Dear Diet Culture Letter: Why Honoring Hunger Feels Confusing
Dear Diet Culture,
It’s me, Sunday.
Can we talk about hunger for a moment? Alright, awesome! I was planning on it anyway.
As an eating disorder dietitian, the constant unending advice (cough cough rhetoric) around "eating less, moving more" and sanctifying disordered eating behaviors in the name of "health" drives me bonkers. And I know that you are the creator of it, Diet Culture, so don’t claim innocence.
You complicate what could be a simple process of honoring hunger and in the aftermath leave people swimming in confusion, unsure of what to eat and how to feel satisfied, with an apple in hand that they don't even want, questioning if they really absorbed the information from their latest anti-diet book or article.
And rightfully so!
You elevate going without food, skipping meals, and being hungry as an achievement (except of course when it’s related to poverty which you fail to acknowledge. Oh the irony!). It’s is absurd when you break it down. To intentionally deny a human being’s body its most basic need for food is neither healthy nor sustainable, and yet you promote it as such.
You have made the act of NOT eating some sort of “achievement” which is often rooted in classism, healthism and fatphobia. But yet you advertise these behaviors as morality and health packaged up neatly and tied with a bow without talking about the very real harmful physical and mental health effects of not getting enough food, not to mention the long-term impacts on the development of disordered eating and eating disorders.You will have people thinking, through your powerful rhetoric, that most food is bad for them only you label it as “wellness.”
Health, while uniquely defined for each individual person differently, will never be found in the act of NOT eating food. While food provides so much more than energy (joy, connection to culture/religion/tradition, soothing, celebration, and more) we must begin with the most basic concept and acknowledge the absurdity of the elevation of denying the body food (energy) as something good.
By taking steps to understand this, we can begin to contextualize why hunger feels so confusing to so many people. After years of being told to ignore hunger (you know the examples of the harmful ways that you “advise” on ignoring hunger), most people get both afraid of honoring hunger “too soon” and also get so disconnected from hunger (through training themselves to do so based on harmful advice) that they only feel it when they are very, very hungry which then often leads to unintended things like binge eating.* Not to mention, the diets that you endorse tell people that they lack will or character if they cannot “resist” hunger, with folks in fat bodies being harmed the most by this discourse. (*see footnote)
Diet Culture, you make people afraid of honoring their hunger! You make hunger confusing and you take away what could be a joyous cultivation of connection hunger starting when people are younger and spanning into adulthood, and turn it into fear.
Thank goodness there are tools that I use to help people reconnect with their body over time and relearn what you took from them: their connection and respect for hunger.
Sincerely,
Sunday, aka your most passionate non-diet Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know diet culture will do everything in its power to get you to not eat. Literally anything. And every time you honor your hunger, you are resisting and pushing back on this oppressive system.
*There is a ton of complexity when talking about hunger cues and honoring hunger. In eating disorder and disordered eating treatment we don’t introduce hunger/fullness work until food consistency and adequacy takes place for some time. Additionally, poverty and trauma impact hunger cues a ton and often until adulthood, so not sensing hunger cues is not a failure of a human, but rather it means that we use other tools to learn how to nourish the body that don’t depend exclusively on sensing hunger cues in the body and/or relying on them exclusively.