I have a long list of topic requests for the RD Real Talk podcast, which you can add to via this form! I put it up to a vote on Instagram last week, and (some of) you voted for this: Redefining "healthy".
Have you ever thought about how the words "health" and "healthy" make you feel?
Do you instantly think of some picture of perfect health, that might be achievable if you just keep plugging away at doing all the "right" things?
And have you ever thought, WAIT. Who TF came up with this list of "right things" anyway?!
Obviously the answer is diet culture, for the most part.
Years ago (2015), I was part of an editorial team publishing things on the internet that weren't diet-y or preachy. Or, trying to, anyway! And we decided to stop using the word "healthy" in all of our posts (much to our SEO's demise). I was SO DONE with how that word was thrown around as if it had any meaning, when really the definition was diet culture's moving target.
What I could have done, though, was say we’re going to challenge what we think we know about the word “healthy”. I could have said, let’s be more intentional—MUCH more intentional—about how we use it. Let’s think beyond the number of grams of things in any given food, or the numbers we receive from lab tests. I’m not saying we have to disregard those things entirely, though if you want to, that’s totally your prerogative! I’m just saying, for now, for the sake of challenging what we’ve been conditioned to think about health, let’s put them aside.
Part of non- or anti-diet work, in my world, is reclaiming things from diet culture. Healthy and healthy included!
Because we WILL hear the words health and healthy thrown around carelessly, to manipulate us, to make us feel morally superior or inferior. We just live in a word where that happens often, if not every day.
So, if we can redefine it, we can decide how that affects and influences us...or doesn’t.
This week's podcast episode...
...offers you some background on how we define healthy, what HEALTHISM is and why that definitely matters, and provides 4 prompts to help you redefine healthy for you.
|