Toxic Striving, page 2
You’ll come away from this book with a sense of self-trust. You won’t learn how to be more confident or productive; you’ll learn how to be more yourself. You’ll define your own version of a rewarding and meaningful life; listen to the guidance of your physical, mental, and emotional signals; and make decisions that align with what matters most to you.
To do this, we’ll weave together research-backed tools from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and intuitive eating (IE). Some tools will suggest that you write your answers in your journal (or if you prefer, in a notebook or on your phone); other tools can be downloaded at http://www .newharbinger.com/54063.
Both ACT and IE treat you as the expert on your own mind, body, and life. Instead of searching for the next diet or hack to tame your body or mind, you can live according to the qualities you most wish to embody. This book will guide you to:
understand how and when you stopped trusting yourself and started living according to outside standards;
uncover subconscious rules about what you eat and how you spend your time so you can evaluate whether those rules are helpful or harmful;
set goals that align with your personal values instead of society’s expectations;
learn to take power away from restrictive and self-punishing thoughts so you can be kinder to yourself;
understand your hunger, fullness, and cravings and use them to reclaim pleasure and satisfaction with food and beyond;
learn how to be an observer of your emotions rather than letting them control you;
stop criticizing your body and appearance, and view your body as more than a decorative object;
set effective boundaries with anyone who makes you feel ashamed of yourself for how you look, how much you get done in your day, or anything else.
Even if this seems like a lot of work, I hope you’ll stick with it. I assure you it will be far less exhausting than the toxic striving you’ve been doing. You don’t have to be familiar with ACT or IE in order to start. You don’t have to worry about learning clinical jargon or following a step-by-step recipe. The point of this book is to help you do the opposite: throw away the rulebooks and write your own life story. From now on, you are the expert on you.
Part 1:
A Job You Didn’t Sign Up For
Chapter 1.
How You Were Brainwashed
When you were born, you were a ball of instincts. You cried when hungry. You cried when tired. You cried when frustrated. You didn’t have very many ways of expressing yourself (crying was pretty much it), but you sure weren’t shy about letting everyone around you know what you needed. When you were hungry, you didn’t worry about how much you’d already eaten that day. When you were upset, you didn’t feel self-conscious wailing in the middle of the grocery store. You were guided completely from the inside.
Somewhere along the way, you learned to silence those instincts. Perhaps an adult yelled at you for throwing a tantrum, so you learned that feeling upset was shameful. Maybe a doctor told your mom to be careful with your snacks, so some of your favorite foods became off limits. You started getting messages from every direction telling you what made you good, what made you bad, and what you needed to strive toward. Those messages seemed important; after all, they came from the people you loved and trusted most.
Along with instincts, every child is born with a temperament. Some babies are naturally fussy, others are more relaxed. Some babies constantly want to be held, others prefer to be left alone. Almost immediately, adults begin making value judgments about a child’s nature, insinuating that some tendencies are more acceptable than others. Children learn whether they’re funny, outgoing, brave, shy, smart, sweet, or stubborn. Some messages are given in terms of how they shouldn’t be. “Don’t cry! Don’t eat too much. Don’t be so sensitive.” Other times, messages are framed as a comparison: “You’re so much quieter than your brother!” These messages land in a child’s psyche and begin to shape their perception of who they are and how they’re supposed to be.
Messages like these are often well intentioned. Parents are tasked with raising children to become functional adults capable of contributing meaningfully to society. A large part of that task is teaching children to self-regulate so that by the time they’re adults, they can manage their emotions without throwing a toddler-style temper tantrum. Unfortunately, lessons in self-regulation often get inadvertently twisted into lessons in self-silencing. This is particularly true for people socialized as female in a culture where females are rewarded for being agreeable and selfless. Chronically suppressing your needs and emotions, saying yes when you really wanted to say no, or being endlessly available to make sure others are comfortable can all be forms of self-silencing. These tendencies have been linked to higher rates of depression, eating disorders, chronic disease, and even premature death (Jakubowski et al. 2022; Maji and Dixit 2019; Ussher and Perz 2010).
It’s impossible to move through life without outside influence, and often, outside influence is helpful. We have an instinct, follow that instinct, and then get feedback about whether the way we followed that instinct was effective. The problem is that many of us learn to listen only to external feedback, and completely ignore internal feedback. Eventually, we silence the voice inside of us telling us what we find meaningful and authentic. We learn that it’s more important to satisfy the world around us than to satisfy ourselves.
To peek into how you might develop a habit of self-silencing, let’s imagine that you’re three years old. Your baby sister snatches your beloved doll right out of your hands. You’re overwhelmed with anger. You cry and scream, but she doesn’t give the doll back. You start hitting her in an attempt to cope with the intense rage filling your three-year-old body. Now you’ve got your mom’s attention. She yells, “We do not hit!” Perhaps her intention was to communicate that the anger you’re feeling is natural, but responding to it by hitting is not appropriate. However, instead of separating the emotion from the reaction, you learn that they are one and the same: Anger is not okay.
In another scenario, imagine your mom does acknowledge that anger is natural. She sees you hitting your sister and says, “I know you feel angry that she took your doll, but you’re not allowed to hit.” You learn what not to do when angry, but you don’t learn alternatives. This leaves you confused; what do you do next time anger arises? How do you regulate it effectively? Without further guidance, that confusion becomes shame, and shapes one of your strategies for getting through life successfully: Avoid expressing anger.
These experiences lay the foundation for our belief systems. While not set in stone, ideas of “how to be” set up camp in our unconscious minds from such a young age that we don’t even recognize that they’re beliefs. They simply seem like facts. What if, when you were that three-year-old child, your mom taught you to step outside when angry, take five slow deep breaths, and calm your body down? You might grow up learning how to validate your emotions, while still appropriately controlling your impulses. While there are many schools of thought on how to teach children to regulate, parents are often stretched thin. It is not always realistic that a parent will have the foresight, patience, and internal resources to coach their child through the scenario above. As a result, many children grow up feeling lost when strong emotions arise.
Parents and caregivers aren’t our only sources on how to be. We’re also conditioned by our surrounding culture. We’re shaped by social systems telling us that some brains, bodies, and personalities are more desirable than others. In Western culture, ideals of productivity, discipline, self-control, and youthfulness prevail. Cultural critics have addressed these forces through many lenses: capitalism, white supremacy culture, grind culture, and productivity culture. This book will examine two facets of these social and economic systems as driving forces behind eating-, body-, and achievement-focused anxieties and obsessions: wellness culture and hustle culture.
Wellness Culture
In recent decades, there has been increasing cultural emphasis on health and, more nebulously, wellness. While it’s human nature to seek pain relief, our obsession with wellness has spiraled beyond the basic desire for ease into an aspirational lifestyle that companies have been happy to pounce upon for financial gain. According to registered dietitian Christy Harrison (2023), the global wellness industry is valued at $4.4 trillion. We jump eagerly at whatever trend in health, fitness, medicine, and alternative medicine comes through the revolving door next. There is a glorification of “natural” remedies for ailments, eating “clean” and “whole” foods, and eschewing anything processed or containing additives or chemicals. At the same time, we want a quick fix, a pill or formula that provides guaranteed results. We’re obsessed with biohacking, attempting to control health outcomes beyond what is realistic. We’re allured by the promise of wellness influencers and alternative health providers who swear by their complicated nutritional formulas or miracle herbs and supplements.
While most people want to be well, the degree to which we pursue wellness may actually be making us sicker, if not physically, then certainly mentally. There is significant emotional consequence to obsessively controlling every aspect of one’s well-being, from diet and exercise to pain management, blood sugar, and sleep. Sometimes, the fixation on health symptoms and preoccupation with finding answers can lead us down a rabbit hole of potentially dangerous, unregulated treatments or pursuing unnecessarily restrictive lifestyles. When you’re convinced that a certain food, substance, or product is toxic, the anxiety you feel when around that product and the lengths you go to avoid it can be what’s actually harming you, or at least exacerbating any real effects. Wellness culture preys on our existential anxiety “by promising to stave off death” (Harrison 2023).
The assumptions of wellness culture are inaccurate at best, and discriminatory and dangerous at worst. Wellness culture promotes healthism, the interweaving of goodness and morality with health. For many people, these healthist beliefs become religious; engaging in health practices makes you superior or virtuous, and not pursuing health makes you sinful. Healthism blames people for their health problems. This perspective is also ableist, denigrating people based on ability. Harrison (2023) refers to wellness as “the rich person’s version of health,” especially as social currency is awarded not just for being healthy, but for actively striving toward greater well-being, through seeing alternative health providers (often not covered by health insurance), buying special and costly organic cooking ingredients, and devoting time and resources to these pursuits that many individuals simply do not have.
One of the more prominent branches of wellness culture is diet culture. In Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating, Christy Harrison (2019) describes diet culture as a system that “worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue…promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status…demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others…[and] oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of ‘health,’ which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their physical and mental health.”
While anyone can experience pressure to achieve unrealistic body ideals or attach morality to their health status, people socialized as female, people of color, sexual minorities, people in larger bodies, and people with disabilities often face the brunt of these pressures. The pressures themselves emanate from systems of patriarchy, racism, ageism, and ableism. Consider what’s held up as the ideal body: it’s often young, thin, white (or with Eurocentric features), abled, cisgender, and free of disease. In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Dr. Sabrina Strings (2019) points out the intricate ways in which the glorification of thin bodies has sprung directly from racist beliefs. Diet culture and wellness culture work hand in hand with anti-Blackness, pathologizing the natural diversity across our species.
Cultural obsession with health and wellness has even led to the rise of a new type of eating disorder, orthorexia nervosa. Though not yet part of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM, the manual used by healthcare professionals as a guide for mental health diagnoses), the diagnosis of orthorexia has been well-founded (López-Gil et al. 2023). Someone with orthorexia is preoccupied with eating in a way they deem healthy, which might mean eating “clean,” avoiding processed foods, eating only organic, avoiding anything with additives, and so forth. While on the surface this might seem harmless, it can easily spiral into obsession and rigidity. Sadly, if someone engages in disordered eating and lives in a culture that praises those behaviors, their suffering can go unnoticed for a long time. Sometimes, even health professionals don’t recognize an eating disorder until there are extreme consequences.
Diet culture tells us that body size is completely within your control. Wellness culture tells us that health is completely within your control. By diet culture’s logic, it’s your fault if you don’t have the ideal physique. By wellness culture’s logic, it’s also your fault if you have health problems. These assumptions are flat-out false. You cannot determine someone’s health or habits by looking at them. Most of us know people who are naturally thin, despite eating nothing but fast food and sitting on the couch all day. On the flip side, there are plenty of people who are naturally larger, even if they run marathons and primarily eat nutritious foods. There are people who are thin with lots of health problems, and others who are fat with excellent health markers. Most of us know that health is complex. No matter how much spinach you eat, you can’t control for genetics, early childhood environment, or the stress of discriminatory systems. Not everyone has access to quality health care or a safe environment in which to be physically active. These, and numerous other factors, affect our health.
It’s important to remember that despite the false narrative pushed upon you that body size is a choice, bodies have always come in a variety of shapes and sizes. As Judith Matz and Ellen Frankel write in Beyond a Shadow of a Diet (2024), “Even if everybody ate the exact same foods and engaged in the same amount of daily activities, there would still be a wide variation of body sizes.” For many, trying to fight a naturally larger body is like trying to make themselves taller or shorter. It just doesn’t work long-term. Most people who lose any significant weight on purpose end up regaining most or all of it within two to five years (Bacon and Aphramor 2011; Mann et al. 2007). Since our culture isn’t okay with weight regain, many people then embark on another attempt to lose weight…and eventually regain it once again. This pattern of losing, regaining, losing, and regaining weight is called weight cycling.
Weight cycling causes more harm to physical and mental health than remaining at a stable weight, even when that weight is higher. Research demonstrates that weight cycling increases risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke, type 2 diabetes, cortisol production, binge eating, life dissatisfaction, and body image preoccupation (Bacon and Aphramor 2011; Brownell and Rodin 1994; Diaz, Mainous, and Everett 2005; Fothergill et al. 2016; Rhee 2017). In other words, trying to force your body to be smaller than it wants to be can lead to the same health problems you’re trying to avoid by shrinking it!
Beyond the physical and mental health problems caused by weight cycling, this perspective perpetuates weight stigma. It’s no surprise that weight stigma has toxic effects on health. It is stressful to experience judgment, bullying, and harassment in your daily life. That chronic stress can lead to high levels of cortisol, high blood pressure, heart disease, depression, isolation, anxiety, and avoidance of situations where one might experience shame. Research shows that experiencing weight stigma increases chances for developing an eating disorder. Thanks to weight stigma, health professionals frequently miss signs of eating disorders in larger patients, so larger patients may also have an increased chance of going without proper diagnosis or treatment for many more years than smaller patients (Haines et al. 2006; Neumark-Sztainer et al. 2002; Puhl 2019; Puhl and Brownell 2006). As you might imagine, living with an untreated eating disorder is also not great for health.
Whether or not you have experienced weight cycling or weight stigma, you have likely absorbed messages urging you to avoid weight gain. No matter your size, these messages can contribute to obsession with food or weight, body shame, and suffering. That’s what consumed my client Tanya. When I got a voicemail from Tanya one Sunday morning, I could hear the desperation in her voice. She’d gone out the night before and, after several rounds of tequila shots, came home to lose herself in a binge-eating episode. In the span of an hour, she scarfed down a large pizza, a dozen chicken wings, and five donuts. She woke up with a nasty hangover, sharp stomach pains, and crushing guilt. She whispered, “What is wrong with me?! Will I ever be able to control myself around food?”
Tanya had struggled with food for her whole adult life. By age thirty-five, she had tried every detox and clean-eating plan out there, from Weight Watchers to macro counting to the Keto diet. She’d start determined. Sometimes she lost ten, twenty, or thirty pounds, and would feel a brief sense of accomplishment; then a happy hour or friend’s wedding would throw off her game and she’d be back to late-night binges.
Tanya’s secret nighttime eating was one of many things she beat herself up about. At work, with friends, and with her boyfriend, she felt she was always “too much”—too selfish, too impulsive, too loud, too sensitive. As the oldest daughter of Korean immigrants, Tanya spent her childhood walking a tightrope of specific beauty standards reinforced through the Korean and American media she followed. She felt an obligation to achieve financially and show her parents that their sacrifices had paid off. Despite her successful career as a nurse at a local children’s hospital, she found her self-worth always came back to her appearance. She figured if she could just lose weight and actually keep it off, that would be enough to feel confident in other parts of her life. Things would finally fall into place.
