The One About the Jacket

(tw for diet culture talk—mostly how it’s BS, but how it’s affected me, too)

This blog is like a goonie, it never says die.

I keep it around when I have something I really want to say that I don’t want to pitch and is too long for Instagram. (2021 is weird.)

Last time we spoke, I wrote about realizing my role in being complicit in diet culture.

My therapist and I work on food/diet/body issues when I can stand it—it’s really hard to talk about, which then feels so silly because it’s “just food.”

“Oh, it’s just food?” she says. “It’s not like we need to think about food several times a day to stay alive.”

ALRIGHT ERICA. See why it’s hard? 🙂

Something we talk about a lot in school and in at my training site is how so, so many problems that clients come in for—particularly the clients I’m seeing—are systemic, whether that be socioeconomically, racially, etc.

As a privileged, able-bodied cishet white lady, most of these systems have benefited me—but diet culture is a pretty pervasive one, unless you are Kimmy Schmidt and have been living under a bunker with no media.

This morning, my therapist and I talked through some more of this stuff, and I was incredibly anxious and activated as we ended, so I took a few minutes to meditate and journal. (I would like to pretend I always do that after our sessions, but that would be a lie.) I was sick this weekend, so I couldn’t work out, my usual way to dispel post-therapy anxiety. I had to…just, like, sit with my feelings?!

Like many people, I gained weight over the course of the pandemic—and I have struggled accepting that. I have come to some peace, though, that this body got me through a goddamn pandemic.

It was raining here in LA today, which is Big News, and so I went to put on a rain coat as I took my dog out. Well, said rain coat fit me like sausage casing…which was not enjoyable and did not make me feel awesome about myself.

I took a few minutes for a pity party, and then I got angry—not at myself, but for this diet culture that measures us by the number on our scale, by the tags on our clothes.

A jacket not fitting is just a piece of data that says nothing about who I am.

More than anything, it’s just an annoyance—I just don’t really want to have to take the time and money to buy new clothes right now.

I’m sure I’m not alone in internalizing things like that as my “fault,” but diet culture is designed to make us feel shitty about ourselves like that to perpetuate the industries it supports. I’m doing a lot of work to unpack all of that and also find a way to eat that feels right for my health, too—addressing energy issues, headaches and digestive issues.