Diet Culture and the Patriarchy

Have you ever stopped to consider that dieting and the diet industry work to keep us busy and distracted as a result of the patriarchy? The constant pursuit of body perfection tries to keep us spinning on a hamster wheel so that we do not have the time or energy for anything else, and that needs to stop now.

Key Takeaways

If You Want To Start Uncovering How Dieting and the Patriarchy You Can:

1. Stop equating healthiness to weight
2. Accept that you have a skewed perception of your body
3. Challenge yourself to think about how you perpetuate diet culture in the patriarchy
4. Take steps to actively put your time and energy into something different than body perfection

The System Was Built To Make Us Fail

When we are preoccupied with the scale and food restrictions, we shrink ourselves literally and metaphorically. The ideal body comes from decades of the patriarchy that is reinforced by everything around you. The system is designed to oppress women-identifying folks, while the ideal body keeps changing. The time, resources, and attention that pursuit of body perfection takes is just simply not worth it. It is about damn time that we get off this hamster wheel and focus on something other than our bodies.

Reinvesting Your Energy

How often do you compliment someone on their looks as the first thing you say about them? Can you imagine how much time and energy you could get back if you started questioning the influence of the patriarchy on our endless pursuit for body perfection? 

Instead of focusing on what could go wrong or what you could miss out on if you start feeding into this internalized intersection of diet and the patriarchy, think about all the things you could gain if you stopped focusing on controlling the way you look. 

I truly believe that we were not put on this planet to work ourselves to achieve the perfect body. Your energy, your spirit, and your magic could all be being wasted on the patriarchal view of body perfection, and you are worth so much more than that.

How are you working to stop internalizing and perpetuating the intersection of diet culture and the patriarchy? Let me know how your challenge went this week in the comments section of the episode page.

 

In This Episode

• Examples of ways that diet culture keeps us distracted from the world around us (6:10)
• The role of the patriarchy and how it is woven into oppressive systems (11:50)
• Why we need to tease apart health and weight and accept body diversity (17:42)
• The problem with BMI and how it plays into body dysmorphia (20:00)
• A special challenge for you to take away from this episode (23:23)

 

Quotes

“Dieting for the sake of body perfection keeps us distracted from everything else going on in the world because it is all-consuming.” (6:15)

“We have this constantly being reinforced to us from a very young age that if we look the part if we look a certain way like these body ideals and beauty ideals, that we will be more worthy, that we will be better people. And it is absolutely a tool of the patriarchy.” (11:58)

“Because of body diversity, some people in larger bodies are in great health, just like some people in smaller bodies are in terrible health.” (19:06)

“We live in a patriarchal society, we live in a fatphobic society, we live in a white supremacist society, where all of these things are consistently reinforced. So it is not our fault.” (22:42)

“How can you take your idea of worth, your own worth or what you appreciate about someone else, and expand that? What energy would that buy you back?” (27:14)

 

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