Eat, Drink, and Be Merry - Why You Shouldn't Start Your Diet At The Beginning Of The Year

“If you are fighting the battle of the bulge, my message to you is that your fight is really against a culture who hates the way you look and has convinced you that you should hate yourself too.”

It’s almost the end of the 2021 and like clockwork, fitness brands are pumping out ads to encourage you to buy this-or-that in order to help you lose weight. I know the new year always feels like the right time to begin anew, but the truth is, it is the right time to set yourself up for failure and disappointment that actually moves you further away from your goals. Most of us put way too much pressure on ourselves to make monumental changes overnight and have experienced the excitement of setting goals at the new year, only to find ourselves reverting back where we started before the end of January. When I used to workout at the gym regularly, we’d always have an influx of new members in January, and by February, we’d be back to normal levels. Changing one’s habits really begins with nuanced small changes over time. Like the idiom, “the constant dripping of rock, wears away the stone,” creating and sustaining new habits will take persistence and time. It will not be easy to wake up on January 1st an hour early to workout before you go to work, but starting with a 5-10 mindfulness exercise over the course of several weeks could help get you there! Ironically though, this article is not about setting routines – it’s about not getting sucked into the vortex of diet culture and rejecting the social conditioning that leads us all to believe that we should be thinner. And, that if we were thinner, we’d like ourselves more, and others would like us too.

I’ve wanted to lose weight most of my life. I’ve either been on a diet, thinking about being on a diet, wanting to be on a diet, planning a diet, or talking about dieting my entire life, and at my age I now understand that my obsession to lose weight was driven by forces larger than myself. There is an ideal body size and the outliers feel it everyday. Fatfobia is real and I understood early on that our culture hates fat people, especially fat women – and even more so fat, Black women. There is an ideal standard of beauty. And, I don’t fit into it. I was called ugly and ridiculed about my weight from the time I was 11 years old. You heard that right! My mind didn’t know what to do with that information other than to work at not being the recipient of such scorn. Because I didn’t understand anything about nutrition, there were periods of time where I would not eat, try to eat less, or throw up my food from the time I was 13 onward. I realize that my desire to be thinner, smaller, to take up less space, motivated almost every decision I’ve made over the past 30 years. Self-consciousness about how I looked and worry about my weight dictated whether or not I would participate in sports, whether I chose to hangout with friends, if I attempted to date, what I chose to wear (or not wear), where and what I chose to eat, how I posed in pictures – if I chose to take pictures at all, the list goes on-and-on. There is not one thing in my life that wasn’t dictated by my obsession to lose weight.

So, here I am, in my mid-forties and I’m all set with that life. This paradigm shift wasn’t as abrupt as I’m writing it, but rather a gradual chipping away and discarding of ideas that didn’t serve me. I am in no way saying that you should not care about what you eat, nor am I saying that you should not exercise or care about your health. What I am saying is that you should get in tune with your “why.” My why is different than it used to be – rather than not liking how I look and wanting to be smaller (or not wanting to be fat), I want to be stronger, maintain my mobility, and prevent chronic disease so I can continue to be active as I age. I simply don’t feel the pressure that I used to and perhaps this comes with age, but my hope is that you don’t wait until you’re my age to come to this revelation. And I certainly wouldn’t want you to live and die, still focused on sucking in your stomach, posing awkwardly so people don’t see your fat rolls, drinking diet shakes in place of healthy, delicious meals, and yo-yo dieting yourself to death. Don’t let this country’s obsession with diet culture dictate your life and happiness. The only winner in all of this is companies who stand to gain money from exploiting your long list of insecurities. If you are fighting the battle of the bulge, my message to you is that your fight is really against a culture who hates the way you look and has convinced you that you should hate yourself too. You should be loving yourself and cherishing this life and this body which is miraculous and divine.

We really need a cultural shift that de-emphasizes the importance of one’s physical appearance. I know this is a tall order given that we are in the midst of a time in history where social media is fueling our vaniity-obsessed ideologies. Despite that, I do believe that we can begin to change this within our sphere of influence.. Think about it, we start commenting on physical appearance from the first day a child is born, and it doesn’t stop. I know it sounds good to say someone’s baby is cute and we’ve grown to expect it, but what happens if we feel they are not. Imagine seeing someone you haven’t seen in a while and not saying that they look good because they’ve lost weight. That would be a novel idea, wouldn’t it? Imagine seeing someone you haven’t seen in a while and not saying they’ve gained weight since you last saw them. This would literally set us all free!

Recently, my mom sent me a picture of herself at my cousin’s wedding and after she sent me the pic, she sent me a text saying “my stomach looks so big.” I sent her a message back that said, “you look good mom.” We all deserve to live a life where we are not hyper-critical of ourselves. At the end of your life, ask yourself if you will wish you had not eaten a piece of cake or enjoyed a delicious dinner out with friends. I highly doubt it. I’ll wish I had done it more often and you probably will too – so eat, drink, and be merry. Enjoy everything you want in moderation with no deprivation, because you deserve it.