New Year, Same You.
Content Warning: This post discusses diet culture and common diet tropes. If you have a history of or are still working through an eating disorder, please proceed with caution.
Diet season started early this year. A month ago, when I opened my private Instagram page, I was met with the usual barrage of meaningless advertisements for clothing and various yoga products and paraphernalia. I had recently purchased some equipment to help assist a Yoga Therapy client, so I had anticipated an uptick in ads related to my field. What I hadn’t expected was the onslaught of diet-related content bombarding my feed like some parasitic worm looking for a willing host. "Bazoom, we really work!" "Fat Watchers, It’s a Lifestyle Change." "Penny Greg, we’re here for you."
Well, it’s been nice, but I must go scream. I had a similar visceral reaction to seeing these diet ads and fads on my feed as I would to that bloodsucking worm; horror. I was disgusted and enraged that the multi-billion-dollar diet industrial complex had begun their yearly "New Year, New You" campaign early. I was also deeply confused because nothing, and I mean nothing, in my feed, no one I follow online, and not one thing in my search history would make me a suitable host for targeted weight-loss ads. So, I did some digging, and it turns out, I was.
Do you remember the equipment purchased to assist my client that I mentioned before? Turns out the company website I acquired it from sells diet paraphernalia as well. I had unknowingly sold out to the man, and I didn’t even realize it. The trouble, of course, is that this website is the only one where I can buy said equipment, so therein lies the conundrum: do I purchase this useful tool, or do I forge on without it? Do I continue to buy into diet culture, even in a very indirect way, or do I give it all up and go live in a hut in the woods, immersing myself in meditative study for 20 hours a day? I am a person of extremes; please deal with it.
Of course, there is a middle ground, and I tend to live within it daily. I do not directly participate in diet culture, and when I must interact with it, I set up clear boundaries and deal breakers. For instance, I will attend yoga classes at studios that do not promote diet culture rhetoric but may have a teacher on staff who engages in such behaviour themself. I will not, however, stay in a yoga class with or seek out teachers who make idiotic diety comments like, "come on, burn off those Christmas calories" or "new year, new body, new you, weeee!" When that kind of poisonous garbage is brought up in class, I get up and walk out. I don’t care how floored an instructor becomes, I’m outta there!
Of course, "new year, new you" is a very tired and outplayed trope used by the diet industry for decades because it is an effective and insidious marketing tool created to sell products and broken promises. I may need to scream again. They try to sell you the idea of a perfect new life through the wasting of your body. The life you always wanted and dreamed about when you were the old, less worthy version of yourself. This is not only deeply harmful for a litany of reasons (poor health outcomes for those who weight cycle, low self-esteem, higher chances of developing disordered eating, and so on, and so forth), it’s also flat out not true. You don’t change just because your body changes. If you lose or gain weight, you’re still you.
What’s the solution then? How about "New year, same you!" It’s a brand-new year but you’re still the same great person you always were, so how about you spend it appreciating all the wonderful things that make you you? I have a new year’s challenge for you! Spend a little time writing out all the qualities that you like about yourself. If you want to turn it into an exercise, why not write down one thing per day for the entire month of January? If you want to take this practice even further, you could pick one of those qualities and expand on it for 2022. Maybe you wrote down that you like your sense of humour. You could check out your local comedy scene and maybe even write down some jokes and tell them at an open mic night! If that sounds like a fate worse than death, maybe you could take one of your many fine attributes and write a story. If you love your big blue eyes, maybe you can write a poem to yourself about the ways your beautiful baby blues sparkle like stunning stars in a sea of sapphires. Or something good.
My point is, don’t think you need to reinvent yourself every year just because big advertising execs want you to. They count on you hating yourself, so the best thing you can do for your mental health and wellbeing is to stand up and say, "I like this about me."
If you take nothing else away from this post, remember that the Babylonians used to resolve to give back borrowed farm equipment, and they couldn’t care less whether they were a size 2 or a size 40.
-Steph
