Break Free of the New Year "Change Your Body" Scam
by Arielle Juliette. Approx. 6 minute read.
January is here, which means the diet and Change-Your-Incorrect-Body ™ industries are spending maximum dollars to convince us that our bodies are wrong, and we ought to spend an inordinate amount of time- and especially money- to fix it. We're swimming in a veritable shit soup that tells us making ourselves as visually appealing as possible is a the most important thing we can accomplish in life, and we ought to double down on that right now at the beginning of the new year. It's packaged as getting healthier, sexier, thinner, more toned, more muscular, more attractive, but the ultimate goal is to get us as close to the current cultural ideal as possible. The newer, trendier iterations of this in particular may CLAIM their goal is otherwise, but the visual message we are sold implies that if we do exactly as they say, we'll end up being thin and beautiful and successful. It’s framed as panacea and the only way to true happiness while usually outright ignoring mental health and long-term physical health; it saps our energy, money, and current well-being for what is nearly always temporary and unsustainable success.
Because this time of year is SO rife with messaging trying to convince us we need to change in some way, I had a hard time picking what this blog post was going to be about. So, instead of picking just one thing, I picked them ALL because you know I love to do the most 😄 Scroll through this list and find what resonates most with you, and then click through to read what others have to say on these topics! A lot of this is going to be quite counter cultural, soooo, gird your loins I suppose? And of course there is the disclaimer that this content is for informational purposes only, and isn't a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.
You can focus on health and not focus on weight loss. There's a whole movement about it called Health At Every Size. “HAES advocates reject the use of weight, body mass index or body size as proxies for health and call for health policies and personal practices that support health and well-being without requiring a change in body size or shape. For example, HAES supports eating for well-being based on hunger, satiety, nutritional needs and pleasure — not weight control. And it supports the right to enjoyable physical activity for people of all sizes, abilities and interests, if they choose to participate.” Check out this article from the Washington post for more info on HAES and a lot of great quotes of some of the HAES movement founders. Also, check out this article I wrote on balancing health and body positivity.
Diets don’t work, intentional sustained weight loss isn’t possible for most people, and science proves it. To quote an article by speaker and writer Ragen Chastain, there is not a single study where more than a tiny fraction of people were successful at losing a significant amount of weight long term. Click here to read her article, and get links to the science behind the myth that long-term intentional weight loss is possible for any more than a tiny percent of people.
Yo-yo weight cycling is bad for your health. If you've read the article above or any of the research it's linked to, you know that diets and intentional weight loss fails 90% - 98% of the time. For those of us who seem to "fail" every attempt at weight loss, going up and down the scale can be worse for our health than just remaining at a so-called “less ideal” weight. Click here to read an article by dietitian Christy Harrison, which has links to the relevant science around this.
The Wellness Diet is a diet too. Any program, way of eating, or "lifestyle change" that promises or implies that you'll lose weight because of using their method or ideology is still a diet, even if it's framed as "getting healthy". Click here to read more about the "Wellness Diet" by dietitian Christy Harrison.
The diet industry makes a buttload of money. Even though it lost some value in the pandemic due to temporary closures of weight loss clinics and medical programs, the diet industry is still projected to bring in $71 billion this year in the US alone. This is a rapidly growing industry that makes huge amounts of money on bariatric surgery, diet programs like Noom or WW that are intended to create repeat customers, appetite suppressants, frozen meal replacements, etc. This article from 2016 entitled "What the $60 Billion Weight Loss Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know" from Washington Monthly has lots of great quotations from scientists including, “the truth is, much of what we think we know about ob*sity and weight loss is regularly challenged by science.” Content warning that this article frames larger bodies as a problem to be solved especially in the final paragraph.
Changing your visual diet can help your body image and acceptance. According to a concept called the "cognitive adaptation effect", our preferences can and do change depending on what we are exposed to. In short, the more exposure we have to just one body type, the more we prefer that body type (especially when this body type is being portrayed as successful, happy, loved, etc). The more exposure we have to different body types, especially body types out there living their best lives, the more we can and do come to appreciate and see the beauty in all body types. I highly recommend checking out the following section on visual diet from Lillian Bustle's TED talk if you'd like to learn more.
Body fat is not the killer it's made out to be. I wrote a whole article with that title here! In this blog post, I break down the following four myths: fatness leads to a shorter lifespan, BMI is an accurate measuring tool of a person’s health, fatness causes illness, and that losing weight improves health. There's a ton of links to scientific studies in this blog post, as well.
Feeling shame about your body is, ironically, hard on your body. It’s not just in your head. Shame creates a stress response, which creates a cortisol release. Cortisol alters immune system responses and suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system, and growth processes. When your adrenal glands release cortisol, major arteries constrict, the heart rate elevates, and major muscles are flooded with glucose. Done over and over, this can have serious and very real effects on both physical and mental health. I wrote an article here about how to deal with shame around your body when it arises . I also discuss talking back to the critical body voices in our head in this article.
You don't need to detox. Detoxes are the 21st century snake oil. We have a liver and kidneys, and that's all we need to "detox" our bodies. This article from Harvard Health breaks down a huge variety of various detox trends, including detox diets and intestinal cleansing aka detox teas and laxatives, and discusses their purpose, effectiveness, risks and cost.
Changing your body doesn't fix a poor body image. We can't solve the problem of poor body image alone because these thoughts originate from the culture we are surrounded by, not from ourselves. This is systemic problem we need to unite to solve together as explained by dietitians from Be Nourished.
Fatphobia and weight stigma are real and extremely harmful. Anti-fatness and weight stigma are forms of discrimination in our culture that requires a social justice solution. This article by journalist Evette Dionne talks about how, aside from Michigan, "in 49 states people of size can be fired, denied promotions, and paid less than their straight-size counterparts... Fat applicants [at jobs] are less likely to be hired than straight-size applicants... fat employees earn $1.25 less per hour than straight-size employees... and that more than 50 percent of the primary care physicians they surveyed viewed obese patients as “awkward, unattractive, ugly, and noncompliant,” and the majority of these doctors “view obesity as largely a behavioral problem and share our broader society’s negative stereotypes about the personal attributes of obese persons" which leads to people in larger bodies being given worse medical care, and later interventions for live-saving procedures. According to this article by therapist Ashley Seruya on solving the issue of anti-fatness, "Some strategies include: actively challenging fatphobia rather than continuing to blame individuals for their size; moving away from the model of shame; and integrating a weight-inclusive approach to wellbeing."
I hope you found some links that resonate with you in this list! I want to leave you with a few thoughts:
Diversity in body size, just like in height, hair color or skin color, is a natural part of the spectrum of humanity. We are not all meant to look the same, move the same, or eat the same. (Ope I'm tossing in one more link, check out this article I wrote on body diversity to see a couple poignant examples of how varied bodies can be). We are all meant to be different, and that's a good thing! The diet and Change-Your-Incorrect-Body ™ industries know this, and they know they're selling us a product that won't work. I hope that this year, we can find a different system which allows us to celebrate the uniqueness of our bodies from those around us, and allows us to find acceptance of how our bodies will change over the course of a lifetime. Every single one of us, in all our wonderful array, deserve peace with our bodies and dignity in treatment. Cheers to a new year!
-Arielle Juliette
If you have any questions about this article, or a question/topic for the next blog post you'd like to see covered, please don't hesitate to write me and let me know!