Is it possible to leave diet culture and stop dieting?

Hi everyone and happy Monday!

I wanted to share a recent article from CNN that I am featured in, titled: "How to stop dieting, according to people who have done it."

Of course you can imagine how delightful it was for me to speak to a reporter about my journey through diet culture. But as you read my section you'll learn something that may surprise you.

That even though my life's purpose is to help others find their place outside of diet culture, you never really leave it completely. We may reject what diet culture tells us we need (read: a smaller body to fit in to society's patriarchal and racist standards) but we still need to swim through that toxic sludge on the regular. And that's f'ing hard.

Here's what I say in the article:

“I still have the thoughts of ‘wouldn’t it be great if I could lose weight?’” she said. But she reminds herself, “We have been down that road and that’s just not available to me anymore.”

So....yes, I still get thoughts about dieting and shrinking my body as it grows and changes through perimenopause. (Thanks, toxic sludge - as referenced above.)

But also yes, I know that dieting led me to some really awful places that were WORSE for both my mental and physical health.

So that leaves me...here. Doing the best I can to continue to unlearn the decades of messaging I received about the right way to have a body, and also working on developing mucho compassion for myself because having a body in diet-culture-toxic-sludge-land can suck sometimes.

So don't worry if you're doing this non-diet/anti-diet thing right or wrong. We're all just doing the best we can!

After you read the article, let me know what you think- I'd love to hear from you!

Talk soon!

Amanda

PS. Can we just celebrate how AWESOME it is that a major news outlet like CNN is featuring articles on diet culture? YAHOO!