Last Updated on 14 January, 2026 by Cara Sutra
New year weight loss plans are everywhere you turn in January, berating you for the pleasurable excess you enjoyed in December. Every year, as the wheel turns and we move from party to punishment season, I feel the same harsh judgement about eating habits and body image, and hear the cutting voice of my inner critic, shaped over a lifetime by family, media, and cultural pressure. Happy new year: your body is once again up for review. The same old scrutiny from every quarter.
Not this time.
This year, I’m opting out. I’m done. Not in resignation, but in strength. I’m rejecting toxic diet culture and body shaming, and choosing an overdue focus on mental health and full-bodied nourishment.
Why I’m Talking About Diet Plans and Eating Habits
Wondering why I’m talking about dieting and eating habits when this is a sex blog? Well, they’re not actually all that unconnected. It’s difficult to enjoy a great sex life in a body you’re at war with. If you’re not nourishing yourself with food, how can your psyche believe you deserve the psychological nourishment of sexual pleasure?
To me, it seems that diet culture and sexual shame are cousins. Both of these aspects of society, media and peer pressure originate in control and repression. And who do they mostly seek to control and silence? Women.
Women have been manipulated and shamed by various aspects of our patriarchal culture for eons. Keeping a woman’s worth measured by her physical sexual attractiveness to the male gaze, while keeping her sexual activity beneficial for men’s needs rather than her own, has seen women’s appetites and agency reduced to zero.
My blog has always been a celebration of proudly voracious appetites when it comes to physical pleasure, sex and kink. And, as I write from the perspective of a woman, I hope to have been a profound influence on women who read my posts, inspiring unrestricted exploration of boundless desires. Reclaiming agency over food and our unashamed desire for it mirrors that reclamation of agency over sex.
I feel strongly about rectifying absorbed attitudes that taught us to be ashamed of needs we deserve to have fulfilled. Whatever those needs and desires may be. As women, as people, we deserve to feel safe in our own bodies, for our bodies to be truly our own rather than property for public commentary and judgement, and to live our lives calmly, comfortably, confidently.
As a basic human right, as well as a natural human desire, food is a large part of that story.
My Body Was a Problem from the Start
My earliest memories include a strong awareness about other people’s opinions of my body. How my body looks and the space it takes up was something to constantly manage. Not neutral, not as a celebration of this vessel and vehicle for life, not to inhabit comfortably and confidently; manage. For others. This was one of many aspects of life that taught me that how I felt about an issue didn’t matter. Other people’s feelings were more important, and therefore their judgements were more valid than my own.
I grew up with constant commentary about food, appetite and body size. About what my body and its shape, size and weight supposedly signalled about my worth and character. It had a direct correlation to how I fit in this world. A foundational teaching for me was that eating is something to justify, to earn, to apologise for, to feel ashamed of. Hunger cues can be safely ignored. Eating to fullness? Embarrassing. If done in private, it was with the heavy knowledge that I was a failure.
As a woman, that messaging was relentless. I hit my teenage years at the height of the toxic and damaging ‘heroin chic’ era of the 1990s. Whether it was from TV, magazines, family, friends’ mothers, peers comparing themselves in school changing rooms and classrooms, it was everywhere and it was loud. From unspoken competitions between girls to eat the least, to derisory comments over larger women daring to be visible, and disgust at any woman sating her appetite in public.
It’s unsurprising that my relationship with food, my appetite and my body was tempestuous and combative. At various points through the years I’ve lived with aspects of eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia and binge eating. At these times it felt like I was backed into a corner over my eating and my body, that I had no other viable option. All of them were rooted in the belief that my body was a treacherous thing that required constant control and punishment for merely daring to exist.
None of this felt extreme at the time, it felt normal. It felt right. In fact, some aspects were actively praised by those around me as healthy and positive. That’s how diet culture has prevailed. It wears a self-care disguise.
Dieting Is Damage in Disguise
Dieting is often sold as a responsible avenue for health management. If you don’t think too deeply about it, dieting seems to have your wellbeing at heart. It’s concern for your long-term health, a valid route to self-improvement. Underneath all that, though, the constant pressure on women to diet reinforces a message which is not just unhealthy, but actively toxic.
You need to be controlled. Your body is a shameful burden. You should ignore your body’s needs and desires.
A closer examination of most diet plans shows that they’re teaching people to override natural daily hunger, moralising food into something you have to earn or justify, and outsourcing authority over your own body and appetites to an external set of rules. There are rewards for shrinking yourself, for taking up less space and for abandoning your hunger and desirous appetites. Punishments for listening to them, such as a deep sense of shame and lessened worth. There is constant negative self-surveillance.
All of this is particularly effective on people who already feel vulnerable about their own bodies and don’t feel safe trusting their own judgment when it comes to them.
The intense social messaging from diet culture in January is especially cruel. We’re deep in midwinter, where illness and stress and exhaustion abound, never mind reduced daylight. Many people have just been encouraged by the media to over-indulge through the holidays; yes, the very same media which now shames and vilifies you for having feasted. What’s the solution, you ask? Heavily restricted food, more torturously punishing exercise, comes the annual reply.
And we wonder why our mental health dips sharply every January.
The Exhaustion of Constant Monitoring
On a diet and feeling tired all the time? It’s not just the lack of food which causes constant exhaustion. Living under the strict regime of diet culture is tiring in ways you might not have realised until you step outside of it.
There’s all the mental arithmetic. The second guessing every time you feel hungry or try to decide what to eat. The constant internal commentary. The morality and worth assigned to innocent foodstuffs. Trying to work out if you’re allowed to eat, if you’ve earned a meal. Or maybe just a snack, but make sure you choose the right one, you wouldn’t want to be ‘bad’. You have to keep ‘trying to be good’. How should you feel today? Better grab the scale and measuring tape to find out. Oh, bad luck, your overall worth as a person has dipped. Try harder. Eat less. Burn more. Never relax. Never stop. If you didn’t fret and self-critique about diet and body size all day, who knows what you’d do with your time and energy. There might be a revolution. We can’t be having that.
Dieting keeps your focus on your body and maintains a negative self-image. You’re never simply choosing what to eat then eating it, you’re performing, assessing, correcting. Over time, this erodes trust in your own mind and body cues. You stop recognising hunger. You eat past the point of natural fullness because you don’t know when you might be allowed to eat again. You’re always swinging between regimented control and chaotic collapse and harshly blaming yourself for both. Diet culture calls it a lack of willpower. In reality, it’s a predictable cycle. A cycle that many of us find ourselves trapped in for decades.
I’d had enough of it all. I stopped pressuring myself into control and shrinkage, started asking what I actually need.
Eating Enough Is a Radical Act
For many people, me included, eating enough isn’t the intuitive, easy thing it should be. Even eating the typical amount of food a human needs in a day can feel dangerous, indulgent and just plain wrong. If this resonates with you, you’re not broken. You’ve just been trained to believe that nourishment is conditional rather than a basic right and natural desire.
Eating enough food every day means accepting that this is a non-negotiable physical and mental need even if you’ve not done any exercise. Even when you’re tired. Even if you don’t feel like you’ve had a productive day. Fuelling yourself consistently is the baseline for your life, not a conditional reward.
Fact:
You need and deserve food even when you feel like you don’t need or deserve any.
And that has been one of the hardest yet most healing unlearnings of my life.
If I need a little mental adjustment, I look at my son or even my cat. They don’t start their day worrying about what they’re going to eat, and they don’t end their day berating themselves about what they ate, or how much. They follow their body’s natural hunger cues, eating when they’re hungry, not eating when they’re not. Selectively choosing food not only as fuel, but because it’s enjoyable. These observations have been enlightening about just how much of my eating and attitudes towards food are learned, rather than intuitive.
Feeding Yourself Kindly, not ‘Correctly’
I don’t want my eating to be dependent on some externally validating factor such as diet culture rules, a numerical ceiling before I have to feel ashamed of myself or only acceptable after I have performed self-flagellating rites in the form of exercise. My eating isn’t something to be determined as correct or incorrect.
I’m literally just eating food for my own pleasure and enjoyment as well as to stay nourished and alive. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Healthy eating shouldn’t be indistinguishable from an eating disorder, but all too often that’s the case. ‘Skinnytok’ is this generation’s ‘heroin chic’. It makes me unbearably sad.
A lot of my peers use the term ‘being good’ when it comes to their eating habits. I’m not interested in ‘being good’, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. Eating isn’t a behaviour to comment on, correct or punish. I’m focusing on being kind to myself.
I used to believe that being kind to myself with regards food and eating meant abandoning discipline, giving in to weakness and being some shameful black hole of appetite into which mountains of all types of previously banned foods would disappear. Can you see the conditioned fears and response here? Because now I can see that this isn’t what being kind to myself means at all.
What does ‘feeding myself kindly’ mean to me now? It means choosing nourishing foods which are easy for my body to digest and convert to energy. Foods which are not only nutritionally beneficial but also soothing, filling, sustaining and genuinely pleasurable to eat. Losing that unbalanced mindset of living in either dire hunger or uncontrollable binge, instead learning to recognise my hunger cues and respond to them. I’ve been doing a lot of work on self-parenting, and this is relevant here. You wouldn’t ignore a child who says they’re hungry, you’d feed them appropriately. So why aren’t you doing that for yourself?
I try to notice when my body needs warmth, softness, familiarity – in all things, not just food – and respond. This teaches my body that my voice is the valid one. Over time, I have started to trust myself more, my intuition and instincts. My self-esteem and self-confidence are increasing, not in a superficial way, but in a real, deep and lasting way which underscores everything in my life. This consistent trust in myself and responding to my needs has also made me realise that I don’t just enjoy pleasure, I deserve it. And I say that with no ferocity or false ego. Indulging in pleasure requires no justification. This has a knock-on effect to other areas of my life, such as my evolving sexuality and shared sex life.
Food Is Not Morality
One of diet culture’s most damaging and pervasive ideas is that the food you choose and the amount you choose to eat is a measure of your worth. We’ve all heard it, people who say they are on a diet and ‘trying to be good’, avoiding ‘bad foods’, trying to ‘resist temptation’ and not give in to ‘guilty pleasures’ and have a ‘bad day’ or ‘fail’ on their diet.
What you eat, how often you eat and what your body looks like doesn’t determine your worth as a person. You are not rated ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on what you choose to eat on any particular day. From a health point of view, everyone’s health is uniquely complex. It’s influenced by many factors, such as genetics, trauma, stress, disability and the simple diversity of humanity. Health isn’t a reward that is only accessible or earned by being obedient to our non-benevolent Diet Deity.
To moralise health is to justify cruelty. Whether that’s to ourselves or other people. Remember that when espousing the lies of diet culture, you’re telling people what you think about them and their eating habits and body size, not simply expressing views on your own. If you’re proclaiming you’re ‘being good’ and loudly rejecting food on that basis, what does that say to me if I then choose to eat it?
What Nourishing Yourself Really Means
I’ve come to realise that nourishing myself is something far greater than food intake alone. It isn’t a case of making sure you’ve had enough calories each day, tick a box, done. It’s prioritising rather than avoiding rest. It is emotional safety and predictability so my nervous system can finally relax for once in my damn life. It’s indulging in pleasure guilt-free, without any self-criticism or punishing behaviours afterwards. It has been a learning curve of working with my body, instead of constantly being at war with it. My body is just trying to keep me alive, and I’ve been punishing it all these years.
These lessons and acknowledgements have only been accessible to me through a unique set of circumstances. Aging, with all the self-reflection that brings. Changing health, with the onset of perimenopause, then an escalation to developing chronic illness (M.E.) last year. Because apparently I wouldn’t listen until I was physically forced to stop earning my food and sense of self-worth with hours of punishing exercise every day, forced to stop distracting by rushing around and attempting to manage the entire world, forced to stop starving or eating my feelings because my body simply wouldn’t tolerate such behaviour anymore.
With the help of therapy I’ve been able to shine a forgiving light on how much energy it takes to exist in a patriarchal world with toxic diet culture pressuring particularly women at every turn, with my personal trauma history, in an aging body with perimenopause and chronic illness, with decades of self-monitoring and a system of punishment and reward coursing through the wiring of my harsh inner critic.
Choosing Kindness and Nourishment Through January and Always
This year, I’m doing January differently. I’m doing life differently. It feels strange, uncomfortably new, drastically radical… and long overdue.
Please don’t read all of this as preaching, like I’m telling you what you must do. We’ve all got our own minds, our own pressures, our own unique histories. I just had to share the revelation of my realisations. And let you know that if you’re struggling with diet culture, the harsh voices through January in particular, whether from inside or outside your own brain, you’re not alone and there is an alternative.
A path which doesn’t require you to shrink yourself, punish yourself, ignore your needs to be worthy of kindness, care and love.
If, like me, you’re exhausted from a life of monitoring and restriction, unmet needs and new year weight loss plans that promise health and acclaim while delivering guilt and shame, you’re not alone and you’re not a failure.
This January, this year and for the rest of my life I’m rejecting shame and punishment and choosing to nourish myself. I invite you to join me. I won’t lie; it’s really fucking scary after a lifetime of diet culture conditioning. But it is the necessary first step towards genuine peace with myself, and with my body. From war, to truce, to partnership, to friendship. And not out of following a trend or performing virtue.
When you’re at peace with yourself in a kindly treated, nourished body, just imagine what else you could achieve.
