An apology to my past clients for promoting diet culture

They say when you know better you do better.  And after being in the health & fitness industry for 10 years I know better.  So, I want to apologise to all the clients I promoted diet culture to.  I honestly believed I was doing the right thing at the time (mostly because I didn’t know what diet culture was), but now I see it wasn’t in their best interests.  It’s possible I perpetuated stress about their “imperfect” bodies, continued their diet culture thinking, and contributed to disordered eating patterns.

When I look back on it now I can see three main ways that I promoted diet culture.  I want to outline and define these, and explain how I am now trying to do better.  Perhaps by reading this article you might see how you too are perpetuating diet culture and you might decide to make changes too.

Orthorexia

The first was foisting my old orthorexic tendencies onto my clients.  Back at the time I started studying to become a health coach I was in the grips of orthorexia.  It was pretty entrenched before I started the course but by the end of the 12 months it took me to get certified, I was full-blown.  Orthorexia, according to Eating Disorders Victoria is “an obsession with eating healthy food. It comes from the Greek words ortho, meaning ‘correct’ and orexis, meaning ‘appetite’.”  From about 2010 to 2015 I was sugar-free, gluten-free, and doing my best to eat “clean”.  (BTW, eating clean is not a technical dietetics term.  Really, if your food is dirty, wash it!  I think a whole blog post might be in order to talk about the myth of food purity.)

So, as a health coach, I did everything I could to help others do the same.  I recommended clients eat brownies made with sweet potato (I can’t stand sweet potatoes nowadays.  I had too many in those orthorexic 5 years).  I encouraged my clients to go on detoxes.  I honestly thought it would help them get “healthier” (read that as lose weight) but now I know that our bodies detox on their own and cleanses really are just another name for diet and they are probably the most restrictive of all!  I also once wrote a blog post with 12 tips about being healthy at Christmas.  But here’s the thing… Christmas celebrations last just a few days of the year.  Why shouldn’t we eat whatever we like for a couple of days?  It’s not going to make a huge difference to your health or weight over the long term.

Now I am studying to become an intuitive eating facilitator which is one way of “knowing better”.  Despite its woo woo sounding name, IE is steeped in scientific research and shows us how all foods are acceptable in a healthy diet and that eating intuitively often offers better nutritional outcomes than trying to be “perfectly healthy” which is what orthorexia promotes.

Fatphobia/Weight Stigma

I feel soooooo bad about this one.  Deep shame.  But I also know that we are swimming in the waters that are diet culture, fatphobia, and weight stigma and it took me a while to see it.  Now I know it’s there, I can do better and aim to do that every day.

Some of the ways I perpetuated fatphobia and weight stigma were not thinking about the size of the chairs in the offices I did health coaching sessions in, not offering variations for yoga poses or other exercises for people with larger bodies, and creating workouts and programs that were going to give people “toned abs” or other diet culture focused (bullshit) outcomes.

One of the most deeply shameful ways I spoke about people in larger bodies was to say that they “often create an armour of weight around their bodies to protect themselves from past trauma.”  Saying crap like that just adds to people’s trauma.  People have large bodies for many reasons and trauma (stress) can be one of them, but genetics, medications, health conditions, food scarcity and weight stigma itself are some of the other reasons.  Using blanket statements like the one above is generalising and unhelpful and I apologise.

I am addressing this in many ways so I can do better.  I am constantly learning about inclusivity in the health & fitness world.  I am studying at Body Positive Fitness Alliance and learning Accessible Yoga.  I listen to the podcast Maintenance Phase which speaks in easy-to-understand terms about fatphobia and weight stigma.  And I’m implementing what I learn as I learn it.

Privilege

Back in the day when I was deeply entrenched in diet culture, I didn’t even realise how privileged I was (and still am).  I am a white, conventionally attractive, cis-gendered woman. These things alone offer me lots of perks in the world.  When I started my fitness career I was also very thin and kind of assumed with enough hard work, everyone else could be thin too (hello fatphobia/weight stigma).  Now that I am a post-menopausal woman I know that is not true from personal experience, but I also know it’s not true because of research.  We know diets don’t work, so how are people supposed to substantially change their body size?  It’s almost impossible over the long term, so why do we expect it to happen? 

Nowadays I am living in a larger body but I’m what you’d call an inbetweenie or small fat which means I am fatter than diet culture would like me to be, but on the smaller end of that so I can still go into most clothing stores and find something that will fit.  It also means I am not being constantly hounded by health professionals to lose weight, and I’m not often heckled in the street (but I am occasionally on Instagram). And yes, larger fat people are heckled, approached in supermarkets and told to not eat that, or encouraged condescendingly to “keep going” if they are seen exercising in public.

I am also privileged in other ways.  I have enough money to put the food I like on the table daily and have a roof over my head. I get to choose the work that I like to do.  I am not living in a country where my gender is oppressed.  These things mean I can live a fairly stress-free life.

Plus, I am able-bodied.  I have a couple of chronic illnesses that flare up and affect my capacity to get shit done for a few days, but overall I move freely, see, hear and live life without restriction.

At the beginning of my fitness career, I didn’t factor any of this into my interactions with clients.  I just assumed everyone was the same as me.  That’s what privilege does.  It blinds us to struggles that others might be experiencing.

That’s one of the big reasons why diet culture is so frustrating.  We have these thin, able-bodied, wealthy people saying, “Just do what I do and you’ll look like me.” They aren’t acknowledging the genetic or birthplace lottery they won.  And yes they may have worked hard to get where they are but it doesn’t mean everyone else can.

This is a work in progress for me.  I aim to be an ally and support people everywhere in all body sizes, genders, and abilities.  I am improving all the time.

My apology

To my clients and everyone who has followed me on social media,

I am sorry if my advice encouraged you to start your own path toward orthorexia.  I am sorry if I made you feel less than for your size or shape.  I am sorry for not acknowledging my privilege.

I hope that in recent times and into the future I have and will continue to inspire you to take care of the body you have now with respect, without shame, and for your personal and unique best interests.

All my love,

Emma xx