I had a great conversation with Taylor Wolfram – a vegan RDN about navigating diet culture talk during the holidays.
You can read about Taylor’s tips below,
listen to the episode via the YouTube player, or head to your favorite platform where podcasts are available!
Disclaimer: This article and podcast episode is just providing information and opinions. It is not nutrition or medical advice, nor is it a substitute for nutrition or medical advice. If you have questions about your health or diet, talk to a licensed professional. See our Disclaimers for more details.
Resources Mentioned:
- TaylorWolfram.com – work with Taylor 1:1 + check out her Anti-Diet Vegan Nutrition Course!
- Ragen Chastain’s Substack
- Ragen Chastain’s Chat with a Vegan Group
- The Intuitive Eating Book (my review of the principles for vegans here!)
About Taylor Wolfram, MS, RDN, LDN
I can’t recall how I first connected with Taylor, but I know that I was stoked to find another vegan identifying dietitian committed to combating vegan nutrition misinformation!
Taylor Wolfram, MS, RDN, LDN, (she/her/hers) is the owner of Taylor Wolfram LLC, a weight-inclusive nutrition therapy practice.
She is a Certified Befriending Your Body Teacher and works with adults who are interested in ditching the diet mentality.
She specializes in vegan nutrition and created the Anti-Diet Vegan Nutrition Online Course.
What is Diet Culture?
Diet culture is all around us.
It doesn’t has to be as a blatant as ‘start this diet to lose xyz amount of pounds!’
As Taylor mentions in this episode, it could start out as a program focused on getting healthy…
However, if the narrative is an obsessive focus on losing weight, or causing thoughts of anxiety around food, this too can be diet culture.
Food becomes a moral issue with diet culture instead of an opportunity to find joy in nourishment.
Examples of diet culture talk around the holidays include:
- A friend talking about how they HAVE to go on juice cleanse to be healthy, and tries to convince you to join.
- A sibling mentioning how they must run laps in order to ‘earn’ their dessert.
- A relative spreading misinformation that a well researched and healthy food is ‘bad’ for you and will cause a host of problems.
Diet culture has a lot to say about weight and bodies!
So if you are looking for peace with food and your body, how can we navigate it when it’s almost guaranteed to come up especially around the holidays and New Year resolutions?
Navigating diet culture through the holidays is different for everyone.
How you respond could depend on a variety of factors including how comfortable you are talking about it, who is around, and even how much you can stand to hear.
Taylor likes to group responses to diet culture in a sorta ‘levels’ approach with first one being:
1. Not responding or causally changing the topic
If you don’t want to perpetuate the topic, showing no interest may be of service.
If your non-response is ‘showing’ you could state your boundary and change the topic to something more interesting…
Because there are more interesting things to talk about – am I right?
Some ideas/examples for changing the subject:
- I’m much more interested in catching up around this time of year! How was that cruise you took in the summer Uncle Bob?
- I’m not into commenting on anyone’s body, let’s talk about something more interesting! Have you read ____ ( a book you’ve read)?
- We aren’t together to police the food!… What are you most excited to do in the new year?
2. Have a Excuse Ready
If you can’t be around diet culture talk at all, consider good excuses.
They don’t have to be explained. You could simply say you are going to do something else.
For example you could ‘legit’ excuse yourself to check on the food, your kiddos, etc.
3. Address it Head On
Sometimes you might feel like addressing the diet culture speak head on.
For example, if someone makes a comment about weight gain, and you don’t check your weight, maybe you decide to quite literally say that and share how talking about weight makes you feel uncomfortable.
This may feel awkward, especially when someone makes a comment about your body thinking that they are giving a compliment.
If they are open for discourse and willing to learn though, you may have taught someone a thing about how diet culture can have a negative impact.
This Matters
It’s so easy to find just about anything online-including the latest fad diet promoted by popular or charismatic folks.
This affects us whether we’ve experienced disordered eating or or not.
As Taylor so aptly mentions in this podcast episode: ‘we deserve peace with food and our bodies.’
Before you comment on someone else’s body, consider pausing, and remembering that you don’t know everything they are going through.
No matter what your thoughts are about weight, let’s not forget that health is more than what food we do or don’t put into our bodies.
Aside from nutrition, we can’t leave out the importance of mental health, managing stress, physical activity, sleep, and the list goes on.
And besides, how is making a comment helping?
How could it be hurting?
It starts with us! Let’s be the change by changing how we talk about bodies.
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