The Truth About Your Weight
Your body isn't meant to be at a weight that it can only sustain through restriction.
Intentional weight loss was invented by diet culture, which I define as a system of beliefs that equates thinness to health and moral virtue, promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, and demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others.
Not only is intentional weight loss a product of this toxic belief system, it also doesn’t actually jibe with how the human body *works.*
We’ve all heard that statistic that 95% (or more) of people who pursue intentional weight loss gain back all the weight they lost within five years, and the majority of those people will gain back *more* weight than they had initially lost—and that’s because our bodies were designed to protect us from famine. None of us would even BE here if it weren’t for this mechanism that kept our ancestors from dying when food was scarce.
“Diet culture is a system of beliefs that equates thinness to health and moral virtue, promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, and demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others.”
So what about that other 5% (or less) of people who do seem to maintain intentional weight loss, you might ask? Unfortunately, the research indicates that they do so through disordered means that, if diet culture didn’t deem them "success" stories, could be diagnosed as an eating disorder.
They’re not meant to be weight-suppressed—none of us are. Our bodies aren't meant to live in perpetual restriction, which wreaks havoc on our mental and physical health.