The Diet Rebel
Inside each of us is a Diet Rebel, a part that doesn’t tolerate the rules, guilt trips, and oppressiveness of Diet Culture. How does the Diet Rebel retaliate? We want the push-back to look empowering, but being oppressed by Diet Culture often leads to acts of defiance that include eating too much or eating foods that make us feel sick. This is the harmful restriction and binge cycle that we’ve covered before.
Instead of blaming the Diet Rebel for a “lack of willpower,” we can look toward its innate wisdom. The Diet Rebel protects us against starving ourselves, and underneath its fierce defiance, it tells us,
You deserve to trust your body.
You deserve to eat when you’re hungry.
You deserve to choose foods you enjoy.
And, you deserve and to eat enough.
Enter A Dance
To enter a dance with the Diet Rebel, intuitive eating teaches us to invite in the Food Anthropologist, a part of ourselves that notices without judgment. The Food Anthropologist is our guide in acknowledging when we’re hungry and full and connecting to foods that taste good and feel good in our bodies. If we eat too much, or conversely, restrict, the Food Anthropologist doesn’t shame us. Instead it leads us to curiously ask ourselves, “What can I do differently next time?”
Imagine a world in 2023 in which everyone is moving toward a healthy relationship with food and their body.
What does that look like for you?
Dieting and diet culture wouldn’t make sense if we simply accepted that people come in all different sizes.
Virgie Tovar
