On: Diet Culture
One of the many guiding reasons for creating the Salubrious newsletter was to have an outlet to post creative recipes regardless of their ingredients (though they’ll always be plant-based and gluten-free for personal reasons) without having to stick to any one “diet.” After spending a decade online in the “wellness” space, first with my OG food blog Wicked Spatula, then the subsequent birth of Cast Iron Keto, all of my outlets have revolved around a specific diet. Paleo first, then Keto. While I do tend to think of these “diets” more along the lines of a lifestyle, a lot of my readers don’t. Even I, at the beginning of Wicked Spatula, was so dogmatic in my food choices that over the years I’ve seen how much trauma exists for me around food. Breaking up with the pervasive diet culture that exists in America has been a slow-growing fire in my soul that’s finally beginning to burn all the way to nonexistence. It wasn’t always this way.
My first memories around food were when my Kindergarten teacher sent home a VeggieTales VHS for my parents to make me watch because I was “bigger than the other kids.” At 5 years old, that was hardly my fault and all I can remember now at 30 was how ashamed I felt. I immediately took to the thought process that something was wrong with my body. All through my childhood, I was told by my parents and my grandmother that I was too fat. I needed to lose weight, eat better, look better. It makes no difference that I wasn’t the one putting the food on the table. With a family that relied on frozen foods, tons of sodas, and processed junk, what did they expect the outcome to be?
I always felt like an outsider, I didn’t have a ton of friends and even when I was a cheerleader in middle school I knew I wasn’t the same as the other girls. When I started dating a popular boy in the 8th grade, my mother told me to do whatever he wanted me to as I would never find anyone like him again. No matter that he was verbally abusive, manipulative, and cheated constantly.
We dated until my senior year of high school when it was finally revealed after years of aching suspicion on my part that he and my mother had been having an affair for years. After the fallout, I can remember feeling like not even he wanted me, he was only in it to be closer to her. Those pervasive thoughts of unworthiness were cemented into my soul. I felt alone and naturally, I turned to the one thing that I’d always loved, food.
At that point, it was 100% in my control what I ate and when I dieted. I felt powerful, then having control over my life without someone telling me who to be with and what to do amidst all the trauma that came with their affair. Through the next few years, I’d swing from eating incredibly “healthy” by eating steamed fish and veggies with a huge glass of Metamucil for extra fiber at every meal to binging on tacos and fast food. All the while, never being happy with my body no matter if I was a size 8 or a size 14.
When I met my now-husband in my sophomore year of college, we bonded over our love of food, wine, and beer. He loved me for who I was and at every size I swung back and forth between. I felt liberated and while I’d like to say that my obsession with dieting and binging ended there, that’s simply not true. While I did dismantle a lot of thoughts around dieting to lose weight, it quickly shifted into dieting in order to get healthier, to heal the “fibromyalgia” that I was diagnosed with, to ease the chronic headaches that plagued me for years, and to quell my incessant fear of dying.
I was diagnosed with OCD in first grade and one of my main obsessions is dying from various causes. Controlling my diet made me feel like I had just a sliver of control and when you feel pretty out of control all the time, anything helps. So, I morphed my food blog into a Paleo blog and found great career success with it which only fueled the fire. Then I gradually threw kindling into it with every health diagnosis that followed.
Over the years and from doctor to doctor it’s been fibromyalgia, Lupus, Lyme Disease, Celiac, Gluten sensitivity, numerous food allergies, PCOS, and “unknown autoimmunity.” While I’m sure that all of those diagnoses hold a bit of value, trauma and stress are known causes of autoimmunity and even PCOS. Would actually releasing control be the path to healing?
Since 2019, laughably right around the time when my first cookbook through Cast Iron Keto was published, I started to get very turned off by anything related to dieting. I remember seeing that Weight Watchers (one of the many things I was forced into as a child) had started a spin-off for kids called Kurbo. I was infuriated when I stumbled across their Instagram page with before and after photos of kids as young as 8. What a way to traumatize children from such a young age.
Kids don’t need diets, they need parents that feed them mostly whole unprocessed foods and instill a joy of the outdoors in them from a young age, not teaching them to count calories at eight years old.
Right then, I knew my career path of promoting a diet for weight loss was over. In a world so obsessed with body image and dieting, I didn’t want to add anything to the narrative that in order to be happy you have to be skinny. Slowly but surely I started pulling away from Cast Iron Keto at the same time trying to morph it into something that was about eating whole foods that happen to be low carb, because yes, we all know that eating carb-heavy foods for every meal isn’t the best.
Frankly, I’m tired of thinking about my body. There are far more interesting and pressing things in the world than the size of jeans I wear. The funny thing is, when I tend to not think about my body is when I feel the healthiest and arguably the happiest. Not stepping on a scale, not tracking what I eat, simply being guided by my intuition which sometimes means having a bagel for breakfast and a massive salad for dinner, or eating a deep-dish vegan gluten-free pizza from the local pizza parlor while curled up with Alex watching a movie. The pizza may not be the best thing for my body but it’s for damn sure the best thing for my soul.
It comes to a point where I have to wonder what the point of it all is? You can say the point is health but there’s plenty of evidence that health exists at every size. I’ve been healthier at 250lbs than 175lbs. These days, my blood pressure is great, my cholesterol, homocysteine, and blood sugar all are within normal and even optimal limits. I believe it’s telling that the things that aren’t in alignment are stress hormones and immune markers which go hand in hand. So, I’m choosing not to stress. I’m choosing to eat the pizza.
