Is it wrong to want to lose weight?
Hey, Empowered Eater!
Welcome back to our weekly newsletter, The Path to Empowered Eating!
If you have dipped your tones into body image work, you might be wondering... "Is it wrong to want to lose weight?"
And the answer is: No, it’s not wrong.
It’s an unfortunate consequence of living in a weight-discriminating world, a world in which our bodies are constantly being criticised (either implicitly or explicitly) by a crazy amount of body-shaming messages, diet advertisements, and unfortunately - misinformed health professionals.
Your desire is to avoid condemnation.
“If I gain weight my friends/partner/family will lose respect for me”
“Maybe I’d be married/well-loved/found-more-attractive/etc. if I were thinner”
It is not strange,
It is not crazy,
It is not “wrong” in and of itself,
What is wrong is the greater cultural and social forces that incentivise you to harm yourself with these social rewards and punishments.
If dieting worked—that is, if dieting didn’t usually lead to binge eating, emotional eating, rebound weight gain, and generally feeling crazy around food—it would be a completely rational response to weight discrimination or body shame.
If you're here, chances are that you've tried every single diet under the sun, and you know deep inside that dieting doesn't work long-term— as our biological drive to eat enough gets louder and harder to ignore, leaving most of us with no choice but to look for an alternative solution to the poor treatment so many receive on the basis of size.
YOU are not wrong.
You are trapped in a system that is so diabolically brilliant as to convince you that you are to blame for your own oppression, that your inability to suppress your biological nature is the problem, rather than the systems in place that would have you attempt that suppression in the first place.
The truth is that all bodies are fundamentally worthy of respect and human decency, no matter what.
We either wake up to this reality or keep chasing the unattainable ideal for the rest of our lives.
It's like in that song from Alessia Cara, that says "You don't have to change a thing; the world can change its heart..." listen to it [here]
The world won't change anytime soon, but YOU can change how you choose to perceive your body in this world and focus on creating the healthiest environment for your body to thrive without the obsession.
All the love and strength x
Emi Souza
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