Does Helping My Clients Eat In Accordance With Their Goals Make Me A Participant In Diet Culture? (And Therefore A Bad Feminist?)

I shared a blog post about my eating and about helping my clients feel feelings without eating them. I said that I had recently been falling into frozen cookie dough as a way to avoid negative emotions, and how, as I allowed myself to feel my negative emotions, my frozen cookie dough habit went away. 

My friend Andrea commented that she doesn’t do this bc she is not a participant in diet culture – she gave it up for Lent.

I flushed with shame when I read this. Am I complicit in diet culture and therefor a bad feminist?

I have given this a lot of thought ever since. Does helping my clients achieve their eating, fitness, and weight loss goals make me complicit in diet culture and thus a bad feminist?

Here’s why that’s a NO.

1. I don’t ever tell clients what their weight, size, BMI, or any other indicator should be. I don’t even ask what they are.
   
   
2. I don’t talk about what I eat or don’t eat with my children or in social settings. I don’t want to help perpetuate “diet talk” as a way for female or gender nonconforming people to connect with each other.
   
   I talk to my children about how I love getting stronger and I love seeing them get stronger. They eat sugar daily but not all day long. I never criticize this.
   
   I model body acceptance with them. They have never heard me implicitly or explicitly criticize my body or anybody else's.
   
   
3. My goal in my work with my clients is number one, to love their bodies. Starting now. Not when they achieve their goals.
   
   Partly because we never do well with achieving goals when our motivating emotion is disgust or hatred. And secondly because life is too short to hate anyone, never mind our selves.
   
   
4. My second goal with working with these clients is to help them identify what emotions they are feeling when they eat those foods they wish they wouldn’t.
   
   In almost every case, there is an emotion driving them that has nothing to do with hunger.
   
   Usually, it’s a repressed negative emotion: sadness, loneliness, frustration, grief, anxiety, burn out, and shame.
   
   Then we get to work on processing those feelings so we can release them. We make space to feel all the feelings we most want to avoid. Often times, just allowing those feelings decreases the desire to eat those unwanted foods.
   
   
5. I don’t tell my clients what to eat. If they ask, I share the most accurate science, which is that the calories is/calories out model of eating is dead wrong. It makes people feel terrible about themselves when their bodies inevitably return to their homeostatic set point or even worse, when their metabolism is slowed by calorie restriction.
   
   We talk about controlling insulin instead.
   
   
6. I use an adapted version of “intuitive eating,” which I think is pretty progressive. I don’t tell clients to eat a certain amount of food, and never encourage weighing and measuring food.
   
   Instead, I encourage them to eat mostly healthy foods and listen to their hunger and fullness cues.
   
   It’s true that some intuitive eating advocates would say, I guess, that if your body craves 5 bowls of Cap’n Crunch, that you should eat it.
   
   But I disagree for the following reasons.
   
   
7. Highly processed foods are designed on purpose to fool our bodies and create ever more desire and reliance on those foods. This is no different than cigarette companies designing products that create addiction to them. These companies want our money and our dependence and will stop at nothing to achieve it. 
   
   This is anti-feminist, pro-racism, pro-poverty, and against everything I believe in.
   
   
8. Apart from the companies having a malicious intent to create dependence in order to make more money, we also know that on a biological level, our bodies are not designed to contend with regular, massive spikes in our blood sugar and insulin.
   
   I always think about this in terms of squirrels. If we left out packages of Ding Dongs and Twinkies where squirrels could find them, you bet they would scarf them down.
   
   Does that prove that squirrels need Ding Dongs and Twinkies?
   
   No. It’s obvious that when animals eat those processed foods, we can see it’s unhealthy and undesirable. But when thinking about us humans, we have been trained to think “everything in moderation.”
   
   Why are the rules any different for human bodies versus animal bodies?
   
   In truth, I don’t advocate an abstinence-only approach to certain foods to my clients. Instead, I encourage them to plan ahead for treats.
   
   Do you need to have dessert every night for now? Great! Let’s plan for it. What about two cookies every night after dinner? Would that work for you?
   
   If they want to eat it less often than that but plan for a treat on a special occasion, awesome.
   
   What I love about this is taking control back over addictions and compulsions and deciding ahead of time what brings pleasure to our lives, and deciding accordingly.
   
   
9. And finally, and most powerfully: a body that is in pain, a body that suffers from disease, a body that doesn’t last as long as its owner would like, a body that can’t keep up with its offspring… that is not feminist. That is not anti-diet culture. That is just sad.
   
   I want to empower my clients to feel their best. I want them to be able to move freely and painlessly. I want them to live long enough to achieve all their goals. I don’t care what they look like. I don’t care about their weight, their BMI, their body fat percentage, or what they look like in a bikini. (“What is a bikini body? A body wearing a bikini.”)
   
   I just want them to feel good and to love themselves wholeheartedly starting today. 
   
   

I am a healthcare provider and a feminist and a coach and I don’t see any contradiction in those things. 

​Would you like to eat more intentionally, more in tune with your long term goals? Are you ready to feel good about yourself again, starting on day one of our work together? Awesome. I promise you it's possible. 

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