Diet Culture
Let’s get into it. So where do you fall on the scale of buying into diet culture? Maybe you don’t even realize you’re in it? Here’s a definition from Christy Harrison, a leader in the anti-diet culture movement.
Diet culture is a system of beliefs that:
- Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.”
- Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years.
- Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.
- Oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.
I bring up diet culture because much of what you will read about in the system of Ayurveda involves following a diet to help you bring yourself into balance. However, this can be tricky if you have previously been diagnosed with an eating disorder or have been dieting for a large part of your life (which is an unrecognized form of an eating disorder). Dieting messes with your head. The moment you step on that scale, you are making a judgment and that judgment will either increase or decrease your self worth. However, it has long been shown that diets don’t actually work and so, over time, what you are really doing is reinforcing a decreased self worth by continuing to make judgments based on a system that you were set up to lose in anyway. Diets also mess with your metabolism, so over time you will inevitably gain weight because of the weight cycling nature of dieting.
If your head has already been messed with by diet culture and you don’t realize it, then your motivations to successfully follow an Ayurvedic diet may actually do you more harm in the long run. Diets are not sustainable and ultimately they mess with your head and your body. If you are trying to follow Ayurvedic food guidelines but find yourself falling on and off, then you are in diet mentality. If you find yourself restricting certain foods and then bingeing on them later, you are in diet mentality. If you find yourself feeling guilty about eating certain foods, you are in diet mentality. If you find yourself being super rigid about following a certain diet, to the point where you are obsessed, you are in diet mentality. If you ‘let yourself have this now and workout later’, you are in diet mentality.. etc, etc, etc.
Now I know some people have to follow certain rules because of allergies, medical issues, religious reasons, and that’s fine, that’s not what I’m focusing on. My point of all of this is;
How do you RELATE to food?
Does it cause you anxiety? Is it a bully in your life? Does it cause you stress?
Do you put pressure on it? Do you expect it to Heal you? Is your self worth based on your ability to successfully follow a diet?
In Ayurvedic terms, any ‘yes’ answers to these questions are indications of you being out of balance. In the western culture, you can say that you are in ‘diet mentality’. Either way, only focusing on food/diet is not the solution.
Ayurveda has deep respect and love for everything in nature including food, spices and plants. It understands that these things are given to us by nature as a blessing to be used to help us on our journey to wholeness. However, they are not the only part of the package. If you find that you are in diet mentality and you want to follow an Ayurvedic protocol then you will have to take it very slow with following food guidelines that you are given. While majority of the health and wellness industry may be focusing on new diets fads, it’s important to remember that Ayuveda is not one of them. This system is based on 5000 years plus of observation, study and practice. Its prescriptions are based on the understanding that you are a whole system (of mind, body and spirit) that works together, not just a physical body.
M.P.
(Skylit Ayurveda Team)
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