How can you be “Anti-Diet”?
Since publishing my website in December of 2022 I’ve had a few questions from visitors to the site about what it means in my “Values” section when I say that I am “Anti-Diet”. They’ve asked me how I can be “anti-diet” - doesn’t diet just mean what you eat? We all have a diet; it might be connected to our culture and where we live, the sensitivities we have to things like lactose or gluten, or be connected to our values like veganism is. There exist as many diets as there are people on the planet. Even animals have diets. So how can someone say that they are “Anti-Diet”?
The term “Anti-Diet” refers to a very specific kind of diet. The ones you may have read in your mother’s magazines growing up, the ones that you might hear influencers on social media selling on their feeds, and more specifically, the diets which are advertised to to help you shrink your body. These diets tend to be extremely restrictive, with fewer calories than most people need in a day, and ones which vilify certain types of food.
These are the diets which destroy our relationship with food, trigger disordered eating and eating disorders, and over the long run contribute to lower self-esteem and even worse health outcomes. They are also, for most of us, false advertising. Study after study has shown that permanently shrinking your body is just not possible for about 90 - 95% of people, and the small percentage of people who do manage to stay smaller for longer engage in unhealthy behaviours and relationships with regards to food and exercise.
The anti-diet movement rejects these restrictive diets and encourages us to heal our relationship with food and accept our bodies regardless of what size they might be. Once upon a time you were a baby who knew exactly what and how much you needed to eat. Somewhere along the way many of us lost this intuition with food and eating. Exploring the anti-diet movement is one of the ways we can start to learn to eat intuitively again, and start to accept ourselves just as we are.
Our society makes it difficult to exist in a larger body and the diet industry is a 70+ billion dollar industry designed to make you think that being smaller is not only better and healthier, but entirely possible. It may be difficult to start to explore this concept if body image and dieting is something you’ve struggled with for a long time. I know this because I went on this journey myself. I was once a chronic dieter. I starved myself for years on end to achieve an unachievable goal. I was miserable. It wasn’t until I discovered these anti-diet concepts that I began to understand why nothing I had tried had ever worked.
If this concept of “Anti-Diet” resonates with you, there are countless resources to educate and inform you on this topic: From podcasts like “Maintenance Phase”, hosted by Aubrey Gordon, to books such as “Anti-Diet” by Christy Harrison, and even instagram accounts like yourdietitianbff. Another place to start is the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH).
Regardless of how you approach your anti-diet journey, music therapy can help. If you’re curious about how, get in touch and book a free consultation and take your first steps towards freedom from diet culture forever.
