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Diet, Culture, and My Good Body

Let’s talk diet culture. Hang with me for a second here because we’re going somewhere! 

The term “diet culture” is creating quite a buzz lately, and it’s an enlightening one when you start to understand it. Diet culture refers to the dieting mentality that is pervasive in the world around us. Many of the mindsets we currently hold concerning our bodies, our eating habits, our exercise routines, and more are wrapped up in ideas we’ve knowingly or unknowingly accepted as truths or norms based on diet culture. 

Diet culture teaches us that our bodies should be a work in progress and urges us to focus on changing the exterior through food rules, restrictions, and a heavy emphasis on the number on the scale. 

What we don’t realize is that by being bombarded with these messages, we unknowingly adopt a relationship with food and exercise that is undergirded by changing or shrinking our bodies, rather than nourishing and moving our bodies with freedom and joy. 

This restrictive and rules-driven way of caring for our bodies falls short of the enjoyable way we were meant to experience our everyday lives. We see this as part of our norm, but Romans 12:1-2 shows us a better way to approach these things. 

Instead of allowing ourselves to fit right into the culture around us, we’re urged fix our eyes on Him. 

It says,

“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him.”

Just as with anything in life, it would be easy to slip right back into a rules-based way of placing our “eating, sleeping, going-to-work, and walking-around” lives before God. 

But let’s dig a little deeper here. 

We know that God cares more about the condition of our hearts than whether or not our bodies are a size [fill-in-the-blank]. So what if in our attempt to steward these good bodies He’s given us, we take a look at our mindset rather than jumping into another diet? 

What if we look at our motive as we place all of this before Him?

This means that eating food is not a reflection of our morality or character; instead, we can eat foods we love with gratitude and joy as we nourish our good bodies. 

It means that exercise is not a punishment for food we ate yesterday or food we plan to eat tomorrow; it’s a celebration of the amazing things our bodies are capable of. 

It means that we don’t have to walk through a lifetime of hating our bodies and making them a fixer-upper project; we can see that our bodies are good and be thankful that they carry us through life every day. 

In allowing God to shape our mindset around the bodies we live in, we’ll be changed from the inside out.