Read on Twitter
95% of diets fail. Well, they don’t. They’re not meant to make you thin. They’re meant to make you end up fatter than you were before you started. They’re meant to make you feel like it’s just because you didn’t have willpower. So you’ll start another diet. It’s an industry.
I once spoke to a doctor who said, ‘All diets fail eventually. The only difference between the diets is the time it takes for you to get fat again.’
‘Diets are a cure that don’t work for a disease that doesn’t exist’ was one of the slogans said by the first fat activism movements in the 60s. This is not new information.
And I can hear you screaming into the void, ‘L I F E S T Y L E C H A N G E’ but hey, we can call dieting whatever we want - Weight Watchers are now ‘Wellness Watchers’ - but it’s still the same bullshit wearing a new disguise.
When it comes to dieting, people only focus on the goal. This unobtainable future where they will magically be thin. They don’t think about the process during which they will be A Person Who Diets: the most boring, vapid, uninteresting and annoying people on Earth.
‘Ooh, I would love to taste that, but I’m on a diet.’ is not a personality trait.
What’s the alternative to dieting, though? STAYING FAT? Yeah, imagine the horror. Imagine just living your life. Imagine not trying so hard to conform. Imagine just eating what makes you feel happy. Why is looking like me the worst possible thing that could happen to you?
I totally understand wanting to be thin. I’d love a slice of that privilege. Buying clothes in physical stores. Seats with armrests not hurting. Plane trips not hurting. Being able to eat in public without getting dirty stares. Mmmm. Thin privilege must be sweet.
That’s just not how my body is meant to look. Maybe it WAS, once. I probably would have been a lot smaller if, when I was eight years old, I hadn’t been put on a diet after which I starved myself on/off for fifteen years. If we hadn’t been poor.
If we had had access to therapy to deal with the abuse. If I hadn’t been taught that my body is unlovable and wrong unless it is thin. If I hadn’t been taught to ignore every message from my body until I just didn’t ever know what I wanted to eat or when.
If I grew up in a society where I was told that my body was perfect however it looked or worked. If I was encouraged to move my body because it can be fun. If I didn’t know everything about calories by the age of nine. Yeah, I probably would have been a bit smaller.
I am not, though. Even though I did everything they told me to. I tried every single diet. Every single type of sport. For fifteen years. All the stuff they’re still telling me to do. And here I am - fat. Almost as if dieting and shaming doesn’t work.
I could keep going on about this for hours. Fuck the government, seriously. I am going to talk more and more and more about dieting and health and fatness in this show in August.
http://sofiehagen.com/onlineshow
http://sofiehagen.com/onlineshow
Also this is so important. Thank you, @tommyinboots . https://twitter.com/tommyinboots/status/1288590816793985024
