My big health crisis that started this new approach came right on the heels of leaving the high demand religion I was raised in. I was deconstructing everything I’d ever been taught about the world, holding it up to the light, and examining if it was still worth keeping. The faith community I come from taught me a whole lot about my body that I didn’t believe anymore, so as I deconstructed I naturally kept the critical examination going to decide what I believed about my body.
As always, when I’m looking at an issue, I go looking for the people who are the most impacted to see what they have to say. I was raised by an almond mom in a religion that told me my whole worth was my fertility, so I knew I wasn’t going to find answers where I stood. I needed to open my mind, take in some new information, and see things from another perspective.
Between reading the current research around diet and exercise, learning about the history of diet culture, and listening to fat liberation activists, disability community members, and trans friends, I realized that society is just participating in a delusion together. We don’t know anything about how this stuff works. We can’t account for diverse experiences, we can’t replicate results, and it feels like every new thing we discover reveals three more ways we were wrong.
We know NOTHING about how to permanently change a person’s body size or adipose levels, but we do know that it is bad for our bodies when we try. We know yoyo dieting and calorie restriction is the source of a lot of additional adipose tissue, but that hasn’t stopped new diets from hitting the market. We know that many times a person’s weight is a symptom of another disability, not the cause of anything new, but that doesn’t change much about how doctors address it. We know that a lot of exercise that gets lauded – ironman competitions, crossfit, marathons, even Jane Fonda aerobics – can actually cause a tremendous amount of stress on the body, but the medals and admiration are awarded anyway.
We are ignoring the truth to keep doing things the way they have always been done. Because the people who benefit from the way things have always been done want to keep benefiting.
The ideas a lot of us are still basing our personal approach on come from a time when people still believed that the humors of the body needed to be balanced. Before germ theory, any illness was believed to be caused by forces within the body being out of balance. Which meant that any illness was the result of the individual not managing their body correctly. Capitalists like Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg got rich off of selling food to people and convincing them it was more morally correct than other food because it supported religious asceticism and this humoral approach to the body. Meanwhile, anti-Black sentiment tied fatness more and more strongly to Blackness. (For more on this, check out Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings) At the turn of the 20th century, being fat was disgraceful. But it was always just racism and superstition.
More than 100 years later, after the discovery of germ theory, after the mapping of the human genome, after billions in research and decades of study, after generations of civil rights movements, most people are still believing these pre-Modern bigotries and superstitions. And Kellogg’s is still in business and bigger than ever.
These old fashioned ideas are still so pervasive because they align with the overall structure of our culture. Riane Eisler proposed the theory of Dominator culture vs. Partnership culture to discuss how different cultures operate. Dominator culture means that there is a small group of people at the top dominating all the other people and resources. Partnership culture is shared power among participants. There are many cultures throughout history that demonstrated this different arrangement, but ours, especially writing as an American, is as Dominator culture as it could get. So when we are taught how to manage our body needs, we are told to dominate them.
We have all these cultural myths and justifications we parrot at each other to support this futile attempt at domination. “My trauma made me strong,” despite the evidence of all the people who die from their trauma. “Pain is just weakness leaving the body,” despite all the people who are injured as a result. Doctors who work 30 hours straight despite all we know about how the brain operates when sleep deprived. In reality, the body is nature and can’t be dominated. Thin people get neurological conditions, cancer, heart issues, and all the rest. Even extremely restrictive diet and exercise programs don’t work for 98% of people. There is no way to dominate your body enough to escape the inevitable consequences of mortality. But that doesn’t stop us from condemning fat people when it happens to them.
What we’ve been taught is a lie. It’s a lot of inherited belief that does not match up to the evidence we witness every day. None of this is about what is best for our health, it is about what is most convenient for the corporations and systems that profit off of us. They keep us afraid, distracted, under resourced, and confused. If any of this was actually about our health, the effort would go towards making corporations stop polluting the planet so we could have clean air, water, and foodways. The effort would go towards making sure we could all get eight hours of sleep a night. But it doesn’t. The effort goes towards convincing us to be ashamed of our bodies and their needs.
Care for our physical health done in a way that prioritizes human needs would not feel punishing. Care is nourishing. Joy is nourishing. Meeting the needs of our body should make us feel cared for.
It absolutely does not mean calorie restriction to change your body size, and it does not mean exercise plans that are punishing and shame ridden. The key word is CARE. You can not show care while also feeling hate. If your health and wellness choices include hating your body or believing that it will only be acceptable when it is fundamentally different, those are not the choices that will bring you positive results. You might succeed in changing your body size, but is that even a worthy goal? Particularly if it requires such a miserable quality of life?
Exercise is not punishment for having a body, it is celebration of movement.
Food is more than fuel. It is culture, care, joy, tradition, history, love, celebration, continuity, and fun.
Requiring health choices to feel punishing is just more of that dominator culture, pre-Modern superstition garbage rearing up because we live in a society that teaches us we should be ashamed of our body needs. When you find those beliefs they can become a useful screening tool. Whatever intervention you are considering for your food and movement needs, if it includes shame, you know whoever is offering it to you is a wellness predator. No matter what their claim is, if getting it requires you to believe your body is bad, it will never lead you anywhere good.
We’ve been taught, again and again, in ways large and small, that we will only have safety and belonging if we dominate our body until it behaves a certain way. But that is a delusion we don’t have to agree to anymore. Robbing ourselves of the joy we need to nourish ourselves can never feel like safety, and believing that we aren’t worthy of connection can never bring us belonging.
We deserve to enjoy our bodies, however they function, however they appear, for as long as we have them. Our bodies are for us, and they deserve to feel cared for.