Into the Abyss
I've Been Struggling
Themes: Anti-dieting,Body image, diet culture, eating disorders, recovery, self-esteem
Content Warning: This one goes hard on the body image and diet culture struggles. If you’re looking for cheerleading for your new years diet resolution, this ain’t it.
A Response to Ragen Chastain
I actually did make a resolution this year, but it’s nothing to do with my weight. I haven’t made those kinds of resolutions in 15 years. I’m trying to bring enjoyment back into my writing. The more writing craft and marketing classes I take, the more joy gets sucked out of my writing, leaving me with zero creativity.
I hate this time of year. Everyone is constantly talking about their stupid diet. Nobody cares about your stupid diet. Shut up about your stupid diet. I’m not going to give you a sugar-free, gluten-free, joy-free cookie and a pat on the head for blargling on and on about your stupid diet.
I’ve been attending Eating Disorders Anonymous meetings to try and get a handle on the massive body image issues and self-loathing I live with. I was embroiled in diet culture for more than thirty years. Enough is enough!
Card Pulls and Thoughts
Body Positivity deck
The messages you take in day in and day out impact the way you feel about your body. Create an environment of body positivity for yourself.
Take a survey of your home and/or work environment. Do you watch commercials promoting the idea that only one type of body is okay? Do you have books or magazines filled with weight loss suggestions. Consider removing these products and ads and replacing them with body positive resources.
Making Peace With Food deck
Many diets work in the short term, but food restriction can trigger binge eating to compensate for deprivation. The diet rebound cycle looks a little bit something like this:
Negative body thoughts
lead to
Resolution to Diet
leads to
Deprivation
leads to
Rebound eating
leads to
Shame
Repeat
It may be helpful to make a timeline of your experiences with dieting to reveal instances of the diet rebound cycle.
Although you are likely to feel elation during the induction portion of the resolution to diet, you are actually setting the diet rebound cycle in motion.
An excerpt from The Fuck It Diet
In Defense of Delicious and Decadent Food
Delicious food is healthy. Please note I did not say healthy food is delicious. I said: DELICIOUS FOOD IS HEALTHY. Butter, salt, cheese, meat, carbs, fats….fatty carbs, fruit, butter-drenched veggies, stews and soups, sourdough bread, wine, honey, full-fat dairy…all that delicious food is so incredibly good for you.
Some of you may have been on the paleo or Whole 30 train already and understand that calories aren’t “the problem.” But I want to talk about that a little more. Because even when I was paleo, I still thought that the goal of paleo was to eventually rely so little on food that I ate less and became a sexy, carnivorous, emaciated meat fairy.
An excerpt from Health At Every Size
Putting Calories Into Perspective
You may already know this plain fact: weight loss is simply a matter of taking in fewer calories than you spend. Conventional weight loss ideology exploits this fact, prompting you to diet (reduce caloric intake) or exercise (increase calories spent). On the surface, this seems logical.
The problem is, it doesn’t work–at least not in a lasting way. All you folks who have dieted or exercised with gusto, only to regain the weight, listen up! You did not fail to keep the weight off because you are lazy, weak, or undisciplined. It’s not because you didn’t want it badly enough. You regained that weight because the contributors to your body weight, such as what, when, and how much you eat, as well as how you expend energy (including your inclination to move), are not completely under your conscious control.
Sure, on a short-term basis you can do a pretty good job of manipulating your food or exercise habits–and that’s why short term weight loss is relatively easy. On a long-term basis, however, your body can undermine your best efforts to control your weight.
Three Readings from The Anti-Diet
One
It’s not your fault that your mental health has suffered on diets; it’s hard to feel happy and carefree when you’re ready to gouge someone’s eye out for a piece of bread.
Two
It’s clear that diet culture has robbed millions of us of our happiness--not to mention our time, our money, and our well-being--in all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
Three
Getting angry at diet culture is an important part of the healing process--a powerful antidote to the inward-directed anger that the Life Thief creates to distract you from its crimes. Because make no mistake: beating yourself up for “failing” to lose weight and keep it off--or for not being able to stick to a diet of exclusively “whole,” “unprocessed” foods--distracts you from what should be the real object of our collective anger, which is diet culture itself.
3 R’s Meeting December 26, 2025
https://eatingdisordersanonymous.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/EDA-Body-Acceptance.pdf
Prompts
Setting boundaries with medical professionals
Learning to trust yourself
Connecting or reconnecting with your body
Setting boundaries with others about diet talk
Staying connected to yourself when others are expressing strong emotions
Letting go and letting God/the Universe/Whatever be in control
“Most of us regarded our bodies with suspicion.”
Accepting that the amount I need to eat is more or less than I want it to be.
Just when I think I have body acceptance down to a science or a mantra or completely ingrained in the soft smooth jellybean of a brain taking up space in the cement sphere that is my skull, something happens that forces me to realize just how fragile that belief is.
It’s the day after Christmas, and everybody’s wounded.
Not only are we wounded, but we can expect to have diet talk dumped on us from above for the rest of the year and well into January like some psychotic fighter pilot flying overhead raining down diet programs and food with all the appeal of a hunk of cardboard slathered in sawdust sauce and food journals and apps for calorie counting and all that other shit that never worked in the entire thirty-three years I engaged in it, but some stupid--nay, insane--part of me insists on believing that THIS TIME IT WILL WORK!
Why, I just didn’t do it right before, good people. It can’t be that the cabbage soup diet is a load of manure and you don’t even get to eat the damn cabbage or carrots. You just drink the liquid fart potion all the livelong day, and that certainly won’t lead you to feeling like if someone dumped barbecue sauce on your arm you’d start gnawing on it. Oh no, good people, this is sound nutrition and you will look like a glamorous supermodel and not at all like a zombie rummaging through trash cans behind restaurants to obtain even a crumb of actual food if you decide to pursue this course of action.
This was me at every winter holiday for thirty-three years. I’d enjoy the ample offerings at holiday feasts and enjoy the glorious big tins of popcorn someone invariably gave my family. There might be purging or maybe there wasn’t, that was a coin toss over the years. Then I made the promise that I was going to exercise like a fiend and starve myself in a way that would make a desert animal that subsists of the droplet of moisture in a stalk of withered grass seem like an absolute gourmand.
Now, let me drop a little science on you. This is the diet-rebound cycle.
Many diets work in the short term, but food restriction can trigger binge eating to compensate for deprivation. The diet rebound cycle looks a little bit something like this:
Negative body thoughts
lead to
Resolution to Diet
leads to
Deprivation
leads to
Rebound eating
leads to
Shame
Repeat
I am more than a little familiar with this cycle, good people. I engaged in it every year for thirty-three years, often more than once in the same year. Every time I lost weight, the weight I lost returned with friends. Every time that happened, I hated myself a little more.
Crazy is doing the same thing that has never worked and expecting different results.
A lot of the time, I’m able to resist the madness.
This time of year it’s difficult, particularly with so many people talking about going on whatever the Diet Du Jour is.
I want to shake them and tell them to snap out of it.
I want to tell them that they’re acting crazy.
I want to tell them to shut up with the damn diet talk because they’re pulling me back into the abyss.
Final thoughts
The fact that women bond over feeling ashamed of our bodies and constantly talking about diets is depressing. I’d forgotten how pervasive this is until I briefly went back to work at a long-term care center before having to admit that I really can’t do that kind of work anymore. On the lunch hour, every woman was talking about what diet she was on. I wanted to run out of there screaming. I’d been working solo as a home health nurse for so long that my life had been mostly free of constant diet talk.
I’m not blaming anybody. I did it myself for many years. I want to apologize to everyone I bored to tears with that crap. It’s so depressing. I’m struggling now, but at least I’m not riding the Diet Culture bus to hell anymore.
Resources
Eating Disorders Anonymous
https://eatingdisordersanonymous.org/meetings/
Ragen Chastain’s Substack
weightandhealthcare.substack.com
The Anti-Diet
Body Positivity deck
The Fuck It Diet
Health at Every Size
Making Peace with Food deck
Ornery Owl Has Spoken
