Can a Diet Ever Be Neutral?

And should we be pretending we've never intentionally changed what we eat?

Every Monday I consider several topics to talk about on the following Sunday with you all and I rehearse all the avenues and arguments I could explore. Sometimes it’s bloody obvious (last week), other weeks, it’s down to the wire. But occasionally, I know immediately what I want to talk about, but due to trepidation about the reception, I find I can’t start. 

So, it goes this week, because the subject is food-related and that is something I’ve generally avoided like the plague. I touch on exercise here and there on my Instagram and have worked with fitness brands because it’s less fraught. But even that can feel like a minefield, because exercise culture can be just as loaded with toxic messages. I think so much about how my work on whichever channel might make another person feel, and generally when it comes to anything body related, I just don’t think anyone needs to hear from the perspective of another thin, white woman. So, skip it right?

Yet all week I’ve kept coming back to it, because it is what I’m tussling with in my mind. Self-awareness is obviously hugely important but self-censorship when we’re really talking about a very mundane subject (as in eating, a thing that every human does) is what I set this platform up to try to avoid. Aiming for a compromise, I’ve tried to approach diet amorphously here, without mentioning a single food group, oz or kcal. Diet on a meta level. 

I don’t want to say I’m an expert on diet or even diet culture, but I have spent inordinate weeks of my life immersed in it and written extensively in a professional capacity about its perils. I’ve ghostwritten three fitness and diet books and a lot of the content has been about peeling back the layers of messages so many of us have internalised about our bodies. Through everything I’ve learnt from scores of interviews with the world’s foremost dieticians and nutritionists, my outlook has shifted dramatically. I also follow a lot of campaigners around body neutrality and positivity and practise many of their methods and mantras personally. From the current medical thinking around metabolism to muscle growth and the rest of it, I’m up to speed. So, while I don’t publicly drone on about diet, behind the scenes it has somewhat become my stock in trade. I do feel invested in the ways we can reprogramme our brains to scarf off many of diet culture’s most pernicious messages. 

I get a lot of private messages on social media asking me what my ‘secret’ is and what I eat.  I respectfully ignore them because there is no point me ever sharing my food intake. I know from my reams of transcripts with nutritional scientists that it means nothing to one single other body. Aside from intuitive eating (literally eating when I’m hungry) I have no advice. We are all genetically distinct, we all live in the world in different circumstances, both psychological, material and logistical. There is no comparison to be made and what I do will have no bearing on what you do. It’s not just comparing apples to pears, it’s comparing them to hydrangeas or radiators.

The research on diet and fitness is a mess—mostly because metabolism is notoriously hard to control for in a scientific context (keeping humans under constant surveillance for a meaningful period of time isn’t cheap—and self reporting leads to ahem, inaccuracies). There are also plenty of murky papers, potentially influenced by the sugar or soft drinks industries etc. The truth is that there are so many unknowns that you can both prove and disprove anything. Only this weekend I read of a brouhaha around exercise and body mass. What we do know is that the world we live in today makes it harder than ever before to keep to standards of health and aesthetics which were set in a different time. Whether you believe that’s down to this year’s buzzword ‘super-processed’ foods or hormones in our water, or whichever study has led to the next Holy Grail Hollywood diet, there is so much complexity to the story, which goes way beyond traditional assumptions around gluttony or indolence.

In saying all of that, as I am so aware of the impact of the messages around food, we are very food-neutral at home. There are no bad foods or good foods in my house. My children eat until they are satisfied and after I provide a mixture of nutrients on their plate, my job is done (excruciatingly hard with my youngest who has gone through periods on the ‘exclusively rice diet’, but I am keeping faith with his intuition). Instead of healthy and unhealthy foods, we speak about what foods can offer our bodies. Red foods are great for your heart! Purple foods keep germs at bay! You get the gist. My eldest still comes home from school telling me that doughnuts make you fat; I reply that any food eaten to excess can be bad for your body. Our kitchen table diet chat is diametrically opposed to what I grew up with. I also never mention my own body outside of its strength. There are absolutely people in my family that think I’m holier than thou about it, because I never miss a potentially toxic comment. But I just really really don’t want my children to grow up feeling like I did. Or you know, to stop eating for weeks on end. 

So why am I talking about this here today and not under the cloak of my ghostly pen? Well, I’ve recently gained some weight. Not much. But at 5’3’’ it doesn’t take much. I don’t feel guilty or bad about it, I don’t feel like I’ve been naughty and need to repent. There is no self-loathing, I’m actually pretty ambivalent. Clearly, I’m a thin woman, so now I’m just slightly less thin. I’m sure no one has noticed, and even if they did, who gives a shit? The only tension about the shift is that I’ve gone up a dress size and can’t fit into my jeans or do the zips up in my dresses. Through my career, I’ve been fortunate enough to build an archive of fashion booty 15 years in the making and truth be told, I am not ready to let it go.

I’m not going to give a history of my body changes over the years (it’s on the internet, I wasn’t as educated and considered about writing on bodies in the past) but I’ve been both bigger and smaller in the natural (and not so natural) ways all of our bodies wax and wane. As constantly evolving organisms navigating all sorts of different pressures—injuries, changed working patterns, or as in my recent case, a change in contraception—it is madness to imagine we would maintain the same dimensions. Yet, those 200 dresses are still hanging there in colour co-ordinated order. Yes, I have some stretchy and roomier pieces, they’re just a small percentage of the archive. I’m sure some people might think, ok KO, this is maybe a sign that it’s time to retire the cut outs and God, perhaps they’re right. I’m just not there mentally. To be fair, most of the dresses are more suited to a middle American cult, but still. There will doubtless come a day where it is time to gently move on from the closet of my dreams. It’s just not today.

As an emancipated and educated woman who has exhaustively explored the issues and done all the work to move from the paradigms of fat/thin bad/good, my question to myself in this situation, to us all really, is can you ever diet neutrally? Can you diet with self-love? Can you make any amendment to your regular nutrition without opening the floodgates to the generational stories of body stigmatisation?

While musing on these questions, it was impossible not to think of America Ferrera’s treatise on modern womanhood in the recent Barbie movie. “You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin.” It is this knowing hypocrisy and the resultant doublespeak – euphemisms like ‘healthy’ in place of ‘thin’ (also; ‘toned’, ‘lean’, ‘shredded’) which have refracted the diet talk discourse into its new form of wilful obscuration.  Let’s not pretend the multi-billion dollar industry (in 2022 worth $175.44 billion) has gone anywhere; it’s just morphed into something even stranger. I recently read a depressing article in the Economist about the financial privileges that smaller bodies enjoy and I know from longitudinal studies that fat-phobia is the only prejudicial characteristic which hasn’t become less stigmatised over the past 20 years. And yet, this is something which is just supposed to exist naturally, as if by accident.

Perhaps the only way to square the circle between being thin and becoming thin is to lie about it? Perhaps my only real secret should be the low-key diet I’ve been on over the past two months? Or the low-key diets I went on after all three of my pregnancies? The only way I’m supposed to get my zippers back up is to furtively change my routine then pretend I’ve never once thought about it? If you are a certain size, should you—due to the privileges your body enjoys in the world—keep your lips buttoned at all times when it comes to anything to do with your form? Much like personal wealth, is it now unseemly to mention it?

Over this summer there hasn’t been a moment when my self-love has been shaken, because it isn’t based on the way I look. Whether or not I ever wear my favourite LBD again, it makes no difference to my esteem or how attractive I feel I am as a person. I have no problem with the way I look nude. I’m just over my clothes digging into my underarms and waist. I want to be comfortable in the beautiful things I have collected. It’s that one-dimensional, or at least it is this time for me.

I haven’t told anyone in my life that either a) my clothes don’t fit or b) I’m making some small changes to reopen the opportunities for wearing them, because I know what they’ll say. My family would probably enjoy ribbing me about it considering how self righteous they think I am about bodies. It’s really hard to work out the best path in this instance. Is it better to let everyone believe that I woke up looking a certain way, or is it more sisterly to be frank about the intentionality behind it? Either way, the truth remains that most people go on some kind of diet at some point in their lives for a myriad of reasons. There shouldn’t be any shame in admitting it, because it is hardly immoral. Obviously, the messaging and discourse around it is healthier when divorced from diet culture tropes. Somewhere, that neutral third way has got to emerge. After all, honesty has only ever been the real policy in town.