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Welcome back to Food Psych Weekly, the newsletter where I answer your questions about intuitive eating, Health At Every Size, disordered-eating recovery, and other anti-diet topics.

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The holiday food-related challenges continue this week as many people celebrate Christmas and New Years. Today’s question is about helping you navigate diet-culture comments from family members, which are all but inevitable at many of our holiday tables.

It’s from a reader named Stella, who writes:

Dear Christy,

Thank you so much for this space on your podcast, and for your book Anti-Diet. I just finished reading it, and it was so eye-opening! I went through my bookshelves and pulled out all the diet culture books. I was surprised at how many I had! Paleo, Keto, “healthy habits,” quitting sugar, plant based, you name it! My mother modeled (and still does) disordered eating, and I’ve had my own journey of trying everything to shrink my body. There is so much more to life than being obsessed with size/shape and what you eat/don’t eat! Your book and podcast have been liberating from the Life Thief. My question is, how do I approach comments from family members that are either fatphobic, size stigma, or diet culture-ish? I’m trying to teach my daughter (now 11) about Health At Every Size and body acceptance, but it is sometimes derailed by family and friends who have their own issues.

–Stella, concerned mama and recovering disordered eater/exerciser

Thanks for this great question, Stella, and before I answer, here’s my standard disclaimer:

These answers are for informational and educational purposes only, aren’t a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice, and don’t constitute a provider-patient relationship.

Having a family that makes fatphobic comments is so common and understandable given the diet culture we live in, so you’re definitely not alone. I’ll share that I myself actually made some pretty diet-y comments to the friend who introduced me to Health At Every Size (HAES) more than 10 years ago! And now here I am a decade later as a major proponent of the anti-diet approach, so I’m living proof that people can evolve in their views. But it really does take time, and often people just aren’t open to challenging their own internalized diet-culture beliefs—I know I wasn’t when my friend first brought it up to me. It wasn’t until a few years later, when I started working with eating disorders, that I was really able to open up to HAES concepts and dig into the science for myself. But my friend had planted that seed, which made me more receptive when I finally did encounter HAES at a time when I was in strong recovery myself.

Right now, your family members might be entrenched in their diet-culture beliefs and closed off to other views, just like I was back then—and you can’t actually change their mind when they’re in that place, but you might be able to plant a seed for them, as my friend did for me. That effort alone is huge, even if the seed never grows for them—which it may not, because some people are just wedded to diet culture for many understandable reasons.

I’ve found over the years that the most effective way to plant that seed with family members generally isn’t to debate them on the science and try to win them over intellectually, but to speak to them on an emotional level—because of course they love you and your daughter, and they want to do their best to support you. You can find a quiet moment for a one-on-one chat (or have a phone conversation ahead of time) and say something like, “I’ve really struggled in my own relationship with food and my body, and I don’t want my daughter to struggle like I did. I’ve found that one huge way to help support her (and me) in feeling at peace is to avoid discussing diets or making negative comments about higher-weight people. So I’d really love it if you could refrain from talking about those things when we’re together.” Framing it in this way puts the emphasis on your experience and helps keep them from reacting in a defensive and argumentative way.

Still, it may not be easy for them to honor this boundary, because unfortunately talking about weight and dieting can feel important and necessary to many people. Diet culture has instilled the belief in pretty much all of us that we’re “bad” if we eat or weigh “too much,” and that we need to atone for our supposed food- and size-related sins by loudly flagellating ourselves and conspicuously avoiding certain foods. That’s especially true for people in larger bodies, who bear the brunt of weight stigma in this culture—as well as for people with other oppressed identities like being disabled, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, etc. So if your family members seem to have trouble refraining from diet talk—or seem reluctant to even try—see if you can approach them with a little empathy. You might say something to the effect of, “you know I love you and want you to feel you can talk to me about anything, and I know you have your own feelings about eating and weight. But this is just one subject we need to avoid right now while my daughter and I are both learning how to feel more at peace with food and our bodies. And by avoiding it, you’ll be helping us more than you can imagine.”

Then, once that boundary is set, you’ll probably need to reinforce it again and again, reminding them of your request whenever they slip and talk disparagingly about larger bodies or make some shaming comment about food. It can feel exhausting and difficult, but if you set and consistently reinforce that boundary, it’ll help your family understand that changing the way they talk about food and weight is essential for your healing—and in time, that could lead them to start questioning the diet-culture paradigm for themselves. And I think that’s the best you can hope for, because again, we’re never going to change someone’s mind who isn’t open to being changed.

One more thing to consider when going into these family situations: If you have a partner, friend, or sibling you’re close with who’ll be there when you go to see other family members, it can be helpful to get them on board ahead of time to help you push back against diet culture if and when it comes up at a larger family gathering. Having someone to help you speak up and set/reinforce those boundaries—or even just being able to elbow each other whenever someone says something diet-y—can go a long way. I know sometimes partners and close family members can be caught up in their own diet-culture stuff, so perhaps it isn’t possible right now for you to have an anti-diet comrade at these events. But in time, with enough of these individual conversations, you might find that you end up with a number of allies who can help you keep diet culture at bay during family gatherings.

I hope that helps give you a place to start, Stella, and thanks again for the great question!

​Ask your own question for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.

In Other News

My newest publication, The Making Peace with Food Card Deck, is out this week!

​Order it now to get it shipped ASAP, and get 59 anti-diet strategies to help you break free from the diet mindset and find peace with food.

Co-authored with Judith Matz, the longtime anti-diet therapist and groundbreaking author of Beyond a Shadow of a Diet and The Diet Survivor’s Handbook, this beautiful card deck will help you learn how to:

• Reject diet culture

• Honor your hunger cues

• Practice attuned eating

• Find self-compassion

• Nourish your body

• Navigate emotional eating

• Rediscover joy in life

​Order the card deck right here—it also makes a great holiday gift for others interested in the anti-diet approach!

Podcast Archives

In Episode 177 of Food Psych, Health At Every Size® health coach and certified intuitive eating counselor Linda Tucker joined me to discuss how dieting causes health problems even while purporting to solve them, how diet culture and its new guise as the Wellness Diet twist the definition of self-care and health, how intuitive eating can help with managing a chronic illness, and so much more.

Plus, I answered a listener question about how to handle the feeling that things were just easier in a smaller body.

​Check it out right here, and be sure to subscribe to the pod so that you get (VERY) occasional bonus episodes while we’re on hiatus, and a brand new season of the show when we return.

Here’s to planting seeds,

Christy

P.S. If you’re looking to break free from the diet mindset and heal your relationship with food, check out my newest project, The Making Peace with Food Card Deck. Therapist Judith Matz and I co-created it to help support you in rejecting diet culture, honoring your hunger, practicing self-compassion, and so much more. Order now to get it shipped this week!