Sharing your personal eating philosophies and ambitions is harmful to the very people you intend to help. We aren’t interested in hearing about how you got and stayed off sugar or how going gluten free has changed everything. We don’t need to hear about your latest cleanse or juice fast. The last thing women need is other women, especially those in your position, touting, selling or encouraging another diet or strategy that is rooted in aspirational and vigilant eating behaviors. This is not promoting health; it is promoting disordered eating amongst your followers. Your very suggestion, in this food and body obsessed world, is deeply damaging and silencing of your readers’ own knowing about how to stay in connection with their bodies. Self-knowledge can be so easily ditched for philosophies that sound like deliverance for one, but are truly unsustainable and unnecessary for most. You can do your work in the world without talking about what it is you do with food and your body. This is simply more of the same and it is not elevating the conversation about bodies and health – topics that are in desperate need of a paradigm shift.
We encourage you to trust your fans and followers to find connection with themselves and their bodies through acceptance of all they are right now, including actively embracing imperfection, messy humanity, and body diversity.
We see you sitting there in your apparent but repeatedly unnamed white, thin privilege, and we aren’t buying any of it. To us, talking about your food philosophy only discredits the other, more important things you have to share in the world.
We encourage you to trust your fans and followers to find connection with themselves and their bodies through acceptance of all they are right now, including actively embracing imperfection, messy humanity, and body diversity. Promote unconditional love for all that we are. Strategies aren’t needed when there is truth and vulnerability to share. There is no panacea except this.
Sincerely and with great hope-
“Dear Self-Help Gurus, ctt.ec/eXUD9+ #BodyTrust @BeNourished”
Click the birdie to tweet!
Hilary Kinavey, MS, LPC is a therapist and co-founder of Be Nourished. She encourages conscious and authentic living, with the courage to love yourself anyway.
Dana Sturtevant is a registered dietitian, certified yoga teacher, and self-proclaimed foodie. She especially enjoys blogging about mindfulness, yoga, Intuitive Eating, Health at Every Size®, and the Slow Food Movement.
View more posts related to these topics
We live in a culture that fears grief, denies death, and pushes us to “move on” quickly rather than to be with our sorrow. When grief arrives, it feels like an unexpected guest and something we aren’t equipped to handle.
Diet culture is a sneaky shapeshifter, and we continue to be concerned about how medicine has outsourced itself to the diet industry.
Let’s talk about the new weight loss injectables Wegovy, Ozempic and Mounjaro. We cannot ignore the timing of this medication’s popularity, while everyone continues to reckon with the impact of COVID on their lives, communities and overall health (including mental).