Dear Diet Culture Letter: You Deserve to Get Your Needs Met Too

Dear Diet Culture,

I have been thinking this week about how you are the illusion of almost everything (magic in the making), but this time especially as it relates to humans getting their needs met.

You make audacious claims about shrinking one’s body size and controlling what they eat as some form of “taking care of themselves”. You send out messages that people "deserve” better, that they need to “prioritize themselves” and that you can help them by finally being able to get their needs met.

But really, you are just capitalizing on an already vulnerable population.

You lure people in with the promise of feeling and achieving something they have had a hard time doing their whole life: getting their needs met. But what you end up doing instead is feeding them a bunch of fake needs packaged up as real needs, while you continuously make them less connected to their own bodies and their own needs. You leave them worse off than when they began. As always, I see your business strategy here.

Take the need for connection, fulfillment, to be attractive, happy, loved, and healthy/well. Or the need for rest, relaxation, exploration and zest for life. Or the need for spontaneity, playfulness and experimentation. I could go on, but I will stop here to emphasize that you make people think that only when they achieve a certain body or eat in a certain way that they will FINALLY then be able to get their needs met. Or, you tell them that participating in you, Diet Culture, is a version of getting their needs met.

You and I know that this doesn’t actually happen though because your tricks and “you got this babe” and “ it’s just a healthy lifestyle” rhetoric is unsustainable and is just a Band-aid to much deeper wound. And that wound is this:

When you exist in a culture where your needs are unmet and you are told that your needs (like your feelings, thoughts, desires, wants and more) don’t matter, people begin to believe it.

And then you swoop in and tell them that you have the answers to their problems, but you don’t.

Getting a person’s actual needs met takes time to identify, learn and unlearn patterns of behaviors that kept them safe, but also disconnected to themselves. Then they have to find ways to slowly identify, articulate and practice meeting those needs. They have to also learn as adults that no one else is going to be able to do that for them (some grief here), and that there are systems that are in place that seek to dysregulate them, throw them off their center and make them LESS connected to their needs. You are one of those systems, Diet Culture.

The process of getting one’s needs met is an integral part of healing from disordered eating and body shame and yet you keep taking that away from them and making healing SO much harder. But I guess that is your goal after all.

Sincerely,

Sunday, aka your most annoyed Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that getting your needs met sounds simple on paper, but that it’s tough and brave work and that diet culture doesn’t want you to actually get your needs met or else they would lose tons of money