Revisiting what "healthy eating" means to me

And the long, slow divestment from diet culture

Content warning: disordered eating, fatphobia

I’ll just start by saying that divesting from diet culture is…hard. As was writing this week’s essay.

In preparing to write this one, I revisited some of my old newsletters from when I wrote a weekly dispatch called What’s Chaey Cooking? for Healthyish/Bon Appétit, which I know some of you here used to read. I was immediately struck by the barely-veiled disordered eating that screams out on the page (and, just under it, some raging anti-fat bias, too).

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A couple of excerpts are worth sharing here.

Writing about the high of being a meat/alcohol/sugar/dairy/gluten-free girlie:

I’ve done this at least once or twice a year for at least a decade, swearing off entire food groups for an arbitrary (and always temporary) period, and, as always, the payoff this time has been swift: I have more energy. I don’t crave my nightly ice cream. My digestion is as calm as a placid sea. At the same time, I’m aware of another familiar phenomenon creeping in: All my waking thoughts are consumed by what I’m going to cook and eat. I’ve noticed I haven’t been making plans with friends on an otherwise relatively free week because I’m worried about getting hungry during our hang and not having anything “approved” to eat. If I get into bed at night and realize I’ve forgotten to soak nuts/beans/etc. for the next day’s meals, I’ll get out of bed and make sure it gets done.

And on not yet knowing how to eat without coding food as either “good” or “bad”:

This week, by contrast, I’ve been in one of my “extremely healthy” periods: I’m loading up on vegetables, whole grains, and beans while barely consuming sugar, alcohol, dairy, meat, or refined carbs. I’m reading in bed with tea rather than snacking in front of the TV. I’m going for an hour-long power walk in the mornings and doing my physical therapy stretches before the very respectable bedtime of 10:45 p.m. I’ve dedicated myself singularly to a routine that has left me feeling, quite simply, elated.

But as I rack up more and more days of sugar- and booze-free bliss, my feelings of elation are being steadily replaced by the dread of knowing that, sometime soon, this period will end. I don’t know whether it will happen tomorrow, next week, or next month, but at some point in the future, I will make one decision (ordering too much Shake Shack, drinking one too many martinis) that will signal my brain to kick off a chain reaction of adjacent, familiar habits. The lentil lunches, tea, and power walks will be replaced by late-night chips and too much takeout until I get fed up with all that and revert to my “healthy” self again.

I’m most struck by the quotations around words such as “approved” and “healthy,” “good” and “bad.” I remember thinking that sandwiching these loaded words between quotation marks would make them pass as quirky and lighthearted, rather than toxic and insidious. When I wrote these words just two years ago, I successfully fooled myself; reading them today, I recognize how much I’ve changed and continue to change.

I’m caught somewhere between wanting to laugh and cry at the subconscious mental tiptoeing I was so clearly, obviously engaging in that allowed me to ignore what was in plain sight: I was restricting what I ate to the point where it was affecting my ability to fully engage with my day-to-day life. I didn’t even fathom it as a problem because it only happened a couple of times a year, for as long as I could will myself to stick it out (never more than a few weeks at a time). I didn’t fathom it as a problem because I had lived a life constantly being reminded (by society, media, family, peers) that I could be smaller, and as long as one could be smaller, how could any pursuit of "health” (quotes genuine this time) be bad for you? Oof.

I ended one of the aforementioned newsletters with this thought: “What I do know is that I need to reconsider what ‘healthy’ means to me.” What I’ve learned since then is that, ironically, the less I think about what it means to "be healthy” (i.e. to “perform health”), the better I feel. I find that the less I think, the more I can listen, the more I can start seeing all kinds of foods for what they are (a burger can just be a really delicious burger) and appreciate the different, varied roles they all serve in keeping me going. I want to write more in the future about the practical steps I’m taking to divest from diet culture, including some recommendations I’m working on for books/newsletters/podcasts/etc.—but if this is a topic that resonates and you have recommendations to share, I’m all ears.

See you all on Thursday for a truly spectacular melon dessert in Gentle Foods’ very first GUEST CHEF recipe that I can’t wait to share with y’all. Perhaps I’ll paint an accompanying watercolor.

For now, enjoy some summer berries (painted along with this Harriet de Winton video):

Be well and stay cool out there.

–Chaey