As was my practice back then, I posted about this breakthrough on Instagram—

 

 

The post is still live here. In it, I offer my break-up manifesto in the form of a fuck-that list & a more-of-this list. Here's what I wrote that day (slightly amended)—

 

 

 

Four years later, this list still feels true. But it perhaps over-simplified the journey that was to come.

 

 

 

Since I broke up with diet culture, in some senses I haven't looked back. I haven't dieted for a single day. I didn't set foot in a gym for three years. I gained weight. I got fat. And I didn't hate myself for it. In fact, I loved myself through it. 

 

At this point, I can see that at the most foundational level, 

 

 

In some areas, saying YES to myself was easy. For instance, I had lots of intuitions about what foods I loved and how they nourished my body. I cooked and ate and indulged, and after a year or so, food just generally felt great.

 

In other areas, however, I didn't really know what to say YES to. Most noticeably, I had no fucking clue how to move my body without slipping into self-punishing routines. Any step toward movement brought me dangerously close to immediate over-exertion. So for a few years, I just … didn't move. And that was fine. Until I turned 30 and not moving started to hurt.

 

So over the past year and a half, I've been working on how to move. I started by creating a routine of gentler practices like walking, dancing and stretching. But that still felt like the sort of exercise routine I was trying to move away from. 

 

So I began experimenting with bodywork. I went to a community acupuncture clinic. I got a recommendation for a chiropractor. 

 

Once I had that support team in place, then I decided to join a gym. Now I go twice a week with my partner. We do what we feel like and we leave. There's never the pressure of a “should.” And I'm never in it alone. It's made a world of difference.

 

 

Another piece of my break-up with diet culture that feels important to unpack is something I said very simply above — since I broke up with diet culture, I got fat.

 

Before September 20, 2018, I certainly felt “fat” often, but I was rarely classified as “fat” by friends or doctors or anyone else I encountered.

 

Since September 20, 2018, however, I've gained weight and am now often classified as “fat" by doctors and family members and plenty of others. 

 

I put “fat” in quotation marks here because when other people see me as “fat” it's generally loaded with disempowering assumptions. “Fat” is conflated with undisciplined, unhealthy, unintelligent, unloveable… When I'm “fat” on their terms, it's a bad thing. 

 

But when I'm fat on my terms, it's a neutral statement and an empowering claim. To me, being fat simply means my body takes up more space than it used to. 

 

After a lifetime of trying to shrink myself by dieting and overexercising, taking up more space feels like a success. 

 

At least until someone comes along to tell me that being “fat” is bad or unhealthy or whatever else they believe. But even that doesn't bother me like it used to. And with the help of books like Virgie Tovar's You Have the Right to Remain Fat and Aubrey Gordon's What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat, I'm able to better rebut their claims.

 

 

These days, most folks in my life know that I have hard boundaries around diet talk and body shaming. I don't consume any fitness content. I won't take part in critiquing your body or mine. And I refuse to refer to foods as “good” or “bad." When people near me do those things, I gently reframe or I exit the conversation.

 

Luckily for me, these things don't happen often. Instead, I get to have really beautiful conversations with babes who have gained weight and want reassurance that they don't have to hate themselves for it. (YOU DON'T!)

 

Or I get to be in gentle conversation with myself about loving things that I previously saw as “gross” or “ugly.” For instance, my underarm fat started sagging this year, and it's invited me to break a multi-generational cycle of hating my arms. (How deep-seated and arbitrary it is to hate specific body parts!)

 

 

Recently I listened to a podcast episode called “Budgeting Is Diet Culture For Your Money” and it blew my mind.

 

I had started to notice that my desire to make more money felt suspiciously like my past desire to lose more weight. When I heard podcast guest Dana Miranda say that by the logic of diet/budget culture “you can never be rich enough and you can never be thin enough," it shifted something for me.

 

There is no such thing as enough in diet culture, in beauty culture, or in capitalism. The demand is always that you have more or be less.

 

The task then is to teach ourselves, and each other, what enough feels like. How can we have enough? How can we be enough? How can we let go of what's more than enough? How we claim what's less than enough?

 

This isn't a unique observation. In fact I've learned it before from Jennifer Armbrust, from Sarah Gottesdiener, from Toi Smith.

 

But my equinox breakthroughs are never about learning. They're always about embodying. Because you can learn something a million times, but it's not until you believe it in your heart and your bones that you can really live it. 

 

I guess that means the new task is unraveling how to embody enoughness. I look forward to reporting on that journey on my next diet-culture-break-up-iversary.

 

 

This essay became much more sprawling than I imagined, and I'm honestly not quite sure how to end it. I suppose the truth is that my break-up with diet culture is a spiralic journey. When I find my way through one level, another one unlocks.

 

Overall, I just keep coming back to the final sentence in my original breaking-up-with-diet-culture Instagram post—

 

 

If you've spent even one second of your life wishing your body were thinner, I hope reading this helps you see that you can break up with diet culture, too.

 

It may not be easy. But, I promise, it is possible. And only you can do it.

 

For now, I'm off to celebrate my break-up-iversary with a trip to the same bakery I celebrated at four years ago. Much love to you and happy almost equinox. ♡

xoxo, Amelia

 

 

 

 

 

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