Dear Diet Culture Letter: Reclaiming Your Headspace to Heal

Dear Diet Culture,

It’s me, Sunday.

We are entering into a big week of the 2020 presidential elections and of course you haven’t gone anywhere. That’s part of your shtick, you don’t ever go away and you are a headspace stealer and you take people’s energy, voice and power.

I talk a lot about the importance of healing from disordered eating so that people can free up headspace to pursue that which lights them up, makes their life meaningful and impactful, and brings them joy and pleasure. Having food and negative body image thoughts take up the majority of people’s headspace is exhausting and steals life from them.

It’s hard to be present with family members or friends when people’s head is off counting calories or macros.

It’s hard to play with the kids if people are off thinking about how much weight to loose. It’s hard to take political action and fight for racial justice when people have an empty stomach and are lacking the energy that they need. It’s hard to pursue the job/career people truly want if most of their time is being taken up reading about nutrition and diet.

By taking headspace away from folks, you take life away from them, Diet Culture. You trick them into thinking they are perusing a moral imperative by dressing up fatphobia as “health” and promoting the heck out of any and all products that are aligned with that. But really all you do is oppress.

You take people that are already oppressed in this culture and you try to make them silent, take up less space and occupy their brains.

As Naomi Wolf said, “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.”

Diet Culture, know this: When people take back their power and activity heal from you and continue to practice resistance, they take back their ability to be in the this life, fully. Which is a big deal after all.

Sincerely,

Sunday, aka your most passionate Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that Diet Culture is a headspace and life stealer and that pursuing healing matters SO much in the long run