Enjoying holiday cookies, escaping diet culture
How I'm learning to enjoy food without fear and guilt
Dear readers, as we enter this holiday season, I may not post again until after the new year. I’m allowing myself the grace to enjoy the season and allowing inspiration to unfold rather than stressing about posting in the midst of this season. You are probably busy, too. If I have an inspiration and have the space, then I’ll share something. Otherwise, I’ll write again in January. Wishing you peace, grace, and a heart full of love. - Cynthia
Back in April, I wrote about finding myself always hungry and then learning that my mother was dieting when pregnant with me. I had been dieting since before I was born and had responded to the cultural expectation of feminine food restriction in pursuit of thinness without even knowing I was doing that. A few weeks later, after doing some research, I learned that diet culture and the fat-shaming I grew up with were deeply racist as well as cruel to people in larger bodies and wrote about that experience. All these beliefs, this diet culture, was deeply programmed into my mind and was difficult to dislodge, even with awareness. A reader named Kate, whom I don’t know, left a comment on one of these posts recommending intuitive eating, something I’d never heard of. That set me off in a new direction. Thank you, Kate, wherever you are!
As we head into the holiday season here in the U.S., a time associated with lots of food, I thought I’d write an update on the transformation I’m experiencing as I explore new relationships with my body and food.
Most years around this time, food becomes irresistible, and I struggle with guilt and overeating. I bake cookies for my sons and to see the joy on my husband’s face, but mostly I bake because I love these particular cookies. I have two recipes: one for the chocolate chip cookies my mom always made that bring good memories of when I was a kid and Mom made them. The second is my mother-in-law’s Christmas frosted sugar cookie recipe (see photo above). My husband loves these, for the same reason I love my mom’s recipe. These were sweet things we received as expressions of love within our often-difficult childhoods. These cookies bring us those reminders that our mothers loved us the best they could.
The foods available only at this time of year - the nogs, the cheese rolls, the baked goods, the candies - bring up memories for me of the magic of early childhood before one discovers that Santa is an idea - an essence, a metaphor, an archetype - rather than a real person who magically delivers treats to every child on earth on Christmas Eve. I remember the excitement of lying in bed that night, believing I heard the sound of his reindeer on the roof. When at age 7, I learned that Mom wrapped and delivered all of Santa’s gifts, I wasn’t disappointed. I was lucky to be the oldest and so I felt I was let in on a secret, that I got to help Mom be Santa because Santa is an idea. The Spirit of Christmas was a real thing. Santa is the embodiment of the ancient hopes and longing of mid-winter that as the light returns beginning on Solstice, we humans could become peaceful, kind, loving, and generous. We could become light-filled and ensure that every child has good food, a warm bed, and sweet gifts to wake up to every day, not just during a season of hope and gift giving. And if every child is well cared for, then the hope expands to every person - young, old, in-between - and from there expands and expands to include every dog, every cat, every living being, and then every aspect of this amazing planet. And that’s what the sweets and feasting are there to remind us, or at least that’s what I’m reminded of.
But then, diet enculturation kicks in and I’d feel guilty, place restrictions on what I allowed myself. I’d dutifully count all the calories, enter them into my app to either righteously control my intake or make myself anxious about how I was overeating. That took energy away from moving toward the possibility of peace.
Although these holiday foods are loaded with all the potential goodness that reminds us of our shared humanity and our desire to be peacefully together and whole, I would label them as bad, or unhealthy…just generally wrong. Mom would remark they were sinful or wicked, and yet she made them for the family and ate them. This push-pull of desire and guilt about the desire’s badness holds us captive, robbing our potential. And who among you doesn’t label some of these foods as bad and carry the guilt if you “indulge”?
What this does is sap the joy out of eating and for what reason? To be racist, fat-phobic, and to feed the diet and wellness industry? It’s nuts really, and not the tasty nut butter kind.
I’ll share a bit of my journey since I discovered I was trapped in diet culture. By the time I wrote my article about being hungry all the time, I had already lost my ability to rigidly control my eating. Like many, I gained weight during the early months of Covid, then set about to lose it through severe calorie restriction using an app where I recorded every single calorie I took in and every bit of exercise I expended. I lost a bunch of weight and kept it off for a while until I couldn’t stand being hungry, felt compelled to eat, couldn’t control that compulsion…that longing. Of course, I started to gain weight (and record my failure in my app daily). Then I started to try to understand what was going on. I felt like I was starving. And that’s what my body believed; it believed we were entering another time of famine; except I was causing the food scarcity purposefully.
I explored and learned a lot about our cultural diet and thin obsessions. I explored a number of anti-diet approaches to feeding myself, finally settling on intuitive eating as a path for myself (again, thanks Kate). I eventually started working with a nutritionist trained in intuitive eating because I couldn’t get out of my weight and diet thought loops without help.
Intuitive eating is a very specific anti-diet kind of approach (see links below to explore further)1. I’m in the midst of recovering from a lifetime of disordered eating, so I still struggle to avoid making this another diet with a bunch of rules. Intuitive eating has 10 basic principles2. The first is to reject diet mentality. That’s why I found a dietician because I could not imagine how I could do that. With her help, my mind is gradually becoming freed from obsessing over how much I weigh and the calories in food. Rejecting diet culture meant I needed to stop weighing myself at all because how much I weigh doesn’t matter and being weighed triggers my belief that I need to diet. What matters is how I feel. Boy, that’s been tough to disengage from!
Another principle is that there are no foods that are off limits (unconditional permission to eat all foods). It turns out that making a food off limits, just makes overeating it more likely. The idea is to allow the body what it asks for, paying attention to hunger and fullness cues (tuning into internal body cues). In the early days of releasing calorie counting and diet restriction, all I wanted were the things I had denied myself like donuts, cake, cookies. My husband wanted pancakes. So we bought and ate those things as much as we wanted. There was this learning curve for my body, kind of like a little kid, that it could trust me to give it whatever it asked for and to give it enough. In time, our craving for these denied foods settled down and they became just another food item to eat or not. Really, that happened.
I had to learn to eat until I was full. I had years not eating until I was super hungry and then stopping when I was only barely not hungry. But now I’m starting to experience this sweet spot with eating, of experiencing satisfaction. That requires noticing I’m eating rather than distracting myself with other things – something I wasn’t aware I was doing. Then I have to eat enough to be pleasantly full, a state I had not ever noticed given my anxiety and guilt around eating and food. Now I can experience a state where I am full enough that I feel satisfied. That’s a totally new thing for me. It’s a warm, pleasant feeling that my body has had enough and is pleased. Who knew?
But learning to allow myself to eat until I felt satisfied took a while, because I had so much anxiety around food. Food was going to make me gain weight! My body didn’t trust me not to start to deny it, so for a while I ate a lot. My body was ravenous.
I have gained weight, of course, and at first that terrified me. I am not completely over that terror, but I’ve learned that bodies have a size they want to be, and I had been forcing mine to be a much smaller size than it wanted to be. I will eventually stabilize and in the meantime, need to continue to challenge my judgment around weight and body size in myself and others. Breaking these life-long thought forms is tough and it’s best to be patient and gentle with myself. Thus, I don’t know how much weight I’ve gained because I haven’t weighed for a long time. Did you know you can go into a doctor’s office and decline to be weighed? I learned that all I had to say is “I’ll pass this time.” Some health care professionals will be more pushy or judgmental, I imagine, especially for people in larger bodies.
I learned that being weighed was triggering early in my process after having a doctor’s appointment that had nothing to do with my size. The nurse had me get on the scale as is the norm for health care visits. I weighed about what I expected, but for the next several days I spiraled into a body-hatred funk, fighting off the desire to diet with great difficulty, stuck in a deep body dysmorphia. When I met the next time with my dietician, she asked what had happened because I was happy and enjoying the process the week before. I didn’t know, so I started recounting the events of the prior week including the doctor’s visit. I didn’t realize being weighed was the trigger for my escalating dysmorphia until she guided me through it and informed me that I didn’t have to be weighed. If I needed, she would call the next time I had an appointment and tell them not to weigh me. So now, I decline to be weighed. I won’t be going on a weight loss diet, and I don’t have a health condition that requires knowing my weight. Granted, sometimes being weighed may be necessary, but I’m not experiencing that right now. In fact, being weighed is bad for my mental health. How weird is that?
I haven’t weighed myself since. Sometimes that really bothers me, but I remind myself it’s bad for me, at least now. I can tell my size by how my clothes fit. I have needed to get different clothes because I outgrew my old ones. My clothes were old and falling apart anyway, since I’m not much into clothes. Over my life, regardless of what size I was, I typically felt I looked too fat, so I generally avoided buying clothes unless absolutely necessary. I was terribly unkind in talking with my body. Treating one’s body with kindness is another principle of intuitive eating, so I’m really working on my self-talk. So recently I bought myself some new clothes based entirely on how they felt on my body, not on how they looked, recognizing my judgment of my appearance is distorted, anyway, so I prioritized comfort.
Allowing myself to eat enough; allowing myself to experience food, to enjoy food has been truly life changing. I feel like I’m beginning to stabilize, where my body has enough trust that I will feed her that she is no longer asking for a dozen donuts, or a whole cake, since now I can have them whenever I want. They’ve lost their potency; I don’t crave them. Rather, I enjoy a donut, or two if I feel like having them and then eat other foods. Lately, I’ve been wanting eggs and cheese for breakfast, something I’ve avoided for ethical reasons for years. But I have my own happy chickens, and I’m treating my body gently, so I’m having eggs and cheese. Contrary to my prior beliefs, I digest them just fine and they don’t cause my joints to flare. Instead, they bring me satisfaction.
Before, I blamed every discomfort and every illness I experienced on the food I was eating. This is a thing in the wellness industry now, that everything that we suffer, at least in America, is because of something we’ve eaten that’s bad. For me, that’s not as true as I had believed.
I am only a few months into retooling my relationship with food and my body after 65 years of diet culture so I’m just beginning this new journey. I have become much more relaxed and calm; I feel softer inside. I’m happier. I had no idea how much of my life force was being consumed by trying to force my body to be thin. The effort required to deprive my body of food, now is available to do other things. I don’t think about food all the time. I’m not calculating how many calories I can eat and how much exercise I have to do. This has allowed me to enter a deeper inquiry - exploring where else in life I may be denying myself joy and enjoyment - because this diet culture mind-set goes beyond food into self-worth, overwork ethic, and forgoing pleasure in general...and then binging.
This year, as we head into this season of baking and celebrating with food, I feel relaxed about it. I won’t be eating a cookie telling with myself about the diet I’ll be starting in January, where I’ll again restrict my eating as punishment for enjoying the abundance of our seasonal celebrations. No, this year, I’m enjoying my nog (without checking or recording the calories) and I’ll bake our traditional cookies and enjoy them knowing I can make and eat more if I want. I intend to thoroughly enjoy the feasting by truly experiencing it, by allowing myself to feel satisfaction.
As I move into the coming year, I intend to continue my self-work until eventually I become free of my fear of food and weight gain. Although I am not to the point of loving my body as it is, I care about it enough never to purposely deprive it of food and the opportunity for satisfaction and comfort from food, again.
Since ancient times, people have feasted at Winter Solstice. For those of us in the global north, that happens in December. Our various religious holidays have been placed around these ancient feasting rituals. I was raised with that holiday being Christmas, and although I no longer adhere to the Christian belief system, the ideas - like those of Santa - that peace on Earth is possible and that all people could have their needs met abundantly, are worthy evolutionary intentions for humanity.
When I’m feeling guilty about food, I cannot appreciate or further that peaceful intention or possibility. By loving my body and myself enough to enjoy the sweetness of life, and the promise of magic from childhood, I can embody with my satisfied body the possibilities of peace, goodwill, and abundance for all. May that be so soon for everyone.
I will do my part by enjoying my cookies and other holiday season food…without judgment. May you have an abundant and satisfying holiday season, too!
***Just a note about intuitive eating: I encourage you to explore this further on your own if you struggle with your relationship with food. This is not meant to be a guide or advertisement for intuitive eating, rather I’m simply sharing my experience. Although I am a doctor, this is not meant to be doctor’s advice. Different health conditions may need different approaches than I’ve taken. My husband is also working with a dietician because his eating issues are very different than mine, but issues nonetheless.
I am sharing links to some of the things I’ve found helpful below.
The intuitive eating website is a good place to start. These are the original dietitians who developed this concept. They wrote a book which is what I started with before finding a specially trained dietician. You can find the book here. Here is a place to start if you want to find an intuitive eating certified dietician. Another book I’m finding helpful is Gentle Nutrition, A Non-Diet Approach to Healthy Eating by Racheal Hartley. Another book recommended by my dietician that I haven’t started yet is The Wellness Trap by Christy Harrison. A great and entertaining podcast is called Maintenance Phase with two people explore the science and cultural aspects of fat bias, diet culture, and wellness fads.