When I think about some of the biggest grievances in the world, many come to mind but, in this post, I’m going to be talking about something that infuriates me beyond belief,
the diet industry.
!! DIETS DON’T WORK !!
A bit of context as to why it angers so much…
I spent pretty much my entire adolescence, aged 14 to 17, controlled by thoughts around food, exercise, and my body. I was obsessed with looking a certain way, with having a flat stomach, a thigh gap, abs, and I would stop at nothing to get there and to maintain that image, to the extent that I ended up sectioned at 16 and detained in hospital for seven months under the mental health act with Anorexia Nervosa.
Now, at the time, I had no capacity, not least because I was physically really unwell, but also mentally, to acknowledge the fact that there were actually people out there who were profiting from a teenage girls self loathing, people who were profiting from my self loathing…
Every time I went into Holland & Barrett and bought that diet bar, every time I went running, every time I renewed my subscription to My Fitness Pal, every time I did anything that fuelled my eating disorder, I was essentially putting money (indirectly) into the pockets of the multi billionaires who constitute the CEOs of the diet industry.
Not to mention the fact that most of the things that are marketed as being ‘low calorie’ are low calorie for no reason other than because they are half the size of the ‘regular’ version anyway…
Half the size yet double the price…
makes sense.
The fact is that no diet bar is a substitute for the real thing. It might have ‘tastes just like a brownie’ plastered all over the front of it, but it’s not a brownie, and it’s going to taste awful.
If you want something that tastes like a brownie then… get a brownie, not a ‘Fibre One’ bar… For, the fact is that, in opting for the diet option, not only are you sacrificing taste, but you’re also sacrificing life.
The ability to go out with your friends and enjoy life,
the ability to have a life, even.
The chance to be 10% smaller is not worth making 90% of your life smaller for…
The reason why this (the whole diet culture crap) infuriates me so much is because these people, the CEOs of the diet industry, are men who have most likely never been on a diet in their lives. Why? Because, to put it simply, they do not give a crap about what they look like. It’s all just a money making scheme to them… They are the brainwashes who corrupt us into thinking that our appearance is the ‘be all and end all’, and, as the people doing the brainwashing, they have not been brainwashed themselves, so they know the truth…
They know that our appearance is the least interesting thing about us…
They know that we can’t see ourselves (unless we look in a mirror) for a reason, because what we look like is so unimportant.
‘What you look like is the least interesting thing about you’
actually has some truth to it, who knew?
Writing from personal experience, I can say that I am at my happiest/that I have my best days, when there is not a mirror in sight.
Walking in the peak district,
Writing,
anything that makes me realise how much more there is to life than thinking (/obsessing) about the way I look…
This is when I feel at my happiest, not when I’m in the supermarket scrutinising packets to make sure that I get the lowest calorie option of everything…
And, not when I’m doing ‘just one more round of sit-ups’, as if my happiness could possibly be found in any of these things…
As if a sit-up could be the source of me, finally, being able to love myself…
People within the diet industry know this, they know how completely unimportant our looks really are, and they know that their supposed ‘solutions’ to our unhappiness won’t work, but, they also know the money that’s in selling an unattainable* ideal.
*‘Unattainable’ because, they know that we will stop at nothing to get there. That we will keep striving to get to that ever elusive place of ‘self-love’, devoting everything we have to it and yet still, never reaching it. Why? Because, they make it that way… Their greed overpowering their morals seeing them constantly shifting the goalposts of what we ‘should’ look like… And, don’t be mistaken here, this is not coincidental, they intentionally do so to ensure that we keep consuming under the lure of, ‘this time it will make you happy!!’ (but, of course, it never does)…
Just think about it like this, if diets did work, then someone would go on a diet, and that would be it. They would never have to go on another diet, and the diet industry would collapse. Now, obviously, the top men in the diet industry don’t want this to happen, they want to keep profiting from our insecurities, and so the way to ensure that we keep going back and consuming what they’re offering us, is to keep shifting the goalposts…
If only they would stop and consider how they would feel if it was their daughter being told they’re ‘wrong’, constantly, for something as superficial as their weight/what they look like, then maybe they would reconsider their business plan, a business plan which, I hate to say (but I want to be real), undoubtedly contributes to the unnecessary suffering (and death- one in five people with Anorexia who don’t receive treatment will die) of so many people who should be here, enjoying life, not sat at home crying over a sandwich, or being the source of grief for a broken family…
The fact is that the real source of our happiness comes, not from our weight, not from our appearance, but from who we are.
Tragically though, people don’t realise this, they keep buying into the lies that the diet industry feed them, convinced that losing weight will make them happier. Little do they know that, in an effort to change the way they look, they actually end up forgetting who they are in the process…
Trying to find happiness through dieting,
unknowingly sacrificing happiness through dieting…
And so, the cycle continues.
We get unhappier,
they get richer.
Their business plan is working.
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