Declare your independence from diet culture
Picking your battles lets you keep the peace
This week’s newsletter is short and sweet because my final manuscript revisions are due in a few days! I still wanted to give you all a little something useful as America goes into a big holiday weekend.
If you’re attending a 4th of July cookout, you can count on family, friends, and food. And that means you will probably run into an unwelcome guest, too: annoying comments about calories, macros, weight, etc.
How many grams of protein are in that veggie burger?
Well, I guess this is my “cheat day.”
Enjoy that ice cream now—when you’re my age, forget it!
If you’ve been working on healing your relationship with food, these comments can feel pretty painful, triggering, or just plain boring. And when little ears are listening, you may be wondering what your kids are bringing home from an event like this—besides ketchup stains and mosquito bites.
Is this where they learn to see food in morally-charged categories of “good” and “bad”? When they start to see their body as something up for public discussion? The moment they wonder how much exercise they need to do to “earn” dessert?
I’m guessing a part of you would love to come up with the perfect witty response to shut down the diet talk for good—without killing the mood or starting an argument.
If you’ve found that magic spell, I’d love to hear it!
But today what I want to offer is permission to say . . . nothing.
You don’t have to respond to everyone who drones on about their fitness tracker or peptide stack.
You don’t have to make this particular gathering your moment to speak out as an advocate for body acceptance.
You don’t have to correct or educate every relative who makes ignorant statements about food, weight, or health.
That’s right. You can just say nothing.
It doesn’t mean you have to engage in those conversations, however. You don’t even have to smile and nod politely if you don’t want to.
You can simply ignore, change the subject, or excuse yourself to get more guacamole!
It’s that simple. (Though I know it doesn’t always feel easy.)
There will, no doubt, be plenty of other opportunities to have conversations about diet culture if you want to. You get to pick your battles.
You can choose to keep the peace with your loved ones and protect your own peace, too.
If you give this approach a try, let us know how it goes. And if you need a space to vent about what you’ve to endure at the family barbecue, you can always share it here.
If you are eager for some more practical tips and sample scripts for navigating awkward family diet talk—including how to do damage control if your kids heard some yucky stuff—you can refer back to my Thanksgiving table survival guide.
