So, step 1 toward embracing fat acceptance and coming to a truce with the size of your body is realizing that compulsory diet culture insists we must always be making some kind of effort to change our body and this...simply isn't true.

As part of step 1, you're likely going to hear this: Diets don't work. The stats have not changed in many years. For something like 95% of people, weight loss diets result in an initial loss followed by regain plus extra weight. Maybe this is a relief and maybe it pisses you off.

Maybe you still really really really want diets to work. Maybe you want them to work because the dream of thinness is so treasured - it's certainly presented as the solution to all of our problems, right?

Maybe you want them to work because it seems like it will be easier to find a romantic and/or sexual partner as a thin person. Maybe you want them to work so you can find cheap and easily available cute clothes! Maybe you want them to work because you're tired of being bullied.

Maybe you want them to work because you are in pain and you would like to be in less pain. I really really really wish, for you most of all, that I could point to a diet that works.

That weight loss dieting is presented as a cure-all and no other solutions are even considered for people living in pain is...such a profound failure of empathy and realism on the part of the medical community. It's also a result of the fat hate baked into healthcare right now.

If the collective will of fat people across so many decades could make diets work then the fabric of reality itself would shift and diets would be effective - but this hasn't happened. Because diets don't work. The body isn't an easy-to-solve math problem.

And so I'm inviting you to consider: you can just...not diet. You can pour that energy and devotion into literally anything else in your life. There are other things to explore - intuitive eating and HAES and other stuff I'll tweet about another time.

For today, just consider: What would life be like if you weren't consumed with dieting and body loathing about your size? What would you put that time and energy into? If you were to just opt out of compulsory diet culture, what would that mean for you?