You've intellectually accepted that diets don’t work. You’ve stopped forcing yourself to do types of exercise that feel punishing just for the calorie burn. You’ve accepted that there are countless ways to care for your health and well-being that don’t require weight loss. So why do you feel like crying?

You can feel relief at the idea of never again putting yourself through the punishing routine of restricting food, calories, macros, points. You can know that there are countless ways to care for your health that don’t require weight loss. You can know that many people appreciate, respect, or even love their bodies at whatever size and shape they are currently at. Yet you may feel conflicted about giving up dieting. You might even feel that your life has been upended.

The process of stepping off the diet culture hamster wheel can cause some really big emotions to start bubbling up – or even crash into you with the force of a tsunami. One of these emotions is grief.

Part of moving towards body and size acceptance is grieving what you’re leaving behind. I don't mean giving up the rollercoaster of yo-yo dieting. I don't mean the deprivation of making certain foods off-limits and the guilt of eating those foods when you “cheat” on your diet or quit your diet altogether. I mean the fantasy of having a certain type of body — and the life you always imagined would come with it.

Giving up the thin ideal fantasy

You know the fantasy I mean. While each person has their own hopes and dreams about how their life will turn out, there are several common themes with weight loss fantasies. For example, that you will:

• Be more confident
• Have more friends
• Be more desirable to potential romantic partners
• Land a better job…or a promotion
• Have more fun shopping for cute clothes
• Have boundless energy and perfect health
• Finally do all the things you’ve been putting off, like wearing a bikini or traveling to Paris
• Be able to eat what you want…and not regain the lost pounds

These fantasies don’t come to us out of thin air. They’re fed to us not just through advertisements for weight loss programs and products, but through society, especially the media. How many TV shows and movies do you see where people in larger bodies have oodles of friends, a great partner, and a fulfilling, successful life? Far too few.

Even if you embrace body acceptance in theory, it’s common to still have ambivalent or even negative feelings about your own body.

In her 2008 paper, “Size Acceptance as a Grief Process,” therapist Jeanne Courtney writes about how as women let go of the idea of controlling the size and shape of our bodies, we experience loss and lose any hope of escaping society's (and our own) contempt for imperfect bodies. We lose hope of reaping all the rewards that come with having thin privilege. If you’re in a larger body and have joint or mobility issues, you lose the hope of eliminating those problems (and odds are at least one healthcare provider suggested “lose weight” as a simple remedy).

She describes how the body acceptance process mirrors the five stages of grief.

The size acceptance grief process: Stages 1 and 2 (Denial and Anger)

In the denial stage, you might accept that weight loss is unsustainable for most people, but continue to hold out hope that:

• You are one of the rare unicorns who can lose weight and keep it off for good and that
• You can overcome biology if you just work hard enough.

You’re more likely to still hold this hope if your body does tend to respond to weight loss attempts, albeit temporarily.

You may minimize the struggle to control your body by trying to persuade yourself that struggling against your own body — rather than challenging society’s body standards — is normal. Odds are you feel detached or dissociated from your own body. Courtney gives the example of knowing exactly how many calories you’ve eaten but having no idea in a given moment whether you feel hungry.

In the anger stage, you might direct your emotion internally or externally.

If you are familiar with size acceptance and society’s unrealistic pressures to be thin, anger may be directed at the anti-fat bias you observe and possibly experience in the world.

If you are not familiar with the idea of size acceptance, you may feel angry at yourself for still not being able to lose weight and keep it off. This can lead to self-blame and compulsive dieting in an attempt to control or even punish your body.

Stage 3: Bargaining and the pursuit of “health”

If you blame yourself for “failing” at diets, you may see your current body as some sort of punishment for your failure. You might bargain for one more chance to “win” with renewed self-discipline and deprivation. Courtney says the cycle of failing and bargaining can happen for many years.

Some people who are clued into size acceptance find themselves giving up on yo-yo dieting per se, but still end up making a “bargain” between the conflicting desires to control their bodies (to satisfy societal ideals) and push back against these ideals.

This bargain may be to continue to try to shrink and reshape their bodies, but now doing it in the name of “health.” The pursuit of “health” can take on moral overtones, with as much shame and self-hatred when you miss the gym or choose the cheeseburger over the salad as someone dieting for aesthetic reasons would feel.

So how do you know if you are bargaining rather than simply nurturing your body with enjoyable movement and gentle nutrition? When your behaviors become compulsive and have a distinct whiff of self-deprivation or your choices come from a place of self-control, not self-care. Ultimately, this stage can bring the letting go of the wish for control.

Stages 4 and 5: Depression and Acceptance

Courtney says the depression stage can bring two types of depression — reactive and preparatory. Reactive depression includes catastrophic thinking. If you’re unfamiliar with size acceptance, you may believe that you will never enjoy the benefits of a “normal” life, that you will never feel attractive or be active or have a satisfying career and sex life.

If you do embrace size acceptance, you may know you can have a personally satisfying life in a larger body, but feel beaten down by the uphill battle of changing a fat-phobic society. Preparatory depression is about facing the fact that it’s not easy to live in a fat-phobic world when you are in a fat body.

When you reach the acceptance stage, you feel at peace with your body’s appearance and size, and you no longer see your size as a reason to not engage in activities you enjoy or want to try. You eat and exercise in a way that feels natural and satisfying, not in a way that aims to “fix” yourself in some way. Because you still live in a society that is fat phobic and fully subscribed to diet culture, you will still encounter comments, situations or information that will feel triggering, but you aren’t preoccupied by this.

The non-linear nature of grief

While the five stages of grief are an important and useful concept — no matter what you’re grieving — it’s also important to remember that grief isn’t linear.

It’s all too easy to internalize the stages as a sort of checklist where you progress from one to the next, checking each one off as you go. Then, weeks or months after you’ve (yay!) finally reached acceptance, you experience weight stigma at the doctor’s office or are forced to endure your cousin blathering about their “GLP-1 journey” at a family dinner and you find yourself abruptly back in the anger stage…and you panic.

The nature of grief isn’t something we can rigidly control. It’s normal to move back and forth between the stages, and it doesn’t mean you’re “failing” at grief.

Let’s look at a few additional faces of grief that are common when we let go of rigidly controlling our bodies…

The loss of shared bonding and social friction

One of the challenges of leaving diet culture is that it often leads to social friction. You may be done with trying to shrink, shape and control your body, but your friends, family, or even partners may still be deeply entrenched in diet talk, anti-fat bias and wellness culture.

It may feel incredibly lonely to step away from diet culture when everyone around you is still participating in it. (That’s the social friction.) The loss of shared bonding rituals — bonding over sharing diet tips or complaining about bodies — can cause another type of grief.

(It may also cause discomfort if and when you find it necessary to set boundaries around that kind of talk.)

Seeking out weight-inclusive friends or communities, anti-diet spaces, or fat liberation social media accounts can ease this feeling of social isolation.

The ‘grief of lost time’ to diet culture

When people let go of thin-ideal fantasies, it’s common to grieve the past — specifically the years, decades, or memories lost to dieting, body checking, and food obsession.

You might feel deep regret for the money and emotional energy you spent trying to shrink yourself. This mourning isn’t just about letting go about a fantasy of the future. It’s also about the past years spent standing in front of the mirror criticizing your body instead of enjoying your life.

Intersectionality, weight stigma and real-world harms

The grief of losing the thin ideal is universal, but the consequences of living a larger body are something that isn’t experience equally. Why? Because anti-fat bias intersects heavily with race, gender, socioeconomic status and physical ability.

The fear of living in a larger body isn’t just an internalized psychological fantasy — it’s rooted in very real systemic biases. For example, experiencing medical weight stigma or workplace discrimination means that grieving the loss of the thin ideal isn’t about just losing an aesthetic ideal — it’s about losing a layer of armor against societal mistreatment.

How to honor your grief and move forward

Most of my clients are somewhere between bargaining and depression when I start seeing them. If they’re in the denial stage, when they move to anger they generally direct that anger at society rather than themselves.

I know how hard it can be to give up the fantasy of having absolute control over how our bodies look, feel and function, and having a fantastical life to go with it. I’ve experienced giving up the fantasy, and I see the process unfold in my clients. Here are some things you can do:

• Educate yourself as much as possible about why weight is not an indicator of health.
• Make a list of the ways in which dieting has harmed you. Review it as needed.
• Practice reconnecting your body with techniques such as breathing exercises, body scans, or mindful exercise.
• Remember that succumbing to diet culture is not your fault. Get angry at society, not yourself. Consider writing “this is not your fault” on a Post-it and putting it where you'll see it.
• Set boundaries with your diet-talking friends and family.
• Remind yourself that the science shows you can’t lose weight permanently...even if you think it will make you feel better.
• Do you have ideas that can be challenged? For example, are there things you’re holding yourself back from doing until you’re in a smaller body? What do you lose by doing that?
• Work with a body image-informed dietitian or therapist to start to process why you think you “feel better” at a lighter weight and healing body shame.
• Allow yourself to feel your sadness about letting go of the thin ideal fantasy. If you have trouble showing yourself compassion, explore ways to boost self-compassion.

Disclaimer: All information provided here is of a general nature and is furnished only for educational purposes. This information is not to be taken as medical or other health advice pertaining to an individual’s specific health or medical condition. You agree that the use of this information is at your own risk.

Until next time,