Different day, same sh*t.’ It was written in capital letters on the pencil case of one of the ‘bad’ guys when I was in high school. That phrase clearly left a mark, and I’m still unsure if that’s because I’m passionate about what drives human motivation, or because it was written so clearly, so real, so rough.
What does this have to do with nutrition, Sofie? Let me get straight to the point. I think many of us have done real, meaningful work around food and bodies. At least on the outside, as we still might feel uncomfortable about our bodies on the inside. Many parents can now spot harmful comments about bodies – and not just notice and question them, but also stop them from infiltrating our kids by speaking up and setting boundaries around how we talk about bodies. This is hard work – and I encourage everyone to do it.
And because of that meaningful work, we genuinely believe we’re doing things differently from our parents. At least, I did. Born in the eighties, I was a product of a generation that happily served Rice Krispies cereal and Nesquik for breakfast, for example. After all, ultra-processed foods opened up time, space, and energy for the now-working woman. This means that food work needed to be replaced by convenience food. Like my peers, I ordered club sandwiches at school. For dinner, we’d either have our classic Flemish three-component meal or head to our Italian restaurant that felt like a second home. You could never tell if the chef was having a good day or not, so the quality of the pizza, pasta, and prosciutto-based plates varied more than our actual orders – that unpredictability added an exciting layer to our otherwise very predictable eating pattern.
In that era, diet talk was simply part of the experience, especially around eating out. Commenting on how our bodies would look tomorrow after a restaurant meal was ‘done’, ordering dessert was a morally loaded decision, caught between pleasure and deprivation. With the same logic, stopping to eat was a conscious, managed choice, not an embodied one. Eating in, on the other hand, was about modesty, balance and control.
Flash forward to 2019. I became a mother and officially joined the Radically Different than My Parents club. Already armed with wisdom about intuitive eating, responsive parenting and the harms of diet culture, I had zero tolerance for ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ food talk. I listened to my tummy, let my child listen to his, and never talked openly about how my postpartum body looked. If I ever caught anyone making negative comments about chocolate, candy, and the like, I’d mentally hit delete, hoping my son was untouched by it. I really felt like I was rocking it, raising my child in a radically different way.
Fair disclaimer – not all of us are trying to do things radically differently from our parents. Sometimes we simply want to do better, building on the same foundation. Sometimes we want to hold on to parts of how we were raised, like family meals or shared routines. What matters to me here is not the fact that we want something to be different, better, or alike. It’s the fact that we often can’t tell the difference between those three motivations. Because often, very often, we think we do something radically different, or at least slightly better, but actually, we are doing exactly the same, including nourishing unwanted outcomes.
Are we cycle-breaking, or just recycling?
I was so proud to be a cycle-breaker until the day I realized I wasn’t cycle-breaking. I was recycling the same core ideas that diet culture has been cultivating in us whenever we are lucky enough to experience food abundance. I was still morally categorizing food, only the labels were more subtle than just ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It was about nutritious versus filling, beige versus color, and fun versus functional. And the belief that my child needed to eat the good foods, because that way nothing bad will happen.
I was still controlling his candy portions, manipulating the Division of Responsibility to secure the strategic advantage of the ‘right’ food. Structure became my ally, making sure to give him so much ‘good food’ at specific time slots, so his tummy would not be filled with the ‘bad’ foods. I was still overthinking food, not counting calories, but counting micronutrients. And I was freaking out, scared, and totally unaware that the millennial version of what I thought I’d already broken was running the show.
I had an aha-moment when I noticed that our post-Special K generation is still driven by the same forces as our slim-fasting parents. We might update the language or set different intentions, but the underlying game is still the same. The name of the game? ‘Eat Right, be All-Right’. We may no longer fear being fat or taking up space, but we still worry that the wrong foods will make us unwell. We may not say ‘you need to finish your plate’ anymore, but we still say ‘take one bite’ still making our kids do things that go against their gut feeling. We may no longer say ‘too many cookies make you fat’, but we still say “too many cookies will upset your tummy’, still showing our discomfort.
Have many of us truly broken the cycle of diet culture, or is it just wearing a better mask? Often, I notice it’s the second one. After all, we still don’t trust our bodies, and those of our kids. After all, we still believe there’s a good and a bad way of eating. After all, we still believe that if we can eat ‘well’, something good will happen. After all, it’s still often about weight loss and shrinking ourselves, making us smaller, if you read between the lines. After all, we still believe we have full control over our health. After all, we still believe we have full control over our health.
Of course I believe in prevention. But that’s really the heart of it. Recognizing diets is one of the most meaningful things we can do for our health and wellbeing. Why? Because diets – of any kind – don’t work. This is a proven fact. The tricky part is, diets often show up in new packaging, making them harder to spot. Just like a pair of sneakers made of recycled plastic, it is, at its core, still plastic. But we don’t recognize it as such and try to fit in because it looks so glamorous and new, promising us better functioning. Yes, diets harm, yet they present themselves as a new opportunity, a new set of not only ‘better’ but also justified rules.
So what if we stop changing the rules, but change the game?
January is particularly loaded with updated rules. Even when the food pyramids are upside down now, we still believe that the best version of ourselves is just one meal plan away. Learning to recognize that the rules have changed, but not the game, is one of the most powerful ways we can protect our girls (and boys) from growing up trapped in a web of unworthiness, self-doubt, and self-harm.
Recognizing diets can change the future, but it can also change how you experience meals right now – with less power games, less overthinking, and more ease and peace around food. So what if this year, we stop putting the same old sh*t on the table, just dressed up differently? Because changing the rules isn’t the same as changing the game. What if we break free from having any rules at all? Now that would be truly game-shifting?
