My Dieting Report Card

TRIGGER WARNING: mention of specific commercial diets and specific weight changes.

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We often think of “Diet Culture” as just reality - a thing we all need to accept, whether or not we live by its rules. 

I wonder if that’s true? I already see some changes happening. My instagram feed is filled with individuals around the world living comfortably - happily - in all kinds of bodies. I see activists and dietitians and doctors advocating for weight-inclusive medical care. I even think it’s a good sign that the diet industry is constantly scrambling to keep up with (and co-opt) the fat acceptance/activist world’s language to try to sell diets (#HeathAtEverySize, #BodyAcceptance, etc.). Doctors and nurses I know tell me that patients are routinely opting out of being weighed when it isn’t medically necessary. I think there’s hope!

However, that doesn’t mean Diet Culture isn’t still here and strong as ever - especially in its more insidious “Health & Wellness” forms. 

I decided to spend some time really imagining what it would be like if Diet Culture were a more explicit, tyrannical dictator who monitored me throughout my life. I wanted to take the narratives in my head - the ones that I used to think were my own thoughts - and put them into an external human form. Doing this exercise was really liberating - it helped me see that my thoughts and beliefs are not innate - they are just thoughts and beliefs that were actually - truly - PUT THERE by other people (including the media, the government, doctors, peers...) 

Below is the result of this exercise for me - it’s my food and dieting story, with detailed feedback and grades from my own personal, mean old Diet Culture Teacher.

EARLY CHILDHOOD

Diet Culture Grade: D

Teacher Comment: “Student is a very quick learner and has almost immediately internalized that her body is unappealing to adults, and she feels shame around that. This shame is causing her to sneak food and binge, but she is not yet officially restricting her food intake. There’s hope that she will learn that she can’t be trusted around food and that active dieting will come soon enough.”

I was encouraged to restrict the food I ate from an extremely young age. I was always hungry and being told that “one bowl of cereal is enough, Ingrid”, “you don’t need a snack-- wait for dinner”, “have some carrots or drink some water if you need to feel full”, or as we rolled into the 1980s it was “here, eat a rice cake”. 

At around age five I started sneaking food. I would get up super early so I could eat as much cereal as I wanted before anyone else got up. I’d haul myself up on the kitchen counter to reach the extra large cereal bowls that were stored on the top shelf, then hop back down to eat my cereal in peace. One fateful morning I did this routine as usual, and when I jumped back down off the counter I landed on our brand new puppy and broke his leg. I’ll never forget his scream, and the profound shame I felt when everyone in my family woke up to see what I’d done, and why.

The first thing I learned was that I was hungry at all the wrong times, and too much. The second thing I learned was that I was bigger than I should be (and bigger than my friends), and that if I could just control my eating I could be smaller - which was an unqualified good thing. The third thing I learned was that being thin and pretty was the most important thing. 

At first I would just make a show of eating whatever I was served at mealtime, and would eat more early in the morning, at school or right after school (before my mom got home). But eventually I got on the bandwagon and started to desperately want to control my eating because the pain of being chubby in my snooty private girls’ grade school was too hard. I enlisted my mom in the project of getting me thin.

MIDDLE SCHOOL

Diet Culture Grade: C+

Teacher Comment: “Student has picked up that she needs to restrict her food intake to have a different, smaller body than the one she has. Her desire to be smaller has strengthened immensely since her toddler years, and she is participating in her sisters’ and parent’s dieting attempts, but she’s still not a full-fledged dieter on her own.”

At age 11 I begged my parent’s to send me to Weight Watchers’ summer camp in Lackawaxan, PA. I was one of the smallest kids there, actually, and it was the first time in my memory that I was comfortable running around in a swimsuit (I truly don’t remember my toddler days in a swimsuit, though I’m sure I ran around un-self-consciously at some point.) They fed us a mini ice-cream scoop of scrambled eggs and one mini bagel for breakfast, and had us do calisthenics before and after every meal. It was bootcamp for little kids. My mom mailed me a care package that contained astronaut ice cream and the entire package was confiscated.

Despite being utterly thrilled at being the second-smallest girl at the camp (which had never happened before in any other life context), I still called home crying - I was desperately homesick and hungry and I wanted to go home.

I lost eight pounds.

HIGH SCHOOL 

Diet Culture Grade: B-

Teacher Comment: “Her frequent attempts to restrict her food intake leads only to regular binges, and no perceptible weight loss. She participates in sports and yet-- no weight loss. She assumes she’s fat because she eats too much, which is a good sign that she is absorbing diet culture norms, but she can’t seem to stick to any diet plans for very long. The good news is that she has fully internalized that she is not worthy of romantic love at her weight, and she is gathering a lot of evidence to support that in her social interactions at her boarding school. She is nowhere near giving up on dieting, so that’s a great sign.”

My parents got divorced when I was 13, and I sort-of-chose to go to boarding school instead of moving with my mom to New Jersey (my two older sisters were already in college). 

At my (very rich, very preppie) Connecticut boarding school I was decidedly too fat to be acceptable. I didn’t fit into most Laura Ashely dresses and skirts. So, I settled into being the perennial “fat friend” who acted like she loved flowy elastic skirts, clogs and giant hand-knitted sweaters. 

I tried a lot of new things in high school: eliminating food types, purging after meals, and even little spurts of manic exercise. I talked endlessly about how much I hated my body (and all the boys I had crushes on), and supported my thin girlfriends as they tried to heal from their own eating disorders. In those days (late 80’s) my restrict-then-binge-eat routine was just considered “compulsive overeating” and was not classified as a “real” eating disorder. In other words, I watched my friends with anorexia and bulimia get a lot of health coaching and assistance while my living hell inside my bigger-than-desirable body was entirely overlooked as just an impulse control problem. A problem of willpower.

Of course, looking back, if someone had pulled me aside and said: “Listen - your body is what it is, stop trying to shrink it and you’ll be far healthier and you’ll even avoid future weight gain” I would have been extremely angry and sad about that. I didn’t want to be healthy and at peace, I wanted to be thin.

COLLEGE

Diet Culture Grade: B+

Teacher Comment: “The great news is that she’s realizing that time is running out - she’s heading to college and it’s time to find love, get married and eventually have children. To do that, she’ll need to lose a lot of weight. She finally buckled down using an extreme, expensive diet program and lost significant weight right before starting college. She then got a boyfriend which reinforced the importance of being thinner to find love. She doesn’t get an “A” yet because she regained the weight at the end of her freshman year, but she spent the rest of her college years worrying about her weight, learning how to purge more effectively, and generally torturing herself over how she looks. Great job!”

When I graduated high school I was given a posthumous gift of $3000 from my Granny, who gave $3000 to every graduating senior in our family (she had died my junior year in high school and I was the youngest grandchild). I immediately handed that money over to Nutri-System (yes, all of it) for my pre-college summer of starvation. I wanted a fresh start, and I wanted a boyfriend. I was going to get thin or die trying. I lost ~30 lbs that summer, and was as close to “regular sized” as I’ve ever been in my life when I started college. I had to apply for a special dispensation to skip the college meal plan because I needed to eat my reconstituted freeze-dried Nutri-System foods (alone, in my dorm kitchen). The school agreed to it.

Being regular-sized gave me so much confidence. I wore belts. I tucked in shirts. I wore very short ripped Levi’s shorts and clogs and yes - I got myself a very hot boyfriend. I even started running every day (panic-running - I was scared of regaining the weight). My lifelong dream was coming true. No one thought of me as their fat friend. I wasn’t skinny, but I wasn’t fat either. 

And then I cracked. Sometime late Freshman year I started eating again. I’ll never forget the taste of that first slice of post-Nutri-System pizza. Around this time I fell madly in love with a guy I was friends with. I got fatter and fatter as our friendship deepened. It always felt like it would eventually turn romantic, but then he “dumped” me for a thin, pretty girl. My heart broke into a million pieces and it took me years to recover because I was certain we would have dated if I just hadn’t gained that weight back. If I’m honest I still think it’s a little bit true today (at least to some degree— I’m sure he also just didn’t like me that way.)

Being dumped by my friend also got tangled up in my early trauma over my father leaving us, which all tied back to being fat and unworthy of love and parental care. Don’t worry - I’ve had all the therapy. But this was probably the first time in my life that I started to be really angry about our culture’s acceptance of weight stigma vs just hurt by it. 

MY 20’S 

Dieting Grade: A-

Teacher Comment: “Ingrid has fully internalized that her weight is the only reason she fails or succeeds at pretty much everything, but mostly her romantic life. She loses weight and regains it in shorter and shorter cycles, trying new methods every 3-6 months. This increases diet industry profits, and reinforces the idea that she just needs “one more try” to get there. She has become expert in every nutritional, dietary and physical fitness regimen available in the marketplace. She is going into credit card debt buying clothes to try to mask whatever body she has at the moment. She is unraveling - her life is consumed with the pursuit of romantic love, heartache, diets, drinking alcohol to feel pretty for one night, and job hopping to get a fresh start every couple of years. Good job Ingrid! You’ve completely lost touch with your intrinsic value and purpose on earth.” 

Sadly, my twenties are a blur. After college I abandoned my original intention to be a political investigative journalist and wound up working on the advertising sales side of the budding online media world (it was the 90s in San Francisco). I was also trying really hard to find the man of my dreams so I could get moving with “the rest of my life”. 

When I felt my loneliest and most lost, I would invariably plan and cling to diets. In some ways I think I became “addicted” to dieting in these years. It would give me such a high to get started on a new food and exercise plan, and the first fifteen pounds always came off really quickly. Then I would get a new boyfriend (or hook up with someone), and I’d start eating again. 

Beyond the incontrovertible fact that dieting is not sustainable long term for most people (including me), I think I was also testing my various boyfriends to see if they would stay with me through thin and thick, so to speak. It never worked out (because they weren’t the right guys for me, presumably), but I was always able to blame it on my weight gain in the course of the relationship. Clever trick, right?

At age 29, now living in NYC with 30 lurking on the horizon (and no husband or kids in my sights), I decided to do the Atkins diet. I lost over 30 lbs again, and fell madly in love with eating low carb. And drinking. I could eat tons of cheese and salami and drink a bottle of red wine for dinner every night and still lose weight! My love of wine really took off in this era of my life. Drinking provided a sophisticated meal replacement, and (at that age) I didn’t have to deal with bad hangovers. I would eat eggs for breakfast (if I ate breakfast at all), a chicken caesar salad (no croutons) nearly every day for lunch, and then the sky was the limit for dinner. Steak, lamb, salmon, whole roasted chickens. I’d make creamed spinach with heavy cream (no flour), or another salad. I got really into “whatever protein I’m into” salads. 

MY 30s

Dieting Grade: B-

“Ingrid is still committed to dieting to get to her dream weight (and dream life), but her efforts get interrupted by a cancer diagnosis in this decade of her life, which puts her whole belief system into question. She doesn’t give up entirely on diets, but she seems to be pushing every boundary and thinking “fuck it” an awful lot. She’s also giving more attention to wine than food, so her ability to start and stick to diets is weakening. We are worried her commitment may be waning, despite her continued efforts to lose weight.”

At 30 I met a guy at a conference in Austin, TX and I truly thought I had met “the one”. I was low-carbing like crazy, still losing weight when I met him, and I was sure I was getting close to my forever weight. I could buy clothes at all the clothing stores. 

After six months of dating long-distance I dropped everything and moved to the Seattle area to live with this new boyfriend. And… six weeks after moving to Seattle we broke up (he was very controlling and scary - I had ignored all the red flags). I was pretty broke from the move and had just started a new job, so I moved into an apartment in Pioneer Square (one block from my new job) and planned to save money until I could eventually move back to NYC.

For the first half of my 30s in Seattle I mostly repeated the blurry diet-drink-regain-weight-drink-look-for-a-boyfriend routine, but it was finally getting old. I was weight cycling constantly - 20lbs down, 25lbs up, 20lbs down, 25lbs up. I was getting bigger and bigger, and my hopes for a family and a settled life were receding into the distance.

Then at 36 I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer, and my life as I knew it came to a halt. 

The treatment for endometrial cancer is a hysterectomy, which meant that I would never have my own biological children. At first, I felt relief. Isn’t that strange? I no longer had to worry about getting thin to meet a man to have a baby. I could just give up, and live the single life unapologetically. Surviving cancer also gave me a (momentary) feeling of gratitude for the body I did have. I was willing to consider that living in my own body was actually ok. Better than being dead, basically. 

Instead of sparking a new life of healthy living - loving and respecting my body and getting going on all of my other dreams - surviving cancer led to binge drinking, binge eating, and poor life decision-making. But, against all the odds, one magical thing happened: at 39, I met and fell in love with the man who would become my husband. 

I was blissfully happy to have found my partner, but my wine drinking habit didn’t just go away. As it so often does, it got worse.

My 40s

Dieting Grade: F (for “freedom”)

Teacher Comment: “Ingrid settled into married life and only sporadically dipped back into low-carbing to try to maintain her wedding weight, which wasn’t all that low to begin with. She traveled a lot for work, which involved a lot of drunken nights out. Once she realized she was becoming addicted to alcohol she lost all focus on weight loss and seemed to care more about quitting drinking. In the process of quitting drinking she stopped dieting altogether. She suspects that her commitment to dieting may have been misguided, so she seeks out anti-diet supports and ditches dieting and diet culture completely. Her dieting grade reflects this.” 

Maybe I was just getting so old it no longer mattered, but in my 40s I’d finally had it with diets. I had to focus on getting to a place of integrity and real wellbeing, which meant quitting drinking first.

I’m now in my late forties, and I can say without a doubt that this has been the best decade of my life. I’ve spent the last five years happily sober and focused on plucking out the last vestiges of Diet Mentality and Diet Culture from my life. 

I’ve left my career in online advertising, my husband and I own a tiny bookstore near our house, and (as you no doubt have noticed) launched my own Diet Recovery coaching business so I can help others get here too. 

So, friends: there’s hope. For me, for you, and maybe even for the world.