Very frank discussion of the emotions triggered in me by the word “dieting” – may be triggering to others as well.
Over on Silentbeep’s ‘Dieting is Dieting’ post, there’s an interesting discussion in comments, which I’ve seen elsewhere on what the word “dieting” actually means. My husband, and Atchka, both claim that the word “dieting” is not, by necessity, “calorie restriction” but can just mean healthier eating habits. I know my husband also has tried to convince me that even if it IS about calorie restriction, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.
Now, I have to point out that my husband has been a great supporter in my FA journey, or rather, in my self-acceptance journey. He’s always thought I was beautiful and brings great joy to my life. So, don’t pick on him ;p
However, I think he and Shannon/Atchka are wrong about the idea that dieting, at least in American culture, doesn’t have to be about calorie restriction. Perhaps some of this has to do with being male – men still are, to a greater extent than women (in my experience, anyway), insulated from diet culture. I know that instances of eating disorders among young boys are up and that men are flocking more and more to the weight loss banner but I don’t think that dieting-as-calorie-restriction has become endemic among men. I could be wrong.
All that aside, my point is this: in American society, when you are a woman, dieting is about calorie restriction. Dieting never, ever means that you are eating healthily because of an existing health condition OTHER than something you perceive as being weight-related. If you reduce sugar because you have PCOS, you are not “dieting.” You’re just eating less sugar. If you reduce sugar so that you are eating fewer calories and losing weight because you think it will help your PCOS, then you are dieting, because that weight loss effort requires calorie restriction.
I can tell you what dieting means to me, as a semi-typical, if eating-disorder-recovering American woman and I think my experience is pretty universal. Dieting means that now, in this moment, you are no longer eating all the foods that scream your name the loudest, because if you do, you are a failure and no one will love you. Yesterday, if you knew you were starting your diet today, you probably ate a LOT of these foods, because today you would diet. (Remember that delightful sentiment trumpeted by so many country kitsch magnets and pillows: Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow YOU WILL DIET!).
Yes, dieting is a mini-death, because suddenly your world gets a little tasty and a lot more restrictive. You swear to yourself that chocolate, potato chips, and Cheetos will no longer inhabit your kitchen shelves. You dust off the diet scale (you already have one in your cupboard from the last diet) and put it up on the counter. You pull out your measuring cups, which instead of being exciting tools to create delicious meals become fixed, immovable sentinels guarding your food intake. You hunt down your flat-backed butter knife and tell yourself that the one with the curved back, that doesn’t level that measuring cup exactly right is still okay, because it’s only a couple calories extra. When you empty ingredients into the bowl, you scrape every last morsel of food from the cup, desperate not to cheat yourself of even one tiny calorie of goodness.
You will probably already have gone through your cookbook and meticulously converted from cups to ounces to get point/calorie values on your favorite recipes. You may round off slightly…2.4 points isn’t QUITE 3 points, so count it as two! Or, if you’re feeling virtuous, you will count it as three and realize that you can only have one two-inch cookie, but surely that will be enough. And, if you walk for an hour, maybe you can have TWO cookies!
And you will feel in control. You will be powerful, successful, and lose weight! You will be sexy, beautiful, and no one will be able to keep their eyes off you! You will walk into a room and people will listen to you because you are gorgeous and have fantastic clothing sense, the sort of clothing sense with which one is magically endowed as a thin person.
All this because you weigh and measure every bit of food that you eat and meticulously track it in a little food journal that you carry around everywhere. When you lose that first pound or two, you will feel like a superwoman. When you start dipping your fork into salad dressing before taking a bite of bare lettuce, to cut back on calories consumed from dressing, or just eliminate salad dressing altogether and dump vinegar all over your lettuce, you will feel virtuous, beautiful, light, and clean.
Dieting sucks you in and takes over your entire world. You can no longer enter a restaurant without craving soda, because you know you can’t have it. You can no longer ever have soup as your starter instead of salad, especially if it’s a creamy soup, because it has too many calories. Everything has to be “on the side, please” or “vegetables steamed, no butter, please” because no food choice goes unwatched. If you succumb to temptation (or to a friend’s “sabotage”) and have dessert at your ladies’ lunch, you will hate yourself for your weakness as you eat 0-point vegetable soup (without even 1-point low-fat turkey kielbasa to give it flavor) for the rest of the day.
And the whole time you’re doing it, the whole time you’re counting and cutting candy bars in half, and weighing every bit of food you consume, you will feel like you are a star. When you fail, backslide, or give in to your hunger and actually eat something that tastes good but goes beyond your calorie limit, you will loathe yourself and know that you are the ugliest, fattest failure ever to set foot on this planet.
So why, why, why would I ever use the term “dieting” to refer to what I do now, intuitive eating and HAES? When I listen to my body’s hunger signals and understand that I was probably craving red meat all last week (and the better part of this week) not because I’m a fat slob but because I’m recovering from a pretty nasty cold and my body must need more nutrients, I love my body. I respect its wisdom.
Do I necessarily always love myself in the mirror? No. But I do know, deeply and fundamentally, that a woman my age who developed anorexia when I developed compulsive overeating would probably be far unhealthier than I am. She might even be dead. My weight may have some implications for my health, although my still-sedentary lifestyle is a far greater factor, but my overeating means that my body has done its best to sustain me in times when food was the only answer.
Why would I ever call the loving process of listening to my body and recognizing that I feel better when I have more protein and less carbohydrate, thanks to PCOS, dieting when that word means the ultimate rejection of my bodily signals?
Most American women, I hope, have healthier attitudes toward food than I have had. I don’t claim that my kneejerk reaction to the word “dieting” is the same for everyone…but I think most women do recognize the mingled beauty and despair of that word. And, I suspect, the vast majority of us would never think of “dieting” as anything other than calorie restriction, whether or not we would consider that calorie restriction to be healthy in some way (I do not).
Don’t play the semantics card. Understand that dieting, for many of us who are fat, is a word with baggage. It is not a neutral, accepting word. Use it yourself if you will…but understand that those of us who have suffered thanks to calorie-restriction will not see it from your perspective, because for us there is nothing positive in the word.
