The Complicated Liberation of Leaving Diet Culture
There’s a particular kind of cognitive dissonance that comes with leaving diet culture behind. On one hand, there’s the profound relief of no longer structuring your entire life around food rules, calorie counting, and punishing workouts. On the other hand, there’s the harsh reality that as your body stays the same size, or becomes larger, the world becomes less accommodating, less kind, and sometimes downright hostile.
It’s almost like fatphobia is...a thing
Why Leave Diet Culture at All?
Let’s be brutally honest: the only scientifically proven, consistent outcome of intentional weight loss attempts is further weight gain. Not just regaining lost weight—but typically ending up heavier than where you started. There is nothing inherently wrong with fat bodies or fatness itself. I emphasize the weight gain outcome only to highlight a crucial reality: intentional weight loss endeavors reliably produce the exact opposite effect of what we’re promised they will deliver.
And the path itself? Devastating:
Eating disorders that can be deadly across the weight spectrum
Obsession that crowds out everything else—relationships, hobbies, creativity, even parenting
Constant anxiety and hypervigilance around eating
Self-worth tied to an arbitrary number on a scale
Psychological trauma of repeated “failure” at something designed to fail.
Intergenerational trauma as we pass these attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to our children
Diet culture colonizes the mind. It demands complete self-abandonment—the subordination of our actual needs, desires, and potential to an endless pursuit of a body type that may be genetically impossible for us to achieve.
What we’re seeking liberation from isn’t just inconvenient or mildly problematic. It’s actively destructive. It’s terrible. And it’s absolutely worth facing the bullshit consequences of leaving it behind.
The Grief of Greater Visibility
When you stop restricting, when you allow your body to find its natural size, your size may become larger than society deems acceptable—or than you’ve ever felt comfortable with. And with that change may come a cascade of new challenges:
Healthcare professionals who can’t see past your BMI
Clothing options that disappear or triple in price
Airplane seats, restaurant booths, and public spaces that weren’t designed for your body
Increased staring, comments, and unsolicited “concern” from strangers
Professional opportunities that mysteriously vanish
Dating pools that shrink
The cruel irony is that those of us most drawn to leaving diet culture behind are often those who have suffered most severely under it—people who have endured eating disorders, chronic dieting, those of us who have already experienced immense body shame or even lifelong fat oppression. We’re the ones who need body liberation most desperately, yet we also face the harshest consequences for claiming it.
The Reality We All Face
This reality inevitably leads to a stark understanding: we’re caught between two difficult choices.
Stay in diet culture: continue the cycle of restriction, bingeing, shame, and weight cycling that consumes our lives and damages our physical and mental health, all while offering no sustainable results.
Leave diet culture: face potential weight gain and navigate a fatphobic society that punishes larger bodies, but reclaim your mind, time, energy, and self-determination.
It’s not a choice between an easy path and a hard one. It’s a choice between different kinds of hard. The question becomes not “Is it worth it?” but rather “Which struggle do I choose?”
For many of us, the calculus eventually becomes clear: the known misery of diet culture—with its guaranteed path to self-abandonment and its scientifically proven failure rate—is ultimately worse than the potential challenges of living in a larger body in a fatphobic world.
At least in the latter, we get to keep ourselves. We get to reclaim our lives, our interests, our capacity for joy and presence. We get to model healthier relationships with food and body for the next generation.
Preparing for the Journey
What I can say with certainty is this: those considering leaving diet culture behind deserve honest preparation for what may lie ahead. Not to discourage the journey, but to ensure you’re equipped for it.
This preparation might include:
Finding community with others who understand both the liberation and the challenges
Developing resilience strategies for navigating healthcare, travel, and other potentially triggering situations
Learning about size discrimination and the political dimensions of fatness
Building a toolkit of responses to common microaggressions
Creating spaces where your body is celebrated—not just tolerated
The Both/And Reality
The truth is that leaving diet culture behind can simultaneously make your life easier in some ways and harder in others. You can experience profound relief from the mental burden of constant food monitoring while also facing new forms of (at best) discomfort and (at worst) discrimination.
This isn’t a failure of the anti-diet movement—it’s a failure of our society to accommodate and respect bodily diversity. The answer isn’t to return to dieting; it’s to recognize that our liberation must be both personal and political. We need both individual healing and collective action against the systems that make that healing so difficult.
A Clear-Eyed Choice
Let’s be clear: neither choice is easy. Both choices involve pain, difficulty, and loss.
Diet culture offers the illusion of social acceptance at the cost of your authentic self, your mental health, and ultimately, your physical health too. It promises belonging while ensuring you never truly belong anywhere because you’re never truly present—always calculating, always anxious, always planning the next restriction or compensating for the last “failure”.
Leaving diet culture offers reclamation of self, mental space, and genuine connection, at the cost of navigating increased discrimination and potentially losing certain forms of privilege. It promises liberation while acknowledging that this liberation exists within systems still designed to punish it.
This isn’t about finding some perfect middle ground. There isn’t one. It’s about making a clear-eyed choice between a guaranteed harm and a potential one—between the certainty of self-destruction and the possibility of external obstacles.
What we’re doing when we leave diet culture behind isn’t just personal healing—it’s an act of resistance against systems that profit from our insecurity and self-loathing. It’s refusing to make ourselves smaller—literally and figuratively—to accommodate oppressive standards that were designed to fail us.
Yes, both paths are difficult. But only one path allows you to keep yourself intact. Only one path makes space for a life beyond the endless pursuit of an unattainable ideal.
Leaving diet culture has consequences. But so does staying trapped inside it. When we name both realities, we choose with clarity—and find each other in the wildness of what comes next.
