When Wellness Culture Keeps Us Stuck in Diet Culture

I owe you an apology, maybe a few.

I didn’t get it right and years ago,  I may have caused you more harm than good…and for that, I’m truly sorry.

And what I’m about to say might ruffle a few feathers, especially because I work in the wellness industry, but these things need to be said and called out, including calling myself out for the mistaken, harmful thinking of my earlier days in wellness.

Let me explain…

You see, at the beginning of my coaching career, I felt empowered with all my nutritional knowledge, that I had broken free from counting calories, points, and carbs, that I had traded in my running shoes for my yoga mat, and finally found a happy, healthy weight that I felt good at. I felt like I had figured out the magic sauce that could help so many others leave dieting behind and walk a whole new, whole foods path. But what I didn’t see at the time was that I had unknowingly swallowed the newest dieting culture rhetoric where the labels of “health and wellness” were really, in more ways than not, just a disordered relationship with food/body in a hipper, newer disguise.

Even though it wasn’t Weight Watchers or Atkins, I was still on the hunt for a way of eating that would keep me safe by giving me structure, rules, and protocols. Had the quality of my food up-leveled? Sure it had; I still can look back and see that I was eating way more nutrient dense food as well as no longer starving my body with a ridiculously low calorie count (cause y’all know that’s what most diets are really cleverly disguised as, right? When you count anything- points, calories, carbs, hours by which you are allowed to eat- you essentially cut calories, thereby temporarily losing weight, followed by your sanity when your hunger rules out, and you gain all the weight back plus some). So by that measure, yes, I was moving in the right direction.

But even though it’s a great thing to eat nutrient-dense food, I was still at a very visceral level afraid to trust my body, my pleasures, my own instincts.

So I went through a whole other series of what I can now see were diets by another name.

Vegan. Raw food vegan. Juice cleanses. Whole Foods with no sugar. Elimination Diet Protocol. Paleo. 21-Day Challenges.  Resets/Cleanses galore. 

It was all good because it was a “healthy lifestyle.”  I was choosing wellness, not diet culture (or so I thought). I felt I had risen above the diet culture and industry that I held such disdain for. These ways of eating weren’t teaching me to count calories after all, so what could be so problematic about them?

Because I believed so strongly in each wellness food trend I tried, I shared them with my followers and  even ran group cleanses/resets. I truly believed at the time I was doing the right thing.

Socially, it was far cooler to be in the wellness crowd than the diet crowd. So many of my conversations with the people I formed relationships with in these groups were around the latest food trends, latest boutique fitness classes, latest cleanses. There was a sense of community that felt good, like we were fighting against the evils of the food industry together. When it came to food/body,  I felt alone in other social groups (“They just don’t get it,”  I would silently judge.), but with my wellness groups, I was right at home.

Except there was one ugly truth in each wellness trend/protocol I tried:  they were still very controlled ways of eating and moving my body, with a very strict list of good vs. bad foods. They each had an underlying energy of fear running through them, the “danger” with whatever food was “toxic”, and not one was truly focused on rebuilding a positive relationship with food, let alone enjoying your life, honoring the cultural connections to food, and connecting with others.

With a desire to “get it right”, I moved from one to the other, hoping I’d finally heal all my health issues, achieve the perfect weight/body/digestion, you name it. And just when I felt like I had landed on “the one”, a new book or expert rose to the surface and I had to rethink it all again. Each one had contrasting views from the next, with strict almost religious type rules to follow to be “saved” from the perils of bad health. Wrapped in the cloak of wellness, I had no idea just how much I was still wrapped up in my disordered relationship to food and body.

Adhering to each protocol/challenge/book only kept my fear of what food would “do to me” alive and well. It kept me from being an authority on my own body, my own wisdom. The idea of intuitive eating seemed light years away from what I was doing, and at some level I had drank the Paleo Kool-Aide that intuitive eating equaled eating foods and quantities of food that would destroy my health and waistline.  

So when I first started coaching, I was married to the idea of spreading the gospel of clean, whole foods eating. It had “saved” me from dieting, or so I thought, and I wanted others to experience that same liberation.

Through all these protocols and “wellness trends”, one thing was clear: I couldn’t let go of the wheel. In fact, I was white-knuckling it like no one’s business. How would I know what was good for me unless someone else told me?

But I wasn’t liberated.

I was still afraid.

Afraid of eating something that wasn’t organic because what would those pesticides do to my body? (Nothing is wrong with organic, but when you are terrified to eat anything that isn’t, it’s a problem.

Afraid of even the slightest bite of sugar because I feared what it would do to my blood sugar, that I would lose control and eat it all, not to mention that I was fearful of its ties to cancer.

Afraid to have gluten because I’d inflame my body (note: I’m not speaking to people with celiac here or a sensitivity that you feel in your body when you eat gluten…I’m talking about the general fear around gluten with no known allergy or symptoms).

Afraid that when I’d travel I’d have no safe food options, so I’d pack a bunch of “safe food”  in my suitcase just in case.

Afraid to have my grandma’s cooking because she didn’t use the good oils or organic meat, and I didn’t want to destroy my health. I was also being told that all grains, corn, etc. were toxic, so that pretty much killed any chance of me eating any of  her traditional Mexican cooking. (This BTW, is one of the worst parts of being overly focused in an addictive way to health and wellness…so many of us are told our cultural foods and traditions are toxic, and we lose this  vital connection to our very roots as a result.)

The words “addictive, bad, toxic, inflammatory” circled my mind constantly, keeping me on high alert….and putting me in a stressed out state.

And so, I missed out on living.

And isn’t living what we are really going for here? Do we just want to live longer or do we want to live lives that are rich, full, flavorful, and pleasurable?

Is it possible to support our health AND eat for pleasure, connection, experiences?

Through all these protocols and “wellness trends”, one thing was clear: I couldn’t let go of the wheel. In fact, I was white-knuckling it like no one’s business. How would I know what was good for me unless someone else told me?

This was why when I discovered my mentor Marc David and Eating Psychology, a light bulb went off inside of me.

Someone was finally putting words to the things I thought, things I knew deep down were true but I couldn’t find the language to express, and frankly no one else in wellness was brave enough to say like he did.

I devoured his book The Slow Down Diet and a shift began.

I was opened up to a whole new way of thinking about health, wellness, food, and my body. 

Once you see, you can’t unsee.

I went on to study with Marc and became a Certified Eating Psychology Coach and Teacher.

And I shifted from being a nutrition coach whose mission was to help people lose weight without traditional dieting to being an Eating Psychology/Body Image Coach whose mission was to help people find peace, pleasure, and freedom in their relationship with food and their bodies. My measure of success with a client was no longer if they lost weight without crazy counting; instead, my new measure of success was continually checking in to see if they were feeling at home in their bodies and moving/expressing their bodies in joyful ways, feeling a greater sense of trust and peace with their relationship with food, understanding the roots of their struggles with food and body image, healing their body/food story, living the lives they truly desired, and honoring their pleasures instead of using all their life force on perfecting their diet or their bodies.

And if weight-loss occurred, it was because they were finding their body’s personal happy, healthy weight without constant restriction and shame.

This brings me to another important point: arriving at your personal happy, healthy weight might mean you actually need to gain weight or stay exactly at the same weight. There is no set guide for what our personal happy, healthy weight is (BMI charts are bogus and we can talk about that another time.). We can only discover ours by changing our relationship to body and food, honoring our bodies cues for hunger and fullness, moving in ways that are joyful, and eating in a way that brings peace, pleasure, AND nourishment. Therefore, weight-loss isn’t the primary goal; it just might (or might not) be a side effect.

In short, the focus became my clients really experiencing their bodies instead of constantly monitoring them, ending the internal battle around their relationship with food so pleasure and nourishment could blend together in a life affirming way, and living lives that felt pleasurable.

As the years have passed, I have to be honest…I’ve grown less and less enamored with the wellness industry and with a vast majority the big players/faces out there who are telling people what to eat. (There are still a few who really are promoting a peaceful relationship with food, but sadly they are very few in number.)

Most are pumping out weekly content that keeps you afraid, shameful, and believing that you are just one plan away from wellness nirvana.

But like any relationship, a healthy relationship with food can not be built on fear, guilt, or shame.

Love, trust, respect, flexibility…those are just a few of the powerful, transformative components that make our relationship with food and body empowering and life affirming.

We have to ask ourselves, are our wellness pursuits really making us well or are we just becoming intoxicated by another diet with a cuter, Gwyneth Paltrow approved outfit?

And that’s where true wellness must start; before changing or being overly focused on the “what”, we need to have a healthy foundation with how we connect to food, to our bodies, and get rid of all the restrictive, moralistic language about food. (And don’t even get me started on how we assume what someone’s health is like simply by our culturally informed aesthetic ideal.) We need to value the whole person, their story, the intricacies of their lives.

How many of these practitioners are taking even a moment to ask their audience/clients what their relationship with food is like, how they feel about their bodies? Are they asking about the role that food plays in their connection to their family, to their culture and cultural identity? If they experienced (or are currently experiencing) food scarcity? If they did, if they were trained in this aspect of wellness, they might learn that so many of their clients are disordered eating/dieting refugees and restricting food/intermittent fasting only keeps that disordered relationship with food alive.

They might learn that intermittent fasting brings to mind times of food scarcity (either presently or in their childhood) for some individuals, thereby stirring up very painful memories of when they didn’t have the “luxury” to fast for 16 hours, but had to worry where their next meal might come from. They might learn that fasting brings a still being healed eating disorder or disordered eating right back to the surface, sending them into a spiral of shame and fear. They might learn that what their clients need first and foremost is compassion and the room to relearn their bodies signals for satiety and hunger, thereby helping them to navigate their way into discovering what foods work best for their bodies. They might teach their clients that food has no morality (it’s not a living being, it’s food), and that one’s culture shouldn’t be a casualty in “healthy living”.

But very few “wellness” influencers/practitioners would dare do that. After all, they have a book, detox, program to sell….

So much of it feels scammy and emotionally toxic.

I wish I could go back in time and do things differently in my own practice as well. I ran cleanses and programs that I would NEVER run now, with names that make me cringe in my seat as I think back  on them. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m still in the process of combing my own site to take down any language that I once used that I now know is extremely toxic and has the taste of diet-culture on its breath. Know better, do better.) What gives me solace is that my heart was in the right place, but my body-food relationship still needed to evolve.

And though I still believe that healing protocols have their place (for a limited time and for a very clear reason that isn’t just fear of food/getting summer ready) and that eating the best quality food we can find and afford is important (contrary to misguided belief, intuitive, body affirming eating isn’t about eating all the junk food you can get your hands on; it’s about taking away the morality around food so you can make the best decisions for your body and what feels good for your body, which of course includes eating nutrient dense foods), I also now know that when we are all consumed by our rules, protocols, and quest for “clean eating” to the point that it dictates every move we make and becomes obsessive (hello, orthorexia), we limit our lives in deep, lasting ways. We lose experiences and memories we will never get back with friends, family, people who are here with us for just a sacred moment in time.

That was true for my years on traditional diets, and it’s been true for all the times I lost out on life by the self-flagellation of strict whole foods protocols.

So many in the wellness industry will tell you it’s about all or nothing…you are either following a clean eating way of life, or, with their judgmental  nose down at intuitive eating, poisoning your body with a gluttony of “bad foods”. But it’s exactly that all or nothing thinking that keeps us stuck, having a disordered relationship with food, afraid and unable to trust our bodies and their cues,  and obsessing around food instead of refocusing our energy to go about the business of giving our gifts the world, changing the world, and enjoying the lives we have.

We have to ask ourselves, are our wellness pursuits really making us well or are we just becoming intoxicated by another diet with a cuter, Gwyneth Paltrow approved outfit?

(I’ll dig into her recently shared and dangerously disordered “wellness protocol” aka “I don’t consume anything but liquids til my Paleo dinner” another time. Why isn’t the wellness community calling her and Goop out and naming what she is doing for what it really is? My guess is that there is too much money at stake for calling a spade a spade, and it’s infuriating to me.)

Just because it’s labeled wellness or health doesn’t mean it is.

As hard as it was for me to see the dirty truth in my once obsession with clean eating, I was still on the hamster wheel of diet culture in the guise of wellness because my life centered around what I was eating and what I wasn’t eating. It took up most of my mental space and preoccupied my mind constantly, the very definition of obsession. Truth be told, my initial step into a career in wellness and health just allowed me to grow my obsession, though I honestly thought at the time I was light years away from the chains of diet culture, a culture with so many painful roots, especially for a woman of color.

As Naomi Wolfe stated, “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history,” and as Harrison said so succinctly in Anti-Diet, “It’s hard to smash the patriarchy on an empty stomach or a with a head full of food and body concerns and that’s exactly the point of diet-culture.”

If you deep dive into the roots of dieting culture, you’ll find its roots are deeply racist, sexist, and classist. As Christy Harrison explores in her well researched book Anti-Diet, so much of it was designed to keep people from looking like the body types that were deemed less than or inferior to white bodies. Fatness was seen as “a marker of ‘savagery’ because it appeared more frequently in the people of color they (19th century scientists)  observed, whereas thinness supposedly appeared more frequently in white people, men, and aristocrats,” Harrison states. 

And as fat became the enemy and a marker of inferiority/”savagery”, it gave permission for women as a whole to be deemed inferior too.  Because women naturally hold on to more fat, it was labeled a factor that pointed to women’s “evolutionary inferiority”, and set the stage for a “hierarchy of ethnic groups, with white men at the top.”  

With fat now demonized, and full bodies seen as inferior, the stage was set for the promotion of cleanses, detoxes, and protocols, which were tied to ideals of purity, holiness, being a “strong person”, and being superior to others who were “weak” when it came to food and pleasure. (Cue the phrase “Guilty Pleasure” when we talk about eating the foods we love but feel “sinful” about eating.)  Morality and “clean eating” were now linked and seen as one in the same. In the same vein, these tools were seen as key ways to curb one’s “excessive eating”, which was, as Sabrina Strings writes in her book Fearing the Black Body, deemed “immoral and a detriment to (a woman’s) beauty, as it would lead to her having a body more like those of African or Irish women.”

With women now having to turn all their focus, money, and energy into controlling and changing their bodies, dieting kept women from showing up in the world in their fullness, with their creativity and ideas, with their quest for equal rights and representation, a fact that is still true today.

As Naomi Wolfe stated, “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history,” and as Harrison said so succinctly in Anti-Diet, “It’s hard to smash the patriarchy on an empty stomach or a with a head full of food and body concerns and that’s exactly the point of diet-culture.” ( I HIGHLY recommend you read her book if you want to learn more about the roots of dieting and wellness culture…she’s a dietician who, like me, traded in her dieting culture for strict “health” protocols, only to finally find freedom from the toxicity of both.)

We also can’t ignore just how out of reach so many of today’s wellness protocols, tools, foods, and treatments are for the average person. With insane price tags, elaborate programs, and big time commitments that keep it out of reach for so many of us, the wellness movement of today seems to be less about health and more about elitism. 

Wellness is and has been colonized.

This is especially true for members of Black and Brown communities, who already have so much else to contend with in their day to day lives and sadly are used to having their bodies policed. The idea of pouring all their money and mental energy into intense wellness programs is a luxury they don’t have and the constant monitoring of their bodies is a burden they don’t need. In her book Decolonizing Wellness, Dalia Kinsey shares how quickly the honeymoon of wellness ended during first job as an R.D. in public health. As one of the very few Black R.D.’s at her job, she states, “It became clear that we were not serving anyone by adding food preoccupation to the already-long list of things weighing on our (Black) clients’ minds.”

The colonization of wellness also includes the ugly truth that white wellness has repeatedly taken rituals, ideas, and home remedies from a vast array of cultures and adopted them as their own, often without paying a bit of homage or respect to the culture it appropriated. I just experienced this the other day at a festival. I found it interesting but not surprising when two white men approached me, a Mexican woman, to try their brand of ceremonial cacoa, a ritual that happens to be part of ancient Aztec and Mayan (and other indigenous cultures) traditions. They went on and on about how I should properly drink it, with a pack of oracle cards in hand that I “must” use when taking my “sacred sip”. Nowhere in their branding did they acknowledge its indigenous roots nor, I’m guessing, did they ever ask themselves if these cultures would want their rituals being mainstreamed this way, especially by two white, male owners. Though this isn’t about dieting per se, it is another example of how wellness and wellness products fail to be inclusive or thoughtful of cultures beyond the white mainstream. It has an ugly tendency to take something pure, bastardize it, put a cute label on it, and sell it at an obscene price tag, keeping it out of the hands of the very people it stole it from. (Yoga, and $100 yoga pants, anyone?)

As you can see, when you start to learn the history of dieting/wellness culture, how it still influences our ideas about beauty and fat stigma, how it fails to acknowledge culture in the conversation, and how it both steals from other cultures while simultaneously keeping it out of reach from them, your eyes are opened to just how anti-woman, anti-Black/Brown, anti-anyone who doesn’t possess the “ideal” white body, and anti-economically challenged it really is.

Does this mean I’m “anti-nutrition” or “anti-wellness”?

Absolutely not. Your girl loves a trip to the health food store, eating in a way that promotes my health and feels good to my body, and getting my sweat on. I’m definitely not anti-wellness, but I’m not with how the industry is currently doing or promoting wellness, who it excludes, and who it praises. What I’m suggesting is a true definition of wellness that is inclusive, honors one’s culture, makes health something we all have access to, and doesn’t make us walk around in a constant state of stress that we’re doing it all wrong, questioning each bite we eat instead of, oh I don’t know, living big, beautiful lives.

That’s what I’ve aimed to find for myself and for my clients, the sweet spot where health and pleasure, freedom and nourishment, and the desires for my life beyond food can collide.

It’s about knowing the true wellness isn’t simply what you eat and how much you move- it’s your quality of life, living your passions, seeking pleasure, connecting with others, love and relationships, safety, community, and so much more.

Today, I am a very different coach, practitioner, and woman then when my coaching career and devotion to the wellness culture began.

And I’m living a life that values health but doesn’t obsess about every bite I eat.

I trust my body, and I know by my body’s feedback what works for me, what enough or not enough feels like, and that if something is off, we’ll figure it out together.

I love food, consider myself a bit of a foodie, and happily don’t fit in any one way of eating.

My path to wellness is sprinkled with green juice, grass fed meats, avocado toast on my favorite GF bread, kombucha, as well as tacos, family favorites, a gelato as I stroll the Italian coastline, a charcuterie board with my favorite baguette, and the sound of clinking glasses at an apertivo with friends. 

It’s eating organic when I can, but not freaking myself out when it’s not possible. It’s my favorite gluten-free treats and my favorite Girl Scout cookies. It’s a sweaty dance class, and a yin yoga class. Sometimes it’s just resting and getting extra sleep. It’s saying, “Yes, I wanna try that!” and “No thank you, I’m full.” It’s about knowing I am free to have anything I want, and with that, it means that I’m free to choose what’s right for me, which sometimes means being a “picky eater” and sometimes means having the cake. It’s about eating when I’m hungry, not when a fast ends. It’s perfectly imperfect, ever changing, full of exploration, full of pleasure, a release from numbers/counts. It’s intuitive, wise, trusting. It’s eating with gusto, for pleasure, and the sacredness of breaking bread with others.

It’s about living well, and really living in the process. It’s about not forsaking my culture; it’s about owning the fullness of who I am and where I came from. It’s knowing that so many of my travel experiences would have been robbed if I had stayed obsessed on food perfection (Could you even imagine me spending as much time as I have in my beloved Italy stressed about gluten dairy, sugar, and a whole other laundry list of “dangerous foods”? Yeah, neither can I!). It’s about expanding my life.

It’s knowing that love and respect for my body does not come from force or shame. It’s about a deep, loving communion with my sacred being, who has a sensitive constitution, and being loyal to her needs AND her pleasures. And it’s about knowing the true wellness isn’t simply what you eat and how much you move- it’s your quality of life, living your passions, seeking pleasure, connecting with others, love and relationships, safety, community, and so much more.

Sure there are times when the latest wellness trend tries to seduce me with promises of “you can reach this pinnacle of body perfection”, but then the reality kicks in. I remind myself that I’ve been there before. I remember how limited I felt, how small my life got, how much of my creative energy went into my endless quest for “the perfect diet”. I remember that I can take what works and leave the rest.  I remember I don’t need another promise of perfection, because nothing is perfect. And I go on with the business of living my full life, building more love and rapport with my body, and walking my path to food and body freedom.

With Love and In TRUE Wellness,

Anita

P.S. Need a community, coach, or support system as you break free from diet culture and find body-food freedom? I know these things take time and support as you move away from diet culture. But you’re in the right place! Contact me HERE to learn more about one-on-one coaching, group coaching, or access one of my downloadable workshops HERE.