The Courage to Confront the Toxic Diet Mentality

Hola amigos! Welcome to One Small Bite!

We may not be aware of the plethora of the toxic diet talk and implicit negative body and food messaging that comes at us from so many directions – TV, social media, movies, magazines, news outlets, parents, teachers, family, and friends. The pressures to be transform our bodies into something they are not, is incredibly prolific. Today, I am going to discuss the one single most important method to confront the toxic diet culture in our society…self-compassion. It may not sound like much, but self-compassion is critical to dismantling diet culture because it requires that we start with ourselves. Instead of trying to fix others, change their bodies, or force them to be healthy, self-compassion starts by looking internally within ourselves first. To be self-compassionate is to build courage, and it is courage that will stand up to the toxic diet mentality and end it.

Highlights of this episode:

• The Path Toward Courage
• What is Self-Compassion
• Self-Kindness
• Shared Humanity
• Mindfulness
• The Relationship with Food is the Same
• Chopping the Food Police Voices

Episode Show Notes: 

[01:39] The Path Toward Courage
Exactly 20 years ago I made a significant change in my life, I decided I was going to become a nutritionist. A registered dietitian nutritionist to be exact. There were various consequences that led me to this point. A bad break up, my mother diagnosed with diabetes and cancer, 9/11, and the change I finally realized I needed in my life. This path led me toward courage, but not because I was fearless or strong, but because I learned about self-compassion. It has been an interesting journey so far. One that I am still learning today. What is interesting is that I learned about self-compassion through working with my clients, which has been one of the single greatest gifts I’ve received. My clients showed me that finding self-compassion leads to courage, and that courage leads to confidence in paying attention to myself, my feelings and emotions, and therefore being kinder and empathetic toward others. These are the ingredients of self-compassion, and they are the ingredients that help people chop the Food Police Voices, the endless criticism and banter that ensues in our heads.

[11:18] What is Self-Compassion
According to Kristen Neff, who wrote the book Self-Compassion, stated that Self-Compassion is comprised of three main elements – Self-kindness; Shared Humanity; Mindfulness. Let’s explore these below

[12:42] Self-Kindness
Self-kindness means that we stop the constant self-judgment and disparaging internal commentary that most of us have come to see as normal. It requires us to understand our foibles and failures instead of a condemning them. It entails clearly seeing the extent to which we harm ourselves through relentless self-criticism and ending our internal war. But self-kindness involves more than merely stopping self-judgment. It involves actively confronting ourselves responding just as we would to a dear friend in need. It means we allow ourselves to be emotionally moved by our own pain, stopping to say, “this is really difficult right now.” Diet culture keeps us from feeling, recognizing, and being kind to ourselves because it dictates that we must first achieve a certain body shape and size in order to be kind. It requires that we ignore what we feel and fix things first. Ignoring, numbing, or pushing our feelings away, as we all know oh too well, never ends well. Therefore, how can we be kind to ourselves, much less to others, when the critical Food Police Voice takes over? Simply put, we can’t, especially not in the long run.

[14:33] Shared Humanity
The second fundamental element of self-compassion is recognition of the common human experience. As Kristen Neff writes “Acknowledgements of the interconnected nature of our lives, indeed of life itself, helps us to distinguish self-compassion from mere self-acceptance or self-love, although self-acceptance and self-love are important. They are incomplete by themselves. They leave out an essential factor. Other people’s compassion is by definition relational. Compassion literally means to suffer together, which implies a basic mutuality in the experience of suffering.” This next part is what takes on the courage to be better, to move past. It’s the ability to slow yourself down, pay attention to what’s going on to what you’re feeling, because it is more than likely that someone else is feeling it too.

[18:43] Mindfulness
Once again, I turn to the wisdom of Kristen Neff. She writes in her book “Mindfulness refers to the clear scene and non-judgmental acceptance of what’s occurring in the present moment facing up to reality. In other words, the idea is that we need to see things as they are no more, no less in order to respond to our current situation in the most compassionate and therefore effective manner. We can’t heal what we can’t feel. As mentioned earlier, we often fail to recognize feelings of guilt, defectiveness, sadness, loneliness, and so on. As moments of suffering that can be responded with compassion. The moment we see something about ourselves that we don’t like our attention tends to become completely absorbed by our perceived flaws. In that moment, we don’t have the perspective needed to recognize the suffering caused by our feelings of imperfection, let alone to respond to them with compassion. It’s not just the pain of personal inadequacy that we need to ignore or that we tend to ignore. We are surprisingly rush toward ourselves when the more general circumstances of our life go wrong through no fault of our own.”

That pain or fear is what I was feeling considering my mother’s and father’s death. Instead of paying attention to my emotions, fear, and pain I instead felt the need to fix it. I was in denial. I didn’t accept the feeling. I didn’t understand the feeling. I needed to do something about it. That means start a diet, cut out food groups, eat only at certain times of the day, go to the gym and work off that pizza. And that becomes our self-identifying qualities. The courage to be self-compassionate takes courage. It requires the effort of slowing down and saying, well, okay, I see what I’m feeling. I’m feeling that nervousness and that fear that I won’t be accepted, that I will look funny in front of other people or that people will think I’m lazy, unhappy, inadequate, or unworthy.

[16:26] The Relationship with Food is the Same
There are parallels to the experience and relationships people have in life, and with food and their bodies. For example, when we were young and did our homework, we might have been rewarded with ice-cream after dinner. Therefore, the relationship with hard work becomes intricately tied to the desire to eat ice-cream. The more we work, the more ice-cream we can have, but if we don’t then we have to punish ourselves until we get the work done. Another example is how critical we are about eating too much of something and feeling overly full. We may not like this feeling, don’t want to feel it, and want to push it away, so we demoralize ourselves instead and talk down to ourselves. “You’re so stupid for eating that much.” “You’re a horrible person for not taking care of yourself.” And so on. These are the Food Police voices that live on in our minds into adulthood, and they are tied to the experiences of food and eating. Therefore, diet culture comes around and tells us the same thing, so we restrict or avoid foods, get smaller, and think we’ve done great. Again, it’s building negative relationships left and right. The cycle can only end when we learn to be more compassionate with ourselves.

[21:37] Chopping the Food Police Voices
We need to build a more positive relationship to food and our body and the way to do that is through self-compassion. This is one of the reasons why I wrote my book One Small Bite: Anti-Diet Stories that Help You Build a Positive Relationship with Food. One of the things that I saw in people was this weight inclusive self-compassion approach. They were recognizing their self-talk, how they felt about themselves, how they seemed to be in relationship with others. I saw people be present with their fears and pains, and little by little they started finding more self-compassion. They started recognizing the negative ways they talk, and instead of immediately trying to stop it or change it, they were with it.

This work is not easy. To this day, I think about my mom and dad. I think about how hard I tried to change them, make them live longer by making them try to be something they couldn’t. Instead of being more compassionate with myself and recognizing my own fears. What most of us need is to be heard, to be with, not offering advice, not offering any wisdom, but just be there for them. This is self-compassion, and this is how to build the courage to stand up against diet culture.

Resources:

ON Community
A community of people just like you interested in building a positive relationship with food and body, to learn and practice new habits, grow together, so that people can feel good and live fully. Read about it here: ON Community

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Chop the diet mentality; Fuel Your Body; and Nourish Your Soul!