The Anti-Diet Movement’s Role in Black Women’s Soft Life Revolution

Soft life and anti diet? At first the two may seem unrelated. But because diet culture not only affects us when we are eating, but it spills into almost all of our lifestyles. From how we shop, to what we wear, how we feel about ourselves, what activities we choose, or where we go to relax. Diet culture dictates too much of what we do.

Diet culture is oppression

Black women’s adoption of anti diet principles are keys to liberation, self care and the soft life. The anti-diet movement is a recognition of and response to diet culture, and the harms caused by it. Diet culture is a whole lifestyle and belief system built around controlling food, weight loss and glorifying being or trying to be thin over all else. It holds us hostage to myriad arbitrary rules and behaviors that are in direct contradiction to the soft life. 

“The soft life is an intentional, holistic, liberated lifestyle that prioritizes overall health and happiness, while rejecting hustle culture, diet culture and wellness culture. It is characterized by normalizing daily pleasure, energy, sensuality, femininity, self confidence, self trust and self love.” ~Lisa

Restricted and regimented eating is the ultimate form of un-freedom, and denies black women daily pleasure, sensuality, energy and self trust.  Diet culture is struggle culture, the direct opposite of soft living. 

During the 1800s, Sylvester Graham, the religious figure credited with inventing the graham cracker designed a health regime to curb the human sex drive, which he believed depleted the body. He had been a sickly child and equated certain foods to weakness not only in himself, but in society at large. Graham’s fervent beliefs centered around the idea of curbing what he perceived as excessive indulgence, particularly in matters of food and sexuality, which he linked to physical ailments. His prescription? A diet stripped of flavor and pleasure, consisting solely of unseasoned fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, while prohibiting meat, alcohol, and spices, includng black pepper. This ascetic approach to eating garnered a devoted following, drawn to its promise of purity and moral superiority.

European colonizers had already mythologized black women as being hyper sexual and over indulgent to justify exploitation and domination. Although diet culture may not have initially been intendend as a weapon specifically against black women, it fit neatly into the narrative. 

How to break free of diet culture’s oppression:

• Avoid classifying foods as “good” and “bad”
• Learn more about and practice intuitive eating as a means to get back to basics
• Reprogam your mind to accept pleasure from food and eating
• Stop thinking about needing to shrink your body
• Reject the whole idea that an “ideal” body size and shape exist
• End the cycle of falling into diet and lifestyle change traps
• Get past the whole fear of food and eating.

Fat Shaming of Black Women

Meanwhile, amid the expansion of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and racist attitudes, white supremacists sought to bolster their unfounded claims of racial superiority with pseudo-scientific justifications. Traveling men created theories about physical characteristics of different ethnicities in comparison to Europeans. These comparisons tended to focus on feminine aesthetics which was used to create a racial hierarchy.

Racial pseudoscience was a very effective tactic for attempting to co-opt objective knowledge as a means to promote the lie of white supremacy and justify racial inequity. Anti-black misinformation began to also rely on early expressions of anti-fatness.   

Early American colonizers recognized the utility of establishing a hierarchy of human worth, wherein thinness became synonymous with health, beauty, and societal value. Through both overt and subtle means, they inundated communities with messages reinforcing the idea that thinness equated to desirability, love, respect and whiteness, creating an unattainable standard that all women were expected to relentlessly pursue. 

Food was turned into a weapon against black women, strategically used to reinforce their position at the lower rungs of the patriarchal, white supremacist societal structure prevalent in the Western mainstream. This weaponization manifests through diet culture and the promotion of white physical attributes as the epitome of beauty, health, affluence, and virtue. Rather than an unintended consequence, this weaponization was deliberately integrated into the system, serving as a feature of oppression.

They stereotyped black women as being out of control with food, drink and sex, and therefore unpure and sinful. White women were encouraged to distinguish themselves from black women by any means necessary. This was despite the fact that not all black women were fat, and not all fat women were undesirable. It was nothing but a racist scam.

As early as the 18th century, fatness was derided as evidence of African “savagery” and immorality. Slenderness, by contrast, was considered evidence of Christian elevation and Anglo Saxon superiority.

~Sabrina Strings, The Fear of the Black Body

These distinctions between fat and thin bodies were employed to degrade black women and control white women. And to this very day those attitudes prevail and continue to be used to oppress black women by requiring the thin white beauty standards, which often inherently excludes black women and deems them unworthy and despised, especially if they are fat.

How to reverse the harm from fat shaming:

• Learn the practice of body neutrality (appreciation of body functions but without judgement).
• Stop body checking (checking is the habit of seeking information about your body’s weight, shape, size, or appearance).

Demonization of Cultural Cuisines

Not only were black women’s bodies deemed unacceptable, but the cultural foods, important parts of family traditions and heritage were stereotyped as inferior as well. 

Do research on healthy eating and you will overwhelmingly find very skinny white women laughing at salads, as if that is the only way. Any time there is a discussion about healthy eating it overwhelmingly involves a whole lot of raw green salads and smoothies, meals of brown rice, broccoli and dry, unseasoned chicken. All joy around food and eating is frowned upon. It’s nearly impossible to find photos of black women enjoying a treat that doesn’t portray guilt, sneakyiness, binging, or craziness.

The stereotype that soul food, or black american food traditions are making black people chronically ill and causing early deaths is a culprit. It promotes the erroneous racist lie that African American culinary culture is inherently bad, unhealthy and inferior to other food cultures. Fried chicken seems to be the number one culprit, followed by macaroni and cheese and rich desserts. It doesn’t matter where it’s coming from, magazines, diet plan literature, social media or the doctor’s office, the message is that we are fat and unhealthy because we enjoy our own cultural cuisine, and that we should abandon it forever if we have any hope of living a decent life. 

“Black Southern food is seasonal, healthy, nuanced, and rich with culture and meaning. Systemic racism — in the form of food deserts, stress induced by racial terror, and medical negligence — kills us, not the food made by our people’s experienced and loving hands. The idea that Black food is unhealthy and inferior is rooted in anti-Blackness and prejudice against overweight people.”

~Nylah Burton, Black Southern food isn’t killing us

There is no reason to believe that steamed kale is better than your grandmother’s collard greens, that basmati rice is going to kill us, so we need to convert to dry, bland chicken or Jamie Oliver’s jollof.

What’s missing here is the truth, which is that soul food has always been heavily plant based, and fresh off the land. Our grandparents had gardens and farms and cooked up all kinds of greens, beans, okra, tomatoes, root vegetables and more! 

Black people have a rich food heritage, and to deprive ourselves of the pleasure, memories and love from food traditions would be a crime, and just one more in a long line of racist harms. 

To accept our cultural food heritage:

• Honor your ancestors by learning about what they actually ate and what our sisters and brothers throughout the Diaspora actually do eat
• Understand that no single ingredient or food group is responsible for modern day health issues in our communities

How Healthism Sabotages Health Outcomes

Healthism is an obsession with achieving optimal health solely as a perceived personal and moral responsibility with total disregard for systemic, structural, political, economic and environmental influences on health, which create conditions most often out of individual control. 

Healthism is unfair judgment of people’s lifestyle and food choices and a tool for enforcing anti-fat bias, racisim, sexisism and classism.  It is used to promote diet culture and feeds right into the patriarchal narrative that blames black women for poor health outcomes instead of the policies and conditions that create them. Chronic lifestyle diseases are affected by personal food and lifestyle choices, however, the influence is relatively small when compared to other factors. 

Blaming black women for poor health outcomes allows inaction on the systemic level, and exasperates the problem. Counteracting these negative forces requires some creative thinking. Civic involvement and community initiatives that address all of the health determinants that are not personal lifestyle choices are a start. The most effective measure is to acknowledge that not only is health subjective, but the ability to attain it is almost never because of personal failure.

The leader in the cause of eliminating healthism is an organization called Health at Every Size (HAES). According to HAES:

“Health should be conceived as a resource or capacity available to all regardless of health condition or ability level, and not as an outcome or objective of living. Pursuing health is neither a moral imperative nor an individual obligation, and health status should never be used to judge, oppress, or determine the value of an individual.”

~HAES

Any efforts at living a truly soft life have to be free of diet culture. A soft life is a life of liberation and joy, and since food and eating are essential for life, the anti-diet movement plays a significant role in increasing lifestyle freedom by reducing or eliminating body shaming and oppression around food. It would be impossible to live the soft life while restricting food, body checking and generally feeling miserable. Diet culture seeps into almost all other areas of life, including movement choices, mental health, social activities, etc. This is why anti-diet ideals and principles must be explored when seeking to live a soft life.