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On the First Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave to Me a Holiday That’s Diet Culture-Free
Why not hit pause on all the self-criticism and fatphobia at the most wonderful time of the year?
One thing I don’t enjoy about the festive season since I quit diet culture a few years back, is all of the food and body shaming chatter that is much more noticeable to me now. It’s boring and mentally exhausting. Believe me, as a former fellow weight-obsessed type, I get it. I was like this once too, big time.
I know some people don’t even know there’s another way to be other than obsessing over their weight their entire lives. I know I have the thin privilege of being what fat acceptance groups call a “small fat”. I can live in the world without too much discrimination over the size of my body. It’s the same size my body has wanted to be since I spent a decade yo-yo dieting in my thirties after I gained almost thirty pounds with chemotherapy steroids.
I would go on some crazy diet, lose much of it, and then regain it. I told myself all the things we do to keep going with the pursuit of weight loss: it was for my “health”, I was doing it the “right way” when in truth many of the diets I was doing were even stricter than the stuff I was doing when I had eating disorders in my teens…
