social media, watch a TV show, or listen to the radio, I’m bombarded by these messages and countless others promising to deliver a “perfect” body. 

     What’s the larger effect of these messages on our physical and mental health? In her formative book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf wrote, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience.… Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.”

     Although it has been more than 30 years since those words were written, they continue to apply to our world and to people of all genders. We live in a society where the diet industry makes $70 billion a year selling the promise of a wildly unattainable idealized body and pushing the idea that there is a “right” way to look. Where has this unending task of obtaining the perfect body gotten us? Into an endless cycle of dissatisfaction and a merry-go-round of fighting against our bodies, which saps our time, energy, money, and relationships. Even if, by some miracle, someone can achieve this bodily ideal, the costs are high.

     None of us is to blame for falling victim to the insidious messages of diet culture, which whisper seductively about the ways that this workout, food, pill, supplement, or medication will “fix” everything that is wrong with our bodies and make us feel like we’ve reached the unattainable goal of arbitrary physical perfection. But can we consider how it would be to engage with food, eating, exercise, and our bodies in a way that prioritizes ourselves instead of societal ideals?

     I don’t pretend this is easy, always possible, or without consequences. There are societal and systemic repercussions for looking different than the “physical ideal,” and very real stigmas and discriminations present that we cannot ignore. We cannot pretend those systemic factors don’t exist, but instead we can consider how we are affected by diet culture and in what (if any) areas we could move away from these ideals.

      I’m not here to decry people trying to engage with food and movement in a way that feels best for them, which might feel like working towards self-improvement. What I hope is that we can question why we’re eating, exercising, thinking about our bodies in this way, and what larger structures – like the diet industry – are consistently benefiting from making us feel negatively about ourselves.

     What would we have the energy to do if we stopped fighting our bodies? What would we have the energy to build, create, discover, and dismantle? I would love to see a revolution where we question all the ways we have been told we have to look and instead focus on how to individually care for our bodies and minds in the way that feels uniquely best for each of us as a person. 

      You might ask, what would that even mean? Aren’t I already caring for myself? Obviously, what feels best for each person’s body and mind is highly individualized and can’t be dictated by someone else. However, our society continues to sell the promise that there’s a one-size-fits-all approach not only to how we should look, but also to how we should get there. 

     Audre Lorde wrote about caring for ourselves, others, and communities as an act of resistance in her book, A Burst of Light: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” 

     When considering this with Wolf’s words above, think about the energy some of us spend each day trying to change our bodies because we are told by society that we should, not because it actually feels like the best way to care for ourselves. Some of us may have come to think of self-care as something indulgent, something that is a reward, instead of an essential foundation of care that we must build upon to exist as people in the world.

Consider if any of these ways of self-care around food, eating, and body image fit for you:

• Eating to fuel our bodies, but also eating for enjoyment and because we like the taste.
• Engaging in movement that feels positive and strengthening and empowering, and moving not to earn our food or because we think we have to, but because it feels good for our bodies.
• Accepting that our bodies, just as they are, are worthy of existence and care and acceptance right now. 

     If you find yourself thinking or feeling negatively about what you’re eating or how you engage in movement/exercise, try to reframe your thought in a positive or neutral way.

For example, saying “My body must really need nutrition” instead of “I’m eating so much.”

Try, “I’m glad I’m taking time to rest” instead of “I’m so lazy/bad for not working out today.”

     Try commenting on people’s internal and non-physical attributes instead of their appearance or eating. For example, instead of saying “You’ve lost/gained weight,” “You look great,” or “Wow, I’d feel so guilty if I ate that,” you could say “It’s so nice to see you,” “I love the work you did on that project,” or “Tell me what’s new with you.”

     I’m not saying you must love your body, like it, or feel positively about it. The question I leave you with is this: What would it feel like to stop actively fighting your body? What would it be like – even if you don’t feel like any of the possibilities above work for you – to neutrally coexist with your body? What would that allow you to do? 

Cover image by Farhad Ibrahimzade.