Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Welcome to Queers Against Diet Culture, the podcast where we unlearn toxic food rules and reclaim our bodies. I'm Raya, a queer anti diet coach and your guide to healing your relationship with food and your body in a world that profits off our self hate. We're not here to shrink, we're here to take up space. So let's get into it.
[00:00:27] Hello, hello. Welcome back, everyone.
[00:00:31] Today we're going to talk about restrictive food rules and how to unlearn them. There are so many food rules out there, a ridiculous number, and honestly, most of them don't make any sense.
[00:00:44] Trying to follow all of them or even just some of them will make you go absolutely crazy.
[00:00:52] Most of us pick and choose which rules feel right in the moment. Sometimes we rotate them out, and a lot of the time we don't even see how toxic they really are.
[00:01:02] But before we get too far, I want to talk about the tarot card I pulled for this episode. I pulled the Queen of Wands, which I don't know if y' all have noticed, but we've been getting a lot of wand cards lately.
[00:01:15] Wand energy is about fire, passion, creativity, and taking action.
[00:01:22] But the Queen of Wands specifically, she's about following through on your goals and dreams even when things get hard.
[00:01:30] She's bold, she acts. She owns her power. She wants you to shine your light and express yourself fully, to be who you are meant to be without watering yourself down.
[00:01:44] She also asks you to look inward to get to know your own shadows, to unpack the shit you've carried.
[00:01:53] So it's kind of perfect for today's episode because unlearning food rules is absolutely shadow work.
[00:02:01] So what even are food rules? Well, food rules are basically rigid beliefs about what, when, or how we're allowed to eat. They're guidelines that we put on ourselves, often without realizing where they've even come from. And whether we notice it or not, they're one of the biggest ways that diet culture sneaks into our lives.
[00:02:24] A lot of people adopt food rules to lose weight or to feel more in control of their health. But food rules aren't neutral. They're deeply moralized and laced with shame.
[00:02:37] So some examples of these are not eating after 6pm Intermittent fasting, not allowing yourself sugar or carbs, counting calories, forcing yourself to skip dessert, having to earn food with exercise, or not allowing yourself to have any processed foods.
[00:02:57] Everyone has their own unique set, picked up from different places and times in their lives.
[00:03:03] Food rules promote a false sense of what health actually is and quickly turn into disordered eating habits.
[00:03:12] Following food rules might make you feel like you're doing the right thing in the moment. It might give you a sense of control. But the long term effects are way more detrimental.
[00:03:23] And the stricter these food rules become, the more we restrict, the more likely we are to break the rule and binge. That's the binge restrict cycle.
[00:03:34] Your first time dieting and following strict rules, you'll usually see results because your body has no idea what's happening.
[00:03:42] But when the weight inevitably comes back, people go back and try again. And it doesn't work the same way. Suddenly the pounds aren't melting off like they once did.
[00:03:54] Why is that?
[00:03:55] Well, it's because your body has learned, it knows it's being starved. It goes into survival mode, which can show up like thinking obsessively about food, or feeling out of control around food, or having intense urges to binge.
[00:04:11] That is your body protecting you, it's trying to keep you alive.
[00:04:16] And this inevitably turns into a cycle. You restrict yourself so much that you end up binge eating. Then you get upset at yourself for bingeing and maybe gaining back the weight that you've worked so hard to lose that you restrict again. And it becomes this cycle that for some people never ends. They continue their whole lives like this, trying to meet society's standards of thinness. This becomes a lifelong cycle for so many people, unless you consciously choose to stop. And this takes a huge toll both mentally and physically.
[00:04:50] Mentally, it can show up as guilt or shame and anxiety, or having a feeling of being out of control.
[00:04:58] Physically, it shows up as bloating, nausea, having cramps, your metabolism slowing down, or is eating disorders.
[00:05:08] And if any of this sounds like you, please know that you are not alone. Most people go through this, myself included. It just doesn't get talked about enough.
[00:05:19] So where do these food rules come from? Well, they can come from so many places. On an individual level, it can come from family.
[00:05:30] Maybe you grew up around people who talked about food with guilt, called certain foods bad.
[00:05:37] Maybe they worked out more to make up for something they ate or didn't let certain foods in the house.
[00:05:44] Maybe someone in your home forced you to finish your food even when you were full. Or they restricted your eating because they were scared that you'd get fat. Food rules are often generational trauma disguised as health.
[00:05:57] And they can also be cultural. Some cultures moralize food more intensely than others.
[00:06:03] Some value thinness or self discipline.
[00:06:06] Some tie worthiness to how much you eat or don't eat.
[00:06:12] Some food Rules come from media and social media, TV shows and movies, especially in the 90s and early 2000s, were flooded with fatphobia and diet talk.
[00:06:24] Today it's more subtle. It hides under wellness or clean eating, but it's still there on social media. Hardly anybody uses the word diet anymore, at least not that I've seen. But they absolutely promote food rules. Just rebranded versions.
[00:06:42] Not eating after a certain time, intermittent fasting, high fat, low carb, avoiding certain food groups altogether.
[00:06:50] There's an endless number of food rules that get promoted on social media. I'm sure I'm not even scratching the surface from the ones that I've mentioned.
[00:06:59] Even medical professionals contribute. Most doctors have zero nutrition training, yet they give nutrition advice all day long.
[00:07:09] It's not their fault, it's the system. But the impact is so real.
[00:07:15] Even though doctors usually have the best intentions in wanting us to be healthy. And it doesn't mean that they don't inflict diet culture and food rules on us.
[00:07:24] Most of us do take nutrition advice from our doctors, but the reality is the majority of doctors have never taken a nutrition class in their entire life. When I was doing research, I was having a hard time finding exact numbers, but it seems to be that about 75% of medical schools in the United States do not require any clinical nutrition training. And only about 8% of doctors in the US have received at least 20 hours of nutrition training. Yet the majority of doctors still give out nutrition advice.
[00:07:58] So if doctors aren't teaching us the stuff, then who is? Well, the answer goes way, way back. And honestly, understanding the history of diet culture makes everything that we're talking about make so much more sense.
[00:08:12] Die culture didn't just show up on Instagram one day and ruin everybody's self esteem. It has centuries of roots and those roots are messy. They're tied to morality and politics, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, basically every oppressive system you can think of. And once you see that, it's a lot easier to understand why food rules feel so deeply ingrained in us.
[00:08:40] If we go all the way back to ancient Greece, philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were already talking about food and the body in moral terms.
[00:08:51] They believed that controlling your appetite and controlling your body made you more disciplined, more pure and more virtuous.
[00:09:01] So even thousands of years ago, food wasn't just food. Eating wasn't just eating. It was tied to morality, to being, quote, a good person.
[00:09:13] Fast forwarding to the Victorian era. In 18th and 19th century Europe, these ideas get even stronger. Thinness was suddenly linked to spirituality and good Character, femininity, purity.
[00:09:27] And on the flip side, larger bodies, especially women's bodies, were labeled as lazy, indulgent, stupid, and even promiscuous.
[00:09:38] So the whole thin equals good and fat equals bad idea is not new. It's been marketed to us for hundreds of years.
[00:09:48] And around the same time, western countries were expanding through colonialism and industrialization.
[00:09:55] And this is where body size becomes not just a beauty standard, but a tool of white supremacy.
[00:10:02] European colonizers described black, brown and indigenous bodies as excessive, undisciplined, or gluttonous.
[00:10:11] And they positioned thin white bodies as superior, orderly, civilized or morally better.
[00:10:19] This wasn't accidental, it was very strategic. Body size became a way to justify oppression, A way to separate what they considered to be the civilized from the uncivilized. A way to control and shame colonized people.
[00:10:38] These racist narratives still shape dye culture today, especially in how fatness in black and brown bodies is treated as a threat, a danger, or something that needs to be fixed.
[00:10:49] Then there's the patriarchy, which has always loved dictating what women and femmes should look like.
[00:10:57] Patriarchy wants us to take up less space, to be quieter, to be smaller.
[00:11:03] So thinness became tied to being desirable and agreeable, or more feminine and polite.
[00:11:10] Everything that patriarchy rewards.
[00:11:13] And this didn't just affect CIS women. Queer people of all genders and sexualities absorbed these messages too.
[00:11:21] Even if we weren't consciously trying to be specifically masculine or feminine, we were still taught what kinds of bodies were allowed to be acceptable.
[00:11:30] Diet culture isn't just oppressive, it's also profitable. Capitalism realized that it could sell thinness back to us as a product.
[00:11:41] If it could create insecurity, it could sell us the solution.
[00:11:46] Low fat, pretty much everything. No carb diets, programs that count calories for us, portion control products, weight loss supplements, detoxes and cleanses.
[00:11:58] Every few years brings a new rule and a new product to buy. Diet culture is worth billions because it keeps you believing that you are the problem, that your body is wrong, that you need fixing. And every time you feel insecure, the industry makes more Money.
[00:12:17] The early 1900s is when diet culture as we recognize it today really takes off. Weight loss ads and slimming foods started to appear in newspapers.
[00:12:28] Dieting became something women were encouraged to do as a matter of morality. Being a good woman meant controlling your Appetite. By the 1950s, diet culture became a full blown cultural obsession. This was the era of having tiny waist, rigid beauty ideals. Calorie counting books, weight loss clubs, and the early versions of weight Watchers Food rules became mainstream. Women's magazines guilted you on every page. Food companies and pharmaceutical companies realized that there was so much money to be made off of keeping women insecure.
[00:13:08] And by the time the 90s and early 2000s rolled around, diet culture was absolutely everywhere. This was the era of Atkins, South Beach, Special K diets.
[00:13:21] Tabloids shaming celebrities and crash diets. TV shows mocking fat people, heroin chic thinness, magazines with lose 10 pounds fast on the front of every cover.
[00:13:34] Celebrities bragging about how little they eat.
[00:13:37] Even cartoons made jokes about bad foods or overeating. We inhaled these messages constantly.
[00:13:45] And then one day, diet culture rebranded. Traditional dieting started to get a bad reputation. So diet culture got smarter. Now it calls itself wellness, Clean eating, biohacking discipline, anti inflammatory eating, gut health routines.
[00:14:05] The branding is fresher and the fonts are prettier and the marketing is a lot more subtle, but the message is still the same.
[00:14:14] Control yourself, shrink yourself, don't take up too much space.
[00:14:19] And here is where everything ties together. Diet culture was never about health. It was about control.
[00:14:28] Control of women, black and brown bodies, indigenous food ways, queer people, disabled people, fat people, anyone whose body didn't align with the western, white, thin centered ideals.
[00:14:44] Food rules were not built to help you. They were built to make you compliant physically, emotionally and socially.
[00:14:52] Diet culture disconnects you from your own body, making you dependent on external rules. So you're always second guessing yourself. Diet culture has always been political.
[00:15:04] When you understand where food rules actually come from, colonialism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism, you start to realize that none of this was personal.
[00:15:15] It was never about you. It was never even about health.
[00:15:20] And realizing this is usually the first step to letting go.
[00:15:25] Now I want to take a moment to look at dye culture and food rules through a queer lens. Because when you really zoom out, it becomes painfully clear how tightly these things are woven together.
[00:15:38] Queerness and die culture intersect in a really specific way because both are shaped by norms about how we're supposed to exist in the world, what we're allowed to look like, how much space we're allowed to take up, what makes us acceptable or desirable, what gets judged or rejected.
[00:15:57] A lot of queer people grow up learning that their identity, their expression, or even their body isn't right by mainstream standards.
[00:16:06] And when you're constantly being told that you're wrong or you're different, or you're too much or not enough, diet culture can start to feel like a way to compensate or survive.
[00:16:17] For some queer folks, controlling food and their body becomes A way to blend in or avoid attention.
[00:16:24] For others, it might become a way to feel worthy or lovable or feel safe in environments that reject queerness.
[00:16:34] For some, it's a way to find structure during chaos. And for many, it's tied up in gender and feeling disconnected from a body that doesn't match who they truly are.
[00:16:46] There's also the pressure within certain queer communities, like gay male spaces, to be extremely lean or muscular. Or in Sapphic spaces, there can be pressure to either reject femininity entirely or or embody a certain type of femininity perfectly. These unspoken rules can make people turn to food as a way to fit a role or protect themselves socially.
[00:17:12] And what's especially wild is that a lot of the earliest body standards and food rules were built around heteronormativity, around patriarchal ideals of what a good woman looks like or what a strong man should be. Queer people were never included in these standards, and yet we often end up policing ourselves with them the most.
[00:17:34] Diet culture basically tells everyone to be small, be silent, be manageable, be acceptable. And queerness says, be who you are, take up space, be loud, be free.
[00:17:48] So when you look at it this way, rejecting food rules is actually an act of queer liberation, not conforming to make anyone else comfortable, allowing yourself to nourish your body.
[00:18:01] Unlearning food rules isn't just about food. It's about reclaiming your body from systems that were never created with your well being in mind.
[00:18:10] So how can we unlearn these food rules? Well, start by trying to identify them. Think about which rules you follow or feel pressured to follow.
[00:18:20] You can write them down if that helps. Make sure to include your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs, and your behaviors around them.
[00:18:29] But make sure to keep an open mind about this.
[00:18:33] Then I would question where these rules come from. Where did you learn them? Was it from a person in your life? Social media? Maybe a movie that you loved when you were a kid? Does anyone around you follow these rules? It's very possible that different food rules come from different places.
[00:18:52] And then think about how these rules have served a purpose in your life. Did they help you lose weight? Did they give you some sense of safety by helping you conform into mainstream society?
[00:19:05] Maybe it gave you a sense of control.
[00:19:07] Acknowledge it kindly. But then also notice how they don't serve you. How do they make life harder? How do they restrict your joy and your freedom and your connection with other people?
[00:19:19] How would your life get easier if you threw all of these rules out the window and never looked back?
[00:19:26] How Free you would feel without them.
[00:19:30] Then experiment with breaking your food rules. But gently, I would start with one so you're not overwhelming yourself and giving yourself unconditional permission to break it. Eat some carbs, have the dessert that you've been craving.
[00:19:46] Let yourself snack after 6pm and don't guilt yourself.
[00:19:52] Notice how you feel physically and emotionally.
[00:19:57] Once you've comfortably let go of one, let go of another.
[00:20:01] Release yourself from one rule at a time, but don't overwhelm yourself. It might be scary, but if you've listened to my other episodes, you know how harmful diet culture is.
[00:20:13] Releasing these food rules is an act of resistance. You're going against the norm.
[00:20:19] And lastly, be compassionate with yourself. Unlearning restrictive food rules isn't going to happen overnight. Change of any type takes time and patience. This is not going to be a quick fix. This is healing. And healing takes time, even for myself. I've been doing this work for a long time, but I still find myself falling back into old patterns sometimes, or talking negatively about food or things like that. So it's not always going to be linear. The goal is not to stop binging. The goal is to reduce restriction and the binging will naturally follow, bringing it all back to the Queen of Wands. She's honestly the perfect card for this kind of work. Food rules don't get unlearned through force or perfection or getting it right.
[00:21:14] They get unlearned through the exact energy the Queen carries.
[00:21:20] Curiosity, self trust, and the willingness to stand in your power even when your old conditioning tries to pull you back.
[00:21:29] The Queen of Wands is bold. She's not harsh. She doesn't fix herself. She just understands herself. She doesn't shrink to make other people comfortable.
[00:21:41] She doesn't outsource her worth to how disciplined she looks or how good she is with her food.
[00:21:49] She knows that her value is inherent. And honestly, that's the energy we're trying to cultivate when we break food rules.
[00:21:57] Because unlearning food rules is not about becoming reckless. It's not about letting go of yourself. It's about letting yourself be.
[00:22:06] It's the courage to say, I don't have to earn my place, I don't have to earn my food and I don't have to earn my body.
[00:22:15] It's the fire inside you that says you're done being controlled. Whether that's by diet culture, by someone else's expectations, or by the fear that you've been carrying around for years. So the Queen of Wands invites you to step back into your body like it's a home, not a project.
[00:22:34] She asks you to trust your instincts a little more, to trust your hunger signals a little more, to trust the wisdom you've pushed down for so long.
[00:22:46] She reminds you that your healing doesn't have to be quiet or apologetic. You're allowed to take up space in your own life. You're allowed to eat foods that you enjoy, and you're allowed to be seen and loved exactly as you are.
[00:23:03] So as you move into your week, or even just the rest of your day, try holding a little bit of that Queen of Wands fire. Let it warm you.
[00:23:13] Let it be a gentle flame that makes you feel braver and more rooted in yourself.
[00:23:20] And with that, I want to leave you with a few journal prompts to help you take this energy inward.
[00:23:26] So number one, what food rules have I enforced on myself throughout my life and where did I learn them from?
[00:23:34] 2, what would food freedom truly look like to me?
[00:23:38] And three, how can I let my light shine and embrace my Queen of Wands energy in my healing journey?
[00:23:50] Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Queers Against Diet Culture. Don't forget to rate, subscribe, subscribe and share this podcast until next time. Remember, carbs are not the enemy and neither is your beautiful body. See you next week.
