59. The psychology of diet culture and embracing our bodies

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Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to another episode. It is so great to have you here, So great to have you here for another discussion. New listeners, old listeners. It is a really interesting topic this week. I'm so excited about it. I'm also a little bit nervous. This topic took me so long to write and a lot of thinking time, I think because it's one that I think personally influences and impacts every single person in their twenties, every single person in their teenage years, in their thirties, almost at every stage of life, and it is so complex. So this week we are going to discuss the psychology of diet culture and how we can embrace our bodies in whatever form they come, despite excessive society or pressure to kind of conform to a particular beauty standard and a particular body type. There is so much content to cover. I'm really excited to explore some of the findings and intricacies around this topic. I think as our society has become more self aware of the dangerous impacts of social media and general popular media on how we see our bodies. Discussions on the harms of diet culture have become so much more prevalent, and that is such a brilliant, brilliant thing, because I think I really don't think I can name even a single person in my life who has not been influenced in some way by the standards set by our society, and a society that is inherently impacted and inherently caters to diet culture in some way or another. I know personally this topic and diet culture has impacted me throughout my adolescents, throughout my twenties so far in a way that has been really insidious and has been sometimes hard to shake. So I think that is why I'm super excited to talk about it and also to kind of shed a light on some of the consequences that we don't always know that can be incredibly severe over our mental well being and our physical health. In particular, we are going to talk about, basically the psychology behind diet culture is so influential, how it takes form, how it impacts us to treat our bodies in a certain way, especially in this decade of our twenties. We're going to talk about the impact that it has on us from an early age. We're going to talk about social approval, the impact on self esteem, body dysmorphia, and mental health, amongst other things. But before we begin this episode and get into some of the content, I would just like to give a brief disclaimer. This episode will include discussions and descriptions of disordered eating and diet culture. So if this is something that is particularly triggering for you, I would just ask that you do a quick mental health check, a quick check of your emotional state at the moment, and ask yourself whether this is something you need to listen to today. I promise the episode will still be here in a week, two weeks, a month's time, so you can always come back to it when you feel more prepared. But if this is something that is going to trigger you, maybe just sit this one out for a little while. If anything in this episode is distressing, there are contact numbers in the description for someone you can speak to if you need help and if you need clinical assistance. I also just want to stay we cannot talk about everything today. We are going to do a whole other episode primarily on eating disorders and the impact on us in our twenties. And like I said, this is a topic I feel really, really deeply about. It's definitely something that has personally impacted me amongst many and many of my friends, many many of you guys as well, I'm sure. So I'm excited to kind of dispel some of the ambiguity and the confusion around why we often buy into diet culture even when we don't really want to. And we're going to discuss some of the harms, but importantly the psychology behind how we can push back against diet culture and embrace our bodies despite this pressure to kind of cater towards societal expectations about how we should look. So let us get into it, let us begin the discussion. I'm so excited, Thank you again for joining us. Let's go. So essentially, diet culture, it refers to a rigid set of cultural and social expectations alongside ingrained systems and ingrained beliefs and behaviors that convince us to value a certain physique or type of body, one that we deem physical attractive, physically attractive, often that's one that is thin over our physical health and emotional well being. Diet culture it's essentially rooted in fat phobia, but it's often disguised as health and wellness, as something that's trying to make us better people and treat our bodies roll. I think it's an overgeneralization to say that the word diet is probably ultimately problematic, but it's a fact that the vast diet industry it essentially befits from our insecurity and our fear of being perceived as overweight or as fat. I think it's important to stay here that just because you are a naturally petite person or your thin doesn't mean you have to feel any shame at all that your body happens to conform with beauty standards. Nor do I think it really helps anyone by enhancing the attractiveness of people who are bigger by dragging another body shape down. We all come in different forms where we are all beautiful at our core. What we're mainly talking about is how diet culture convinces everyone along that spectrum that no matter what they look like, they could always be thinner, they could always be doing something more to look better. Diet culture It often emphasizes good foods and fad diets like fasting or cutting out certain food groups. It wants us to excessively focus on what we eat and how much we wave through calorie restriction and excessive exercise, and it essentially normalizes a self deprecating attitude and belief towards our bodies that we are not good enough, that we are not valuable enough unless we look a certain way, and normally that is extremely thin. This kind of culture is incredibly toxic. I feel like that goes without saying right, like it's incredibly toxic because of its obsessive focus on our physical appearance, particularly our weight or what size we wear, and it can be a massive risk factor for body dysmorphia, for disordered eating, and other mental health issues. I don't want any of us to feel any shame if we fall into kind of the trap of believing the lies that diet culture has told us. You know that if we're thinner, if we take a certain pill or a certain supplement, will be happier. This is a seventy one billion dollar industry, probably even bigger when you consider all the other industries that feed into it. So it's come up with a lot of creative ways to control us, and kind of in the most hidden and nefarious of ways, starting as early as childhood, in the shows we watch, the media, we absorb the beliefs and comments made by those around us, by our parents, I think essentially, diet culture is based on control. The diet industry is based on control. It's based on profit. And I think the most terrifying aspect of this is the underlying message. It promotes that our worth is tied to our physical appearance, not how we treat others, not what we contribute to the world, not the people we love, or our intelligence or our creativity, you know, the things that truly matter. It wants us to view our worth by the shape and the size of our bodies, not what is inside. I know that sounds pretty self explanatory, right, you know, that's a pretty easy way to see things. You know. Diet culture convinces us that our body is our most valuable and most attractive and desirable asset, whereas the other things, the quantity and the quality of our souls and the quality of our hearts, doesn't really matter. But one way I really like to frame it to myself when sometimes I find myself slipping into this belief that my body is and how I look is a lot more valuable than other parts of myself. Is to think about myself on my deathbed. I know this is really morbid, but I always think on my deathbed, people really going to remember how much I weighed, where if I was two or three or four killers skinnier, They're really going to remember what size of clothes I wear. I don't think so, and I think that it seems in the most important moments, like at birth, at death, when we're surrounded by people we love, when we're getting married, when we're overcome with joy, our body is the least important thing about us, as long as it's able to do the things we want it to do and be a safe vessel and a safe home for the attributes, the love, the thoughts, feelings and values that our bodies contain and that our minds and our hearts contain. But diet culture undermines that belief right. It undermines that belief. It says these things don't matter, doesn't matter how great a person you are. If you're not thin, well, then you should be doing better. And it really contributes to a lot of debilitating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, orthorexia, binge, eating disorders. These are really serious conditions, right. They're related to persistent eating behaviors and sometimes restricted behaviors that negatively impact our health, our emotions, our ability to function. And most eating disorders involve a focus that is very similar to that of diet culture. It's focused on your weight, it's focused on your body shape, on your food intake, and it can lead to really dangerous eating behaviors, and often diet culture and that societal obsession with body image and thinness is a huge contributing factor. Okay, I don't want to spend too much time talking on these because I think it needs a whole, whole separate episode, and it will get its own separate episode where we can talk more about eating disorders and the way they present and the impacts they have. But today we're just going to talk about some examples of what diet culture might look like and where we can notice it in our behaviors and the things around us, before we kind of discuss the origins and the psychology behind its existence and its volence in almost every facetted area of our lives. I think diet culture is particularly insidious because it's lumped in with this suggestion that optimal. It's kind of lumped in with this suggestion about taking care of ourselves, right, like if you count calories and if you eat well, you must be perceived as healthy. But that's not always the case. And it appears so often in the media and so often around us that soon we start to believe that eating a certain way, that caring about our way, caring about what we look like, is completely normal. It's ubiquitous. We see it in advertisements, TV movies, at work, at the doctor's office, maybe when you're having conversations with friends and family, and of course, the big kind of devil in this situation in social media. Just think about how much social media we absorb every day. They really think about how many hours do you spend on your phone? But you know, perhaps you can't remember particular posts or videos, but all of that content that you're seeing on a day to day basis is being absorbed and processed subconsciously somewhere in your brain. And when the content we are exposed to frequently reiterates, diet culture frequently reiterates how we are meant to look a certain way, eat a certain way, be a certain way. Suddenly it becomes part of our belief systems, even without us noticing. So I was having this conversation with my friend the other day about how much of the content we absorbed from social media is actually just loosely concealed diet culture. There's no way around it. It's essentially I think it's kind of packaged up to appear something else, to appear like it's talking about health, but it's diet culture. And it's the kind that if we saw a celebrity actively promoting or a magazine promoting, we would call it out and we would say, this is actually really unhealthy, this is promoting eating disorders. But when they're packaged up nicely, when they're seen in our Instagram and our TikTok feeds as these like trendy videos, we often don't notice it as much as we should. You know, I always think about TikTok videos about like what I eat in a day, and they display calories, trending sounds about being skinnier. The idolization of models like Bella had did in an obsession with what they eat, an overrepresentation and idolization of people who are thin across Instagram and other platforms. So many other examples, you know, celebrity diets, before and after, fitness trends, weight loss pills, diet pills, weight loss shakes, all of those things. The other one that's really huge and is a really big indicator of how diet culture kind of seeps its way into our mind is edited photos and edited images. I'm sure we've all done this once or twice. I have done this. I've edited images of myself to better to look thinner, and I don't think I'm alone in this. There's actually been a study on this exact kind of behavior, and it noted that seventy percent and over fifty percent of men, so seventy percent of women, fifty percent of men aged eighteen to thirty five reported editing the images they post on social media pretty regularly. And I think this demonstrates not only how diet culture convinces us that we need to put forward a particular image of ourselves as attractive and as thin, but also the large amount of overall dissatisfaction we have with what we naturally look like, with what we truly look like, to the point where we alter images of ourselves to seem ideal. I think this list of diet culture embedded across social media could go on and on and on. We see it all the time everywhere, and as people and children are accessing social media earlier and earlier in age, it's no wonder that by the time we kind of reach out at a lessens in our teenage years, almost I think it's like six and ten people report some form of disordered eating. This is why it works, and this is why it's so impactful. When we see this content enough, we begin to normalize it. So this is known as the concept of normalization. This refers to essentially a social process through which ideals and actions come to be seen as normal through things like ideology and propaganda and repetition such as that. You know, when we see something enough, maybe across social media, it becomes normal to us. It becomes taken for granted part of our everyday perception and understanding of what the world is like. So let's think about this in terms of diet culture. So essentially, this idea of thinness and needing to treat our bodies a certain way to align with beauty standards and ideals of attractiveness. This becomes an idealized norm through repetition of images and trends and video content that all promotes the same idea to be thinner as to be better, and this becomes an idealized norm. It's been repeated across our brains enough that we are made to almost obey it or see it as normal in our society. And then there's this way of either rewarding or punishing individuals, often subliminally, for deviating against the ideal. So this is a way that diet culture is able to exert almost maximum control over our behaviors, beginning in childhood and in our teenage years. So we have this norm. It's been repeated to us through social media. It's become idealized, and those who match the idealization of thinness and looking a certain way, they are praised, they can fit into traditional clothing sizes they've represented in the media, whilst those who are who don't meet that ideal, who pushed back against that norm, are told that they're lazy. They're made to feel uncomfortable, they aren't able to find clothes that fit in traditional stores, they aren't represented, they face bullying, particularly online. So in that way, they're kind of punished and almost forced to fall back in line to cater towards being thinner. This, obviously, I think, goes without saying, can cause some pretty long term issues with our self perception and self worth and the way that we treat our bodies because it promotes this lie. Like I said, your value to society is determined by how much you a particular mold, a particular norm, or a standard of thinness of beauty, and this has inverse, kind of inverse effects as well for people who don't look that way. Whereby diet culture has so intensely ingrained in our brains that skinny equals good, skinny equals attractive, skinny equals valuable, that people who don't meet that socially constructed and manipulated standard experience discrimination in many areas of life, and they're told or shamed that they don't have self control and that they aren't desirable. A thin or fit appearance symbolizes I think, a lot of important values in our culture. We often confuse it with values like hard work and discipline. So if a person is thin, they're seen as having willpower, the seen as having self control. These are ideals and values and attributes that we value. Whereas if a person is not thin, the assumption is that they must lack self discipline, they must not have much will power, and as a result, they experience harmful stigmatization. They're put down, they're harassed. Wait, stigma tends to be socially acceptable in diet culture because of that alignment with certain values and certain traits that we want that we want to achieve, that we want to be like, this has a lot to do with social approval. It's no longer about what you look like. It's no longer about how much you weigh. It's about what your appearance means for your value to society and what your appearance means for how other people see you. And like I said, this has a lot to do with social approval and wanting to be seen as socially valuable and wanting to align with those traits and those moral qualities that are implicitly associated with thinness. The need for social approval. It sustains things like diet culture. Social approval is how we go about being accepted in society and what social standards and expectations we feel like we have to obey and fitting in with what is a coveted beauty standard, one that is promoted by diet culture of being thin is a way of gaining social approval in so many ways, this internalized belief that if we are thinner, we are happier. People will like us more, people will want to date us, people will admire us, and it all links back to wanting to be accepted and included, as is a natural function of being social beings. I think it's important to understand that diet culture extends beyond just eating nourishing foods and taking care of your physical health. And it's often an excuse to engage in the kind of fat phobia that is promoted by diet culture. But instead, I think what it actually does is become quite consuming. Although the facade of diet culture is often marketed as wellness and marketed as fitness and lifestyle friendly, instead it can become all consuming and it compromises our physical health, our emotional wellbeing. And it's not so much promoting sustainable health. Really, it's promoting conformity. It's promoting a company, it's promoting an industry that wants to make money off of our insecurity. So let's just talk about some examples of diet culture that we might be able to recognize. One that I noticed in myself, I've noticed in others I've noticed across social media is this tendency to label some foods as good and others as bad. So typically that's food like chocolate and ice cream and burghers and those are bad foods. Those are bad, whilst things like salad and fruit and juice, those are good foods. Here's the thing that really annoys me about that kind of labeling. Foods don't come with moral labels like good or bad. Foods are not morally aligned. We don't need to demonize any form of food. It's literally just a cluster of ingredients and nutrients. It's in no way associated with being bad or being evil or needing to be shunned or not consumed. Here's the thing. All foods are good foods, like they don't have a moral label. They all have their benefits. Yes, you know, maybe eating like chocolate bar every day with every meal. It's not going to make you feel really great. It's not going to make you feel amazing. That's all right, but it's also great for your happiness to kind of have a yummy treat and feel comfortable eating what you like, and that kind of rhetoric that's pushed by diet culture of some foods being good and some foods being bad is a way for it to kind of control our behaviors and control our habits and our beliefs to cater towards thinness. I think linking on from that is the sense of shame that diet culture likes to create in us from eating certain foods that we are told are bad because of their calories or because of some other dietary element. That's another systematic kind of symptom of diet culture is this societal obsession with calorie intake. I think that's something we can all admit we have done. I certainly have where you have weighed up two options based on how many calories they have with the specific intention of being aware of your weight. This is especially insidious, I think when we can so easily access this information on the labels of food or at restaurants or using online apps. This kind of general and prolific display of calorie information, it implicitly tells us that calories are something we should care about, something we should measure, rather than just another property of the foods we eat going out to eat fueling our body. That shouldn't be a mathematical equation, and it also can grossly contribute to excessive calorie counting. There's actually been a lot of research on that shows that displaying calories on labels and in restaurants, particularly as kind of like an advertising ploy or selling point to make things appear healthier, it actually contributes to that major symptom of diet culture, which is an obsession about how our body looks, and along with that an obsession with food as something to restrict and label rather than enjoy, and from this food kind of becomes synonymous without physical appearance, and it becomes a tool to manipulate to achieve our dream body or to look thin, rather than its organic and normal purpose as energy and as fuel for our body. Adding calories to menus and labels on grossery items, all those other things, I think it's actually a really common practice and a lot of cultures and countries these days. I know in Australia where I'm from, they do that at the moment. Friends in the UK have said the same thing, but a professor by the name of Sendeep runne I believe she did all of this research into this when the UK was proposing this change to put calories on menus, and she found that placing calories on menus can actually be incredibly triggering for people with anorexia and bulimia, who may search for lower calorie foods, but on the flip side could lead to people with binge eating disorder finding higher calorie items to trigger guilt and shame. And she also found that talking to her patients and clients after this mandate was put in, that calorie counting is actually worsened by this act. Right, people are more likely to engage in it because now the information is available to them and it implicitly tells them that this is something you should care about, This is something that you need to be cognizant of, you need to be counting your calories, and it can contribute to so many disorders like anorexia, like orthorexia, like bulimia. This is yet another way that diet culture is masked as something that is good for us, but it's really influencing our behaviors and our decisions to negatively impact our self worth, our self perception, and contribute to some of those disorders we discussed earlier. I think diet culture also convinces us, through many different avenues that we need to take part in other activities that either restrict our food and take or increase our physical activity that might be excessive exercise to kind of burn off a specific amount of calories, or to earn a treat, to earn the meal that you're going to eat later. I used to do this when I was in high school. I would be like, well, I'm going out for dinner tonight, so I actually can't go out. I can't eat the foods I want to eat unless I run ten case because I have to earn it. I have to earn food. You don't have to earn anything. Food is just fuel for your body. It's nothing more. There's also this sense of feeling guilt or shame for eating, attempting to suppress your appetite with caffeine or skinny tease, nicotine or water. On the severe end, you avoiding certain social situations to avoid eating, weighing yourself and then changing your behaviors based on the number on the scale rather than how you feel, and worship worshiping kind of thinness or worshiping weight loss in a way that social media really kind of helps us do. It provides us with so much content to be able to engage in this behavior. And then, of course there are some of the feelings it creates, some of the impacts that it has on our mental health and our emotional well being. You know, feeling unworthy or unattractive due to the number on a scale, due to the size of clothes that you wear, Feeling unworthy because you don't look like someone else, Assuming that our bodies are responsible for good or bad things happening. You know, this idea that no one's going to love me unless I look like some model, you know, if I look like Bellata did, and assuming that people who do look like that way have it a lot easier. You know, that might be the case, But I also think that it's a very insidious lie that has been concocted by diet culture to convince us that if we're within, we'll have everything that we want. You might also find that you feel anxious around foods, and your mood changes based on how you feel about your body that day. And perhaps one of the biggest symptoms of diet culture and the impact it has on our behaviors and our beliefs. Is body dysmorphia. This is a mental disorder characterized by the obsessive idea that some aspect of our appearance is severely flawed and therefore warrants exceptional measures to fix it or to hide it. There is like it's so obvious. How linked to diet culture, This is right. Diet culture continuously tells us look a certain way or you're not good enough, and that can become an obsessive thought, to the point where we are so obsessed with some particular characteristic or feature of our body that we're not able to function. I used to have this when I was like seventeen and eighteen, and I used to have this obsessive fixation with the fact that my arms, like this random feature of my body, didn't look the way that people in magazines or on TV shows looked, and I would obsess over it. I would obsess over it. I would take all of these efforts to not wear singlets, or to make them seem smaller, or to not wear particular things. And now I look back at those photos and I'm stunned because they are literally just like normal arms. For a teenager to half, but that body dysmorphia kind of tricks you into thinking otherwise. I just want to say and to note that if you have felt these things, you shouldn't in any way feel bad about yourself. These are all symptoms of diet culture, and the impacts start really early, so it's often ingrained in our ways of thinking before we're even aware of it, before we're even aware of it consciously, that we are praising our bodies in a way that covets thinness and certain beauty standards, particularly above our emotional and mental wellbeing. Often the reason we find these beliefs so hard to shake an adulthood is because they begin in early learning in childhood and become indoctrinated into our everyday thinking. I'm sure for many of us, we maybe grew up hearing from our parents, particularly our mothers, some fairly negative statements about body image and the value of appearances. Maybe there were comments from our parents or close family members on our own bodies or on their own bodies about how they looked, how they looked ugly or fat that day. Maybe it was the prevalence of low fat and sugar free foods in your household, comments on people in the media, from our parents and family and people we trusted, or the restrictions of food deemed as bad. I think we all kind of know the archetype of like the armored mom, right, It's such like a tiptok trend at the moment these mums or parents who had an obsession with healthy eating, and in turn they put that on to us as their children, giving unhealthy and unsolicited comments on our body and promoting a healthy diet that is really just restrictive eating as children, if we hear these things, if we hear our parents making comments about their own bodies, about their own appearances, we internalize it, We mimic it, and we incorporate it into our own beliefs and thought patterns and behaviors at such a formative and young age, until it becomes so difficult to step away from and so difficult to shake. The one problematic behavior, Oh my gosh, this behavior, this practice, this really grinds my gears. Is the restrictions of certain foods when we're children for the purpose of weight loss or meeting beauty standards. When parents restrict the foods their children eat on a regular basis or label certain foods as off limits or as bad. Often what occurs is a disordered way of seeing these foods. Children, you know, almost worship them. They see them as something that's off limits and as such something that must be really valuable if they can't have it all the time, and when they're given the free them to do so, often they over eat when these foods become available, and they become obsessed with foods that are forbidden or secret, engage in secret eating. The food begins to control us because we've never been able to have a healthy relationship with it, because we've always been told it's bad, or it's been restricted, or it's something that's off limits. And as soon as we get that independence and that freedom, we don't know how to establish boundaries or eat the foods that we think are good for us, or eat the way that we want to eat, because this kind of object, this food, has this psychological control over us. It's seen as something valuable. The other insiduous way that diet culture hits close to home in childhood is through uneducated, inconsistent, and dangerous teachings on healthy lifestyles and diets. When we're younger, diet culture can expose us to so many negative habits about food from a young age, and it's usually with the intention of teaching children about healthy habits and about nutrition, whilst learning about diets and food restriction is typically with the intention to educate people around healthy habits. I'm sure we all had some kind of exposure to this as children, where we were told to eat five serves of veggies and two serves of fruit and like not eat sweets, and be low on carbs and exercise like you know, five times a week. Yes, those are like important lifestyle tips, right. We want children to be healthy, But when they're not taught in a consistent and appropriate manner, these lessons can actually become really damaging and ingrained in our brains as we get older. And it can also get to the point where we're not actually thinking about how our body feels. We're not thinking about how we can treat our body well so that it can do the things that we want it to do. Instead, we're actually focused on what our body looks like. We're focused on how much we weigh. I always think this, I think this all the time. I've had this discussion with my friends. The only people who should be allowed to give us diet advice or any advice on how like physical appearance or how much we weigh. Are people who have studied the interactions between food, exercise, hormones, genetics, our diet, all of those things. You need to have a fucking university degree. You need to have a qualification because unsolicited, unsolicited and uneducated advice like that's not going to help anyone, and it's only going to cause harm, especially when it's essentially thinly guised fatphobia and diet culture. If we've developed an unhealthy relationship with food, getting caught up in diet culture can become almost normal and become a go to where we're counting calories or watching our weight as we enter into our teenage and adult years. But how does it operate outside of this sphere and into adulthood? How does diet culture maintain itself so strongly? This is the strange thing about diet culture that I think many psychologists and researchers can't seem to figure out. And that is, why does this trend or this social expectation that literally benefits no one except for big industry. How did it become so powerful and influential, this obsession with being thin. It literally doesn't benefit anyone. It doesn't benefit those who are naturally that way because the messaging is always thinner, you could always look better, you could always be smaller, and it doesn't really benefit those who don't look that way either. So who was it benefiting? Who was upholding this kind of unhealthy and dangerous and unsustainable practice in this way of living? I really would ask you to think about that, like, who is benefiting from your insecurity? Who is benefiting from your behaviors and your beliefs. The diet industry is massive. It's like a seventy one billion dollar industry because, like I said, it depends on generational cycles of fat phobia and body insecurity to promote it. It's betting on the fact that you don't feel good about yourself. So it wants you to continue not feeling good about yourself because it can make money off of you not feeling good about yourself. It wants us to believe the stigma that health is directly tied to a certain weight and a certain body type, and it wants us to keep buying products and paying for programs and consuming media that would keep us entrenched in those body insecurities forever for the sake of profit, which is so messed up. So we know how this works now, right. We know that through social approval, through normalization, early learning, repeated exposure in the media, that we begin to see thin being good, fat being bad, and therefore we buy into the beliefs the behaviors that diet culture is teaching us. But what do we do about that? If we're in that stage right now, as I'm sure all of us are, it's a continuous pattern of learning. How do we push back against the negative beliefs that diet culture tries to teach us? So I'm going to outline some of the things that I have been doing recently, some of the things that clinical research and psychology tells us to do. If you're at a stage where you're like, this isn't working anymore. I don't want to feel this way about my body. I don't want to buy into this narrative. The first thing I did, I think I had a really like toxic and negative experience, a negative attitude towards my body for such a long time because I believe that lie that what I looked like was my worth, not the other things about me. That were valuable. So I want you to list five things that make you a good person that have nothing to do what you look like. For example, you know I am a creative person, I treat others with kindness, I'm generous. You kind of get the gist. Five of those. I want you to list five, and I don't want them to have anything to do with what you look like. Use these as your own personal affirmations that allow you allow you to kind of ground yourself in what is important, especially when you're finding yourself caving into this expectation about needing to be thin. Our body and specifically what we look like is the least important and least interesting thing about us. The content of your mind, of your heart, of your sinality. That is what leaves a true impression. How you make other people feel, how you feel about yourself, that is so important, and that's what should be valued, not what size clothes you wear, what your thighs look like, whether you're thin enough to do X, Y and Z. The second thing I would really advise you to do is to find healthy role models, either around you or in the media. There are so many people who promote a really sustainable and healthy outlook towards their bodies and towards their appearances. And kind of counter to that is eliminate people from your feed. Eliminate people from the content you absorb that make you feel bad about yourself. I did this the other day. There were people I had been following since I was like fifteen years old, whose bodies had, for like so long since I was fifteen, made me feel feel bad about myself, and week on week, week by week, I still see those images of them, and every time I see those images, I feel bad. I feel bad about myself. That's not their fault, right, they're just living their life. But it's my choice to decide what is helpful and what is harming my self perception. So removing those that triggering content, that content that asks me to be thinner, that requests me to you know, engaging calorie counting and to exercise excessively, removing that it's going to be super helpful. I also want you to call yourself out when you find yourself engaging in negative self talk and change the narrative. You know, if you're staring in the mirror and you're wearing something that you don't like, and you're like instead of being like, oh my god, I look so fat in this, just be like, oh this outfit just like isn't for me right now? Or instead of being like at the gym and being like wow, she's so much skinnier than me, be like, wow, isn't it amazing thing that my body could get me here? And that my body is able to move me and is able to do the things I want it to do. Try not to engage in so much comparison, first of all, but also call yourself out when you find yourself talking to yourself negatively. I saw this the other day on the internet, and it was like, when you say bad things to yourself, you're also saying those bad things to your inner child. Like would you ever sit across from six year old or five year old you and be like you're fat and be like you need to lose weight. You look hideous, you look ugly. Can you imagine saying that to your younger self or to any child? You would never do that, So why are you saying it to yourself now? That little person is still in you, that childlike wonder, that childlike innocence that is still within you. So don't say things to yourself that are going to hurt that kind of inner child or going to negatively impact how you see yourself. I think the other thing to do is to stop labeling foods as good or bad. Once again, change the narrative. Try not to use language like bad foods or cheap meals. Choose outfits and clothes that make you comfortable, and more importantly, choose people that make you comfortable. If the friends you have sit around and talk about how you know they can't eat that, or they're going to get the sugar free version, or how they're going to skip lunch because they're going to have a really big dinner, I really don't think that that's a positive impact. I know it's hard to step away from friends and family members as well who talk like that because we obviously love them. But maybe it's your responsibility to take what you've learned today and take what you've learned from many other aspects and many other shows or many other learnings, and not so much call out that language, but to push back against it. Someone's like, oh, I'm not going to eat lunch because you know I'm going to have a big dinner, and be like, oh, I'm going to have lunch and I'm going to have dinner because my body needs food right now and my body needs fuel, and I'm not going to punish it because diet culture has told me. I need to look a particular way and set boundaries with those people who make you uncomfortable. If you find that after being around someone, maybe it's your parents, maybe it's your friends, that you walk out of that situation and you feel bad about your body, maybe it's time to push back against the aspects of their behavior and their dialogue and their language that make you feel like that. Push back against unsolicited comments, reinforce your positive ideals about how you treat your body, reinforce your positive attitudes towards food. And if you are someone who is really struggling with disordered eating, go and see a therapist, go and see clinical help. It is so important that if you are struggling with your self perception, with your self worth, with your eating habits or your exercise habits in any form, there is so much support out there for you and you don't have to live like this. It's a really, I think, terrible way to live your life worrying about your body and live your life caring about it that much and letting it take away from the joy and happiness and wonder that life really contains. So there will be some support numbers in the show description if you're at that point where you think you might need some help. And I also just want to thank you guys for listening like this is a hard topic to talk about. I'm sure for many of us it's hard to listen to to understand how our body and our attitudes and beliefs has been manipulated by what is a massive industry that is benefiting from our insecurity. So thank you for walking through this with me. It was such an important episode I think for me to do. I learned so much. I was able to process so much, and I'm really going to take this forward, I think into my conversations with my friends. I hope you do as well. Start that conversation, recognize how diet culture is insidiously working its way into your daily practices and your beliefs about yourself, and actively push back against that. Once again, your body is the least interesting thing about you. You contain so much more than just your physical attributes, your creativity, your love, your generosity, your intelligence. That is incredible that is incredible. Those are the things about you that matter more than anything else. And thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, if you learn something, please feel free to give it a five star review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you listen, follow the show on Instagram It's at that Psychology podcast. Every week I do a poll and let you decide one of my episodes. So if there is something you really want to hear, reach out, I'll probably do it. I love getting some inspiration. And thank you again for listening. I hope you have an amazing week.