The Word Diet is Loaded: Our Relationship with Food

Over the last two and a half years I have lost over fifty pounds. In the process, I had to develop ways of eating that were healthy and hardly restrictive. I know this is not the first time I have lost weight. However, this time there are a few differences in this journey. For starters, I am not on a diet the way society conceives of it. This is not something temporary. I am not going back to some of the things I was doing before.

Mind you, before it was more restaurant food and a few more processed goods. Partly the pandemic helped me break out of the restaurant habit. The more reading I do, the more processed foods that leave my life. But I want to raise an issue, one that is critical to break from in order to succeed, in my view. This is the belief that a diet is temporary. Your diet is whatever you eat every day. So you will be dieting from the moment you are born to the moment you die. Given this, the word should have no control over you.

There is a culture, encouraged by businesses valued in the billions, that have given this word power. This is why you have books, diets of the month, and magical thinking around the word. This is part of the problem and it leads to, the things we tell ourselves that allow us to maintain some bad habits. After all, if this is just temporary, we give ourselves permission to go back to our old…