Pearl E’s Reviews > Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating > Status Update

The idea of body appreciation is great, too, and it's been helpful to me in my own recovery from diet culture. Even if I'm having a day where I'm not jazzed about what my body looks like, I an still appreciate it for everything it does.

Breaking free from diet culture means breaking free from all of it, including idealizing smaller bodies and equating thinness with health and moral virtue. In a truly earing relationship with your body, weight loss or management can never be the goal.

Moreover, we can't learn to use things other than tood to cope with our feelings it those feelings re largely driven by needng food. Granted, once we release the restrictive thoughts and behaviors, we may also see that we need lo develop some additional coping skills. But we can't know that for sure until we've recovered from the trauma of deprivation, wich makes anyone reach for food to cope.

The second key to getting back to the default mode of intuitive eating is to help your body trust that you won't be depriving it anymore. Having enough food —and not "just enough, bul really an abundance, as much as you want—is essential for recovery from diet culture.

All the autonomy and agency we were born with when it umes to food — knowing when we were hungry and telling the word about it, eating what looked good and being excited to try new things, losing interest in food when we'd had enough, moving our bodies whenever we felt like it and resting when we needed to got taken away as we were indoctrinated into diet cuture.

Diet ulture can make people so fearful of food and anxious shout losing control that they can't truly participate in their lives It isolates them, even when they're desperate for connec ton. In this way the Life Thief steals people's capacity for every-darjoy. It keeps them from being present in all the big and small moments of their lives

Remember that diet culture is a system of beliefs that equates thinness with health and moral virtue, so the aspiration to be thin isn't just skin-deep. At its most fundamental level, it's about the desire to be seen as good, lovable, and enough. It's about the desire to be special, and the desire to belong.

To your body, diets (or "lifestyle changes," or "eating plans," or whatever they call themselves now feel like famine.
Even the most seemingly gentle diet pulls the pendulum to the side of restriction. When that happens, your body's natural response is to push the pendulum back to the other side-to eating a lot,

"Even though I'm in a much larger body now —you know, very fat—I like my body so much better and I'm so much more connected to and appreciative of my body than I was when I was growing up," she says. "Weight loss doesn't heal people from their internalized weight stigma.
Bad body image is not cured by weight loss."

like trying on a million outfits in the morning and making yourself late for work because you "feel fat" in everything you own. Aside from the fact that fat is not a feeling,