Diet Culture Is Hijacking Your Focus
It’s not just the hunger, it’s the message that you deserve to be hungry
Mia Feuer’s beautifully calloused hands unconsciously fluttered over her belly as she talked. A sculptor who has shown her work all over the world, she said she was dealing with a creative blockage.
At Babecamp, a weekend intensive I lead in San Francisco that helps women break up with dieting and diet culture, she told me that she could feel that she had it in her to create something truly remarkable, and she couldn’t figure out what, exactly, was stopping her.
But I had a hunch.
Have you ever noticed what happens when you’re hungry? Time seems to slow down. Routine tasks become impossibly difficult. You lose focus as this deeply human instinct eclipses your every thought. Sometimes you get irritable about small things, or unaccountably angry.
This altered state (sometimes known as “hanger”) makes sense when you consider the gut’s profound influence on the brain, and vice-versa. Evolution has wired us to seek food. When people experience hunger daily, according to the American Psychological Association, their mental energy is used to “focus on food, which can lead to neglect in other areas of life.”
When all you can think about is the next time you’re going to have a bite of banana, it’s really hard to have big ideas or build a meaningful life.
Hunger compromises focus. And, as uncomfortable as it may be to admit, hunger is a part of the experience of dieting, a practice that 48 million Americans engage in each year. What might be possible if we stopped opting into a state of hunger? Who could we be, what could we create, if we stopped letting diet culture squat on our precious and limited cognitive real estate?
Chronic hunger keeps our bodies in survival mode. When all you can think about is the next time you’re going to have a bite of banana or a spoonful of peanut butter, it’s really hard to have big ideas, make important things, or build a meaningful life.
After that weekend at Babecamp, Mia did stop dieting. Within a few months, she wrote…
