Dear Diet Culture Letter: Loving Your Body is Complex

Dear Diet Culture,

It’s me, Sunday.

The idea of loving oneself is such a taboo. Declaring love for anything, especially the body, is a radical concept for most people, and you are at the root of a lot of what makes loving oneself really hard. Let me explain.

You see Diet Culture, you actively seek to get people to dislike, even hate, their bodies. After all, how else would you be able to sell products, programs and diets that hinge on the expectation that your customers will come to you filled with deep dislike for their bodies. But here’s the catch: it’s never enough. In a fat-phobic culture (which you perpetuate and reinforce btw) who deems many bodies unworthy, especially those bodies that hold marginalized identities, you keep people coming back for more by selling them something that doesn’t work, then telling them it does work, blaming it on them when it doesn’t work, and then offering more products to “fix” the “problem.”

So in the cycle of body-hate encouragement that you create, loving one’s body becomes seen as selfish, conceded, egotistical and completely unattainable. It makes it feel like loving one’s body means that you are confident, don’t want it to change, or are proud of it. It forces people to exist in a dichotomy, either they “love their body” (there is some really unfortunate branding out there that likes to use this terminology despite being on team Diet Culture) or they “hate their body” What an awful binary to exist in!

But here is what I propose Diet Culture and I know you are not going to like it: loving your body doesn’t have to be the goal, but it is possible. I believe that the concept of love needs to be redefined so that we as a culture can embrace it, but the conversation is nuanced. For example, seeing that the word love is defined as “an intense feeling of deep affection” and “a great interest and pleasure in something,” I think we’ve got the idea of loving the body confused because of you.

Holding deep affection for the body is part of doing healing work. Taking a great interest and pleasure in the body is part of doing healing work. So why can’t people declare that they love their body should they want to or choose to?

Because you have made it seem like declaring that you love your body also means that you don’t take issue with it, don’t get mad at it, don’t fall out of love with it at times, and don’t have any more work to do around body shame. But this is not the way loves works. Think how many humans in the world have people they love in their life with whom they also fight with, get mad at, feel less love toward at times, get angry/sad at, etc. They don’t think twice about the experience of loving the other person despite the relationship being dynamic and ever-changing and sometimes tumultuous.

So while loving one’s body in the way that YOU define love, Diet Culture, is not what I want for people, i.e. only deserving love if you are white, thin, able-bodied, activity dieting, etc.. What I do offer is that we must redefine what it means to love the body so that we can be in relationship with it in a kind, compassionate, and connected way without seeking to change it, shrink it, or harm it.

Sincerely,

Sunday, aka your most passionate non-diet Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that loving your body can be just as fluid, dynamic and wonderful as any relationship in your life AND that loving your body is not an expectation or prerequisite to heal body shame