The Dieting Mind or How Your “Clean” Eating May Actually Be a Diet
Content warning: this blog post discusses dieting, uses words such as weight loss, restricting, binging, and other words that may be triggering to those recovering from disordered eating patterns. Please proceed accordingly.
Diet can be a loaded word. It can elicit a number of emotional responses, from shame and defensiveness to excitement and glee, and everything in between. Some people love them, some hate them, and nearly everyone knows something about them.
With the rise of body positivity movement, dieting as a word may have become slightly less popular yet the companies determined to profit from the collective anti-fat bias have found new ways of shaming people into losing weight. Mindful and intuitive eating have been co-opted from their origin and used to sell dieting products or weight loss apps. Detoxes, cleanses and resets have begun masquerading as an easy way to help your body shed unwanted pounds.
But regardless of what words are used, what names are invented and what strategies are creatively employed to have our society preoccupied with thinness as a goal, if you know what to look for - you can easily identify how the dieting mind is present in each and every one of them.
So today we will talk about what the dieting mind is, what are some common themes, thought patterns and behaviors that are associated with it, and how we can begin to move toward a more kind and flexible way of thinking about our relationship to our food and our bodies.
What is the dieting mind?
Before we jump into what the dieting mind is, let’s quickly revisit what the word dieting means.
Dieting is a process of an intentional attempt at losing weight, appearing smaller or shrinking the size of the body through techniques designed to control and suppress appetite, restrict the amount of food eaten, and attempt to control food-related body behaviors.
You may read the above description and think to yourself, “Well, that doesn’t apply to me. I don’t diet. I just try to watch what I eat. I try to eat healthy.”
But the kicker is - you don’t need to identify as “being on a diet” to have a dieting mind. Because the dieting mind encompasses much more than just food restriction, it rests on a number of fundamental pillars that organize and help it structure how you interact and relate to food and body topics.
Let’s take a look at these pillars together.
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This image and a lot of these concepts are the work of Evelyn Tribole, author of the book Intuitive Eating. The Center for Body Trust also discusses these concepts in great detail, should you wish to learn more.
To read more on how your lifestyle may actually be a diet, check out Virgie Tovar’s blog post Take The Cake: 8 Clues Your “Lifestyle” Is Actually A Diet (& Why It’s Gaslighting).
Pillar 1 - Creating a binary + assigning morality
When we talk about binaries, we talk about two elements that are presented as diametrically opposite. Good vs. bad, tall vs. short, light vs. dark, and so on.
The dieting mind applies a binary to food choices as well as body behaviors. It places food into categories of bad vs. good foods, or a myriad of other terms that have now been in use. These include “clean” eating vs. “junk food”, “superfoods” vs. “processed foods”, “empty calories” vs. “healthy food”, frozen foods vs. prepared from scratch food, and many more.
But a binary is not a benign set of two points. A binary assigns morality to each of these points.
It assumes something about a person’s character and choices based on which of these binary points they land on. Had cake for breakfast? Bad person, poor self-control, lack of willpower. Added green leaves to your lunch? Good person, cares about their “health”, intentional about their food choices.
By assigning a moral value to whichever end of the binary you land on, the dieting mind can use this as a weapon to infuse you with shame and keep you in a perpetual cycle of self-hatred and sabotage.
Pillar 2 - Onus of responsibility is on the individual
When a binary is set in place, it becomes easier to shift the onus of responsibility for food and body behaviors onto the individual, and the individual alone.
Food and body behaviors become a “choice” and a “preference”, rather than a necessity, accessibility issue or simply working with the body you have.
It becomes easy to blame an individual person for their food choices because the dieting mind takes health out of context. The dieting mind does not ask the question of whether the person has access to multiple grocery stores and thus many food options. It does not ask what a person’s socioeconomic status may be, or whether they can afford the food required for adequate nutrition. Or whether the person has parks, walking, biking trails or any green spaces created for recreation, leisure and movement in the vicinity of their dwelling.
Instead of assessing the systems designed and kept in place to enforce the lack of accessibility, food insecurity, poor recreational options, etc., the individual is blamed for not “doing enough” to “care for their health.”
Pillar 3 - Valuing appearance over health
The dieting mind values appearance over health, and frequently poses concerns for appearance as concerns for health.
You may have heard someone say, “But I am just worried for your health!” when you help yourself to a second serving of something delicious. This false worry gets presented as care, when in reality what many people mean by this statement is “Watch out so you don’t get fat.”
There is a difference between cosmetic versus metabolic health. Cosmetic, or appearance-oriented “health” is preoccupied with the number on the scale, clothing size, calories consumed and whether one can fit into a piece of clothing from when they were sixteen (newsflash: bodies change as they age and expecting to fit into your teenage clothing is not only unreasonable, it also creates a false expectation that can be used toward self-hatred and sabotage once again).
Metabolic fitness asks the questions such as :
Can I walk to my destination with relative ease?
Can I lift my child and not get immediately tired?
Do I adequately feed myself, and if yes, do I have enough variety in my food options?
Do I have the energy I need to live the type of life I desire?
Once we begin to shift from cosmetic fitness, or appearance-forward orientation, toward metabolic fitness and its view of health, we naturally introduce more gray into the binaries we are inducted into through our culture, society norms and familial standards
To learn more read this article titled Metabolic versus Cosmetic Fitness.
Pillar 4 - Removing body trust
Lastly, the dieting mind does not recognize the concept of body trust. To the contrary, the dieting mind views the body, its instincts, urges and desires as something to be wary of and even feel fearful toward.
You may have heard this expressed colloquially as “It’s dangerous for me to have ice cream in the freezer”, “I can’t trust myself around sweets”, “If I let myself go, I will never stop eating” and so on.
The underlying notion that our bodies are entities to be tamed and controlled runs rampant through our society, and as a result, through our heads.
From this lack of body trust we hear new terms pop up such as “food addiction” or even “food porn”, categorizing something that is essential to our health and well-being as something sinful, inappropriate or taboo.
The truth is that we are all born with inherent trust in our bodies. From the time we are tiny babies who marvel at their toes or play with their bellies, we enter this world with an awe and delight in the bodies we have. Until something or someone takes that away from us.
Pillar 5 - Racist origins + white supremacy
It is important to note that the dieting mind and the anti-fat bias that our society perpetuates has many racist origins.
In her book Fearing the Black Body, author Sabrina Strings explains that while the anti-fat sentiments were dominating the discourse in Western Europe for a good part of two centuries, it wasn’t until the massive influx of enslaved African people and the resurgence of religious ideology in the United States that “slenderness was increasingly promoted in the popular media as the correct embodiment for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant women” (Strings, 2019, Introduction, para.19).
Only much later would the medical establishment begin to quantify what constitutes ‘excessive’ fat, placing the origin of Western fat phobia squarely in the center of oppression tactics that legitimize some bodies and ostracize others (to read more on this topic, check out my other blog Body Size is a Social Justice Issue)
The dieting mind is a direct descendant of racism and white supremacy, now having been both externalized in our behaviors and attitudes towards others - such as critiquing and commenting on other people’s body size or eating habits - as well as internalized where we become the oppressor within, shaming, guilting and criticizing our own body size, food habits or body behaviors.
The natural question that follows may be: what do we do about the dieting mind and how can we begin to shift toward a more flexible and accepting way of thinking about food and body?
The first step to any sort of change is awareness. It is not directly jumping into action, because until our internal paradigms begin to shift toward embracing the gray rather than relying on the black and white, the foundation for any action will be unsustainable.
The goal is to build more and more awareness. Noticing when our dieting mind is activated, noticing what kind of things it says to us and how it forces us to behave, and getting curious around its motivation, strategies and desires.
To become a mindful observer of our own selves, to build a data set on how and where we think, feel and act the way we do is already an undertaking that is both difficult and honorable as a start.
Let us welcome the gray and invite awareness and mindful presence towards our inner dieting minds so that we can finally step toward healing our relationships with the food we eat and the bodies we inhabit.