Choosing Myself Over Dieting—Even When It Meant Losing Friends
Dieting Wasn’t Just About Food—It Was About Fitting In
When I stopped dieting — I lost friends. And it wasn’t because I no longer joined them at slimming clubs or counted calories obsessively. It was because I no longer abandoned myself just to stay in the shared struggle of feeling "not good enough."
For 20 years, I was obsessed with my body size, bouncing between diets, slipping “off the wagon,” and constantly planning my next restart. This cycle chipped away at me until I finally realised that my fixation on thinness wasn’t just unhealthy—it was deeply damaging. Dieting is celebrated in our culture as a marker of health, but I knew the truth: my smaller body was only achievable through restrictive, unsustainable habits.
And that truth is a hard pill to swallow when everyone around you celebrates shrinking bodies without asking how you got there.
When I chose to stop pursuing thinness as my primary goal, I changed as a person. My priorities shifted, and my values deepened. And the more I peeled away from the identity I’d built around diet culture, the more I noticed how much of my life and relationships had been built around it too.
Here’s what I stopped doing:
❌ Commenting on my body or anyone else’s.
❌ Judging food or myself based on "good" or "bad" labels.
❌ Joining in when friends poked and pinched at themselves with disgust.
❌ Remaining stuck in the cycle of being an exhausted woman, perpetually trying to prove my worth.
And instead, I started:
✅ Speaking up about real issues impacting women, not just discussing my food choices.
✅ Expecting more from relationships, beyond bonding over mutual body hatred.
✅ Honoring my body by respecting its needs, not apologizing for its shape.
As I changed, some friendships didn’t survive. Not because I wanted to let go of people, but because I was no longer willing to sustain a shared self-loathing as the foundation of those relationships. And my new boundaries triggered some people whose identity had been built around the long journey to thinness.
I was accused of not “understanding the struggle” (ironic, because no one understood it more than me). People told me I was risking my health by not dieting, ignoring that I was finally listening to my body’s needs for the first time. Friends claimed I was harming my kids by teaching them to trust their hunger, rather than demonising sugar or fearing food. And I was told I was “full of myself” because I gained weight but refused to hide in shapeless clothes.
Losing friends is painful—but what’s harder is losing yourself bit by bit over decades, just to keep up with the constant expectations diet culture throws at us. We deserve peace and the freedom to feel whole without measuring our worth by the scale.
This transformation is not always comfortable. You may lose people or change the dynamics of your relationships, but I promise that reclaiming your peace, your self-worth, and your voice is worth every step.
If you want to go into 2025 feeling strong enough to reject the fad diets that drain the life from you, I have 1:1 spaces open now for my 3 month container, book a chat with me here
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