Dieting Feels a Lot Like Dating
Dieting & Dating
Tell me if this feels familiar: your life isn’t exactly what you thought it was going to be. You’re not happy with how things are going. You feel inadequate. Your friends appear happy and healthy, and you wonder why everyone else seems to have what you want. You ask yourself, “how did I let this happen?" and “what’s wrong with me?” So you decide to take action and do something!
This time is going to be different. You have tried to make these types of changes before, to no avail, but this time you’re going to work harder! You’re not going to give up!
So you download the app and subscribe to the premium option. You have done the free programs before, but not this time! You’re serious this time. You follow the prompts; you enter your information. You follow all the advice you’ve been given. You just know this time you are going to see the results you’re wanting.
It’s exciting!!! You’re on this journey to make changes and improve the quality of your life. You feel exhilarated!
And then
A few weeks go by and you are no longer excited. You are tired. You are frustrated. You feel defeated. You don’t understand why this isn’t working. You followed all the advice!! You put yourself out there and tried things that were hard and uncomfortable. You start to doubt yourself. “What did I do wrong? Is there something wrong with me?” You question yourself.
After a little more time you find yourself in tears. Angry-crying into a pint of ice cream. Or, in my case, shots of tequila.
Now my question to you, dear reader, is am I talking about trying to lose weight with another diet OR am I talking about trying to find a romantic partner with another dating app?
Or both?
A bit of disclosure
I am a cis/het woman who had been partnered for a while and then found myself single again. This blog is based off my lived experience and the potential experiences of other cis/het women, but I expect there will be nuggets that feel relatable to anyone who has ever dated or dieted.
I was listening to a podcast series not long ago about being single. This podcast is a little different in that it celebrates single women, instead of trying to get them married up. This podcast also discusses the myriad of ways in which women are pressured into dating and marriage and made to feel badly about ourselves if we are single. The host then goes on to describe how the dating industry (apps, coaches, match makers, etc.) has no guarantee of “success” and apps, especially, are designed to fail. The host says that using dating apps and trying to find a romantic partner is one of the few areas in life in which the amount of effort you put in has no real effect on the outcome.
In the quest for a romantic partner, you can try and try and try, but you have no control on meeting someone awesome and then the two of you falling in love. Zero control over the outcome.
As I was listening to this podcast series, I kept thinking “this is just like dieting!!!” Dieting is also something that we have zero control over the outcome. We cannot sustainably change our weights. 95% of deliberate attempts to lose weight fail long-term. Not because the person didn’t try hard enough, but because the body will resist weight loss at all costs in an effort to protect us from starvation.
How Dieting & Dating Relate
Both dieting and dating are money-making industries that disproportionately target women (I would argue also that often cis-het women are the intended audience). Both dieting and dating are rooted in the idea that “you are not good enough as you are right now; you need to change; if you change you will be happier. You can change; it’s easy, but if you fail it will be your fault.” Oh, and also you will be charged money to make these changes and it’s nonrefundable.
I want to pause for just a minute to clarify what I mean by “dieting” and “dating.” For the purposes of this discussion “dieting” is changing behaviors in order to attempt to lose weight or not gain weight. Dieting is the pursuit of the “perfect body.” “Dating” is changing behaviors in an attempt to find a romantic partner. “Dating” is the pursuit of the perfect partner. Dating here is not going on dates with your current partner that you have been with for however long. In this discussion, dating is the hunt that single people go on with the end goal of finding and keeping a mate.
I will elaborate further on the similarities between dating and dieting, but I do want to acknowledge the differences. I do understand that the desire for a romantic partner, a desire to be loved, is genuine. While there are innumerable pressures on single women to get married and then have babies, genuinely wanting those things is also completely understandable and in no way am I trying to minimize the real desire to be loved. I will, however, take issue with the patriarchal pressure that make it hard for women to know what they really want vs. what society tells them they want. I also take issue with the way single women are targeted and made to feel broken when there is not a damn thing wrong with them!
OK, now back to all the ways in which the Diet Industrial Complex and its little sibling, the Dating Industrial Complex wreak havoc on single women:
We live in a patriarchal society. We live in a society governed by white supremacy, sexism, ableism, capitalism, fatphobia, and all manners of oppression. For more on this, check out Your Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings, and The Belly of the Beast by Da’Shaun L Harrison. One of the myriad of ways society enforces patriarchal gender norms is through fatphobia, thus the pressure to be thin. Another rude social construct is marriage. I am not against marriage (I’ve ever been married before!), nor I am against love or partnership or the desire for love or partnership. I am absolutely against the PRESSURE to be partnered. The idea that there is something wrong with you if you’re single and that you must FIX THE PROBLEM by falling in love and getting married.
Both dieting and dating are rooted in the idea that there is something wrong with you and you must be fixed. If being fat (or even slightly larger) is bad, then dieting is the solution. If being single is bad, then dating and marriage is the solution. This is absolutely not true; fat people, single people are not problems to be solved!
And then there’s all these rules associated with dieting and dating. “Eat this, but not that”; “say this, but not that”; “do this, but not that”. The rules are fueled by the idea what women need to take up less space. We need to by physically smaller, but also metaphorically smaller. “Don’t talk too much, don’t be too loud, don’t have too many opinions because then then boys won’t like you.” I hate every bit of it.
I also hate the false promises of it all. Being thin doesn’t bring happiness. Being partnered doesn’t bring happiness. And more importantly, being fat or being single doesn’t mean misery!!! We also have zero control on the outcomes of either of these endeavors. You can’t control the size of your body sustainably anymore than you can make someone fall in love with you (or vice versa). Even if we followed all the advice, we are not guaranteed an outcome, other than potentially making us feel worse than when we started.
What If
So, I have a proposal for you: what if you understood how awesome you are? What if you practiced radical self-love and began to believe that you are good enough as is? You don’t need a partner to make you whole or happy and you don’t need to be thinner to be whole or happy. What if you practiced some self-compassion and were kind to yourself? The social constructs will still exist, and you may still feel pressure, but you don’t have to do what society pressures you to. You could just be you.