I Used to Think Discipline Was the Answer. Then I Stopped Dieting.
May 6th is International No Diet Day, and I want to talk about it honestly. Not the easy version of this conversation, where we all agree that crash diets are bad and then go back to quietly counting something. The real version. The one that requires us to look at why so many of us, especially women, especially women of a certain age, have spent so much of our lives in a complicated, exhausting, often painful relationship with food and with our own bodies.
I have been there. I know what it is to sit at a table full of delicious food and feel anxiety instead of pleasure. I know what it is to do the math in your head before you take a bite. I know what it is to tie your worth to a number on a scale, to feel like your body is a problem to be solved rather than a home to be lived in.
And I know what it feels like to start letting that go. That is the part I want to talk about today.
The Diet Culture We Were Handed
Most of us did not arrive at disordered relationships with food on our own. We were handed them. By a culture that has profited enormously from women’s insecurity. By magazines that put diet tips on the same page as recipes. By a wellness industry that repackaged restriction as self-care and sold it back to us with prettier packaging.
For women of color specifically, there is an added layer of complexity. We grew up in households where food was love, where the table was a gathering place, where refusing what was offered was practically an insult. And then we stepped into a broader culture that told us the food from those tables was making us too much. Too big. Too loud. Too present. And we were supposed to shrink, in every sense of the word.
That tension is real. And it does not get talked about enough in the mainstream body-positivity conversation, which sometimes feels like it was designed for a very specific body type to feel good about itself while the rest of us are still figuring out where we fit.
What International No Diet Day Actually Asks of Us
International No Diet Day was founded in 1992 by British feminist Mary Evans Young, who wanted to create space to challenge the diet industry and celebrate bodies in all their diversity. The intent was never to dismiss health. It was to question the idea that thinness equals health, that restriction equals discipline, and that our bodies are ongoing renovation projects rather than places we actually live.
That reframe matters. Because for a lot of us, the road to actual wellness did not run through another meal plan. It ran through therapy. Through conversations with women who looked like us and had made their peace. Through finally deciding that joy at the table was not something we had to earn.
The Moment Something Shifted for Me
I will not pretend there was one dramatic turning point. That is not usually how it works. But I do remember a trip, sitting at a table in a city I loved, surrounded by food I had never tasted before, and realizing I was completely present. Not calculating. Not negotiating. Just eating, tasting, savoring, being in my body instead of at war with it.
Travel has done that for me more than once. When you are somewhere new, your relationship with food has to reset a little. You are not in your routine. You are not in your habits. You are just a person at a table in front of something delicious, and the most sensible thing to do is eat it and be grateful.
I started bringing that energy home. Not perfectly, not all at once, but gradually. I started cooking food I actually loved instead of food that was performing some nutritional objective. I started eating at a table instead of over a sink. I started paying attention to what my body actually wanted, which it turns out is a fairly reasonable thing when you stop overriding it with rules.
What Food Should Actually Feel Like
Here is what I believe now, after years of trying to get this right: food should feel like pleasure and nourishment and connection and culture and memory. It should feel like love, the kind you cook for someone and the kind you cook for yourself. It should feel like the best parts of being human and alive and present on this planet.
It should not feel like a test you are either passing or failing. It should not be the first thing you think about in the morning or the thing that determines how you feel about yourself by the end of the day.
That is not a radical idea. It is just a healthy one. And for a lot of us, it takes work to get there. Real work. The kind that does not come with a before-and-after photo.
What I am Doing on May 6th
Eating something I love without apologizing for it. Sitting down at a real table. Tasting my food slowly enough to actually taste it. Thinking about the hands that grew it or made it. Being grateful that my body is capable of receiving it.
And if you are somewhere in the middle of your own journey with this, I want you to know that the middle is a real place. You do not have to have arrived. You just have to keep going in the right direction.
International No Diet Day is one small reminder that you deserve to be at peace with yourself. Not when you reach a goal. Not after the next round of discipline. Right now, exactly as you are.
What is one food you have reclaimed for joy, after spending years treating it as off-limits? Share it in the comments. This is a safe table.
