Diane Sanfilippo Quits Diet Culture: Part 1

During the pandemic, Diane Sanfilippo got on the scale and saw a number that was more than when she started dieting twenty years before; and she realized she couldn’t make herself diet again. This isn’t entirely exceptional, it probably happened to a lot of us, except in Diane’s case she was the author of six bestselling diet books, from Keto QuickStart to Practical Paleo to The 21-Day Sugar Detox. So it wasn’t as if she was just done dieting; she was also done with her career, livelihood, an entire identity.

What happens when the thing you believed in stops aligning? What if that thing is a decade’s worth of best-selling books that don’t represent your current value system? What if you’ve been the poster child of dieting and you’ve decided to not just stop dieting, but become a visible and active critic of diet culture itself? Or what about this: what if you’re career kept your life together, kept you structured, and all that just goes away and you’re left in the vacuum of what’s next?

In this first part of a two-part series, we get into a lot: What diet culture is, how it keeps us distracted and forever chasing acceptance within patriarchy instead of burning it down; what about using diets to actually not feel horrible or to improve our health and the spectrum of anti-diet to diet positive; whether sugar addiction is real!; how in 2021 Diane realized after getting on the scale and seeing she’d “undid” all her work and that she couldn’t diet again or spend the rest of her life managing her food, and what came from realizing she was part of the problem.

In next week’s episode we get way down into what happened after Diane walked away and how she’s managing a pretty extreme liminal space.

About Diane Sanfilippo: Diane is the owner and founder of Balanced Bites - a wholesome food company that creates frozen meals, organic spice blends and snacks - all shipped nationwide. She's a certified holistic Nutrition Consultant, and two-time New York Times bestselling diet book author turned anti-diet advocate. Diane co-hosts Full Plate, a weekly podcast about healing from diet culture, setting boundaries, exploring mental health, and finding body liberation. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, Scott, and two fur kids.

You can find Diane on Instagram: @dianesanfilippo

and via her websites balancedbites.com and dianesanfilippo.com

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