The Burnt Toast Guide to Surviving January
Thoughts on Resisting New Year, New You Diet Culture Bullshit
ICYMI, BT Guides are a new recurring series where I dig into your most frequently asked questions. We’ve covered: misconceptions about weight and health, talking to kids about anti-fat bias, diet culture in schools, kids and sugar, and how to survive holiday meals (and eating with other people in general).
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New Year, Same You
Happy 2024 friends!
Maybe you’re crawling back into work mode today, or maybe you’re feeling renewed and full of energy (must be nice!) but either way—I bet your social media/local media/podcast ads/group texts/etc are inundating you with January Diet Talk. Just in the past few days, I’ve noticed a marked uptick in how many diet-y Instagram ads I’m seeing (can someone explain why they’re trying to make “indoor walking” a trend???). And I’m taking great joy in reporting each one as “misleading,” but whew. It’s gonna get rough out there.
New Year’s Resolutions have been around for about 4,000 years but for most of that time, it was just people pledging loyalty to a monarch, praying to a vengeful god, or promising to pay off debts and plant more crops. Sometime around the late 18th century, we began resolving to work harder, earn more money, and be better, less sinful people. And as modern diet culture became its own religion, Resolution Culture has become all about self-improvement—namely in terms of weight loss goals, of course, but also hydration goals, exercise goals, skincare goals, home organization goals—pantry makeover content is also on the rise!—and so on.
Resolution Culture is about optimizing, it’s about perfection, it’s about buying things, and it’s almost always about setting ourselves up to fail according to a set of arbitrary standards rooted in ranking the value of human bodies. Because if we fail, we have to resolve to do (and buy!) it all over again. And that’s the underlying diet culture business model.
Resolution Culture tends to get especially loud when the world feels especially terrible. I wrote about this in 2021, and I could be writing that same piece today except this year, I’d get to sub in “horrifying global conflict and terrifying presidential election” for “horrifying pandemic plus a national reckoning with racism.” Good times!
Keeping us laser-focused on personal growth keeps us locked into capitalism (so much self-care shit to buy!). It also distracts us from the bigger picture. To be clear: I’m not here to guilt trip anyone who buys themselves something pretty/tasty/comforting because life is a lot and sometimes we need that dose of joy. But Resolution Culture keeps us focused on ourselves and our bodies. And these personal projects get in the way of us naming and dismantling larger systems of oppression. As Christyna Johnson recently posted on Instagram, this can even happen if your resolution is not to diet—if that’s as far as you take it:
It seems that many have conflated rejecting the diet mentality with dismantling diet culture. One is about the individual, the other is about community. The ultimate goal of dismantling diet culture is liberation. [...] In your efforts to dismantle the diet culture within, do not stop at the food or the aesthetic of your body. That’s not the mission. Liberation asks us to consider who is not free, and work to free them.
Here are five strategies for navigating Resolution Culture this month:
1. Think about what you can do to help in the bigger fight for liberation.
Is this the year you join your school’s wellness committee to work on getting anti-fat bias out of the curriculum and cafeteria? Can you set up a recurring donation to NAAFA, to support their work in passing more laws banning weight discrimination around the country? Can you advocate for more inclusive seating in your workplace, place of worship, local theater, or any other communal space you participate in? Notice where anti-fat bias shows up in your neighborhood, and look for ways to support solutions.
2. Resolve to add more to your life instead of resolving to take away.
Do you need a new joy-bringing non-diet hobby? Do you need more time in your schedule to cook, or see friends, or go for long walks? As Christy Harrison said in this long ago podcast interview:
I would advocate for a “new year, do you” kind of thing where you’re working to try to really connect more with yourself. [...] Instead of making a resolution to try to lose weight or to “get healthy” by cutting out all kinds of different foods or going on the latest plan/template/protocol/lifestyle change, really think about just getting back in touch with your own body’s needs.
3. If you want to make a movement goal, think about how to divest it from diet culture.
Maybe you don’t re-up your Barry’s Bootcamp membership and force yourself to tune out the body shaming this year. Maybe you use that money to support the work of an independent, weight-inclusive fitness creator like Lauren Leavell, Jessie Diaz-Herrera, or Martinus Evans. (And remember, if you’re exercising, you need to be eating.)
4. Give yourself permission to opt out.
You can hop off social media for a few weeks (or longer!) while the January diet noise is so loud. You can mute group chats that are going in toxic directions. You can skip social gatherings where you know the diet talk will be intense.
5. Cultivate fat affirming, body inclusive community.
This can look like so many things: Starting a body liberation book club, going on a unlikely hikers hike, making a friend soup, driving a neighbor to a doctor’s appointment. Connecting with people we love and forging new connections with people who share our values makes us all less susceptible to the isolation and loneliness of diet culture and capitalism. Plus fat friends have the best recs.
Thank you for this! I think #3 will be important for me because I do have a couple of body-adjacent goals for 2024, namely, doing yoga regularly and continued sobriety from alcohol (which I started back in November). I'm trying to shift my outlook from restriction to making room for other, wonderful indulgences. Ex.: I drank 3 Shirley Temples while bowling last week and got to remember how good they are. Seriously! Omg, they are delicious! And I cannot wait to have more lemonades and sparkling ciders and other fun drinks that were pushed out of my life because I was always reaching for a cocktail. And with yoga I can indulge in the feelings of peace and power that come from moving through the poses, without thinking of my appearance. (Though I still have insecurities that come to the surface! Working on it!)
Thanks for the reminder to donate to NAAFA -- I just became a monthly donor. I’m fat, but in my 60s and out of the fray, but our daughter, who is a big woman in every way, is very much IN the working world, and in an industry space that, while not actively hostile to larger bodies, is at least indirectly judgmental. She just got a well-deserved promotion, but I think she had to fight harder for it than her colleagues, and I am convinced her size has something to do with it. There should absolutely be anti-discrimination laws to protect those of us in larger bodies. Thanks, Virginia, for goosing me. 😊