From Self-Critique to Strength: Shifting the Narrative on Diet Culture

Content warning: This piece will mention eating disorders, disordered eating, and diet culture.  It may not be for everyone, and if you or someone you love is struggling, NEDA has resources for folks at every stage of recovery.

For too long, diet culture has told us that discipline means deprivation and that strength is measured in shrinking. It’s time to change the narrative—one that fuels confidence, celebrates resilience, and reclaims food as a source of power, not punishment.

Like many runners, I think about food a lot.
Like, a lot, a lot.

Sure, I dream about my post-race burger (extra avocado, obviously), my après-workout smoothie (meticulously calibrated to a 3:1 carb-to-protein ratio, and a 5:1 chocolate-to-peanut-butter ratio), and I have very strong opinions about the best gummies for long-haul endurance missions (Scandinavian Swimmers, sour edition, no contest).

Also, like many runners, my journey to making peace with food—and even making friends with it—has been a bumpy one. (Much like my first attempt at technical downhill running—graceful as a baby giraffe on roller skates.)

After being diagnosed with an eating disorder in college, I found my way onto the trails. Running became my sanctuary, a space where my body was valued not for how it looked but for what it could do. Out there, among the rocks and roots, calorie counts and clothing sizes lost their grip. The mountains didn’t have time for insecurities; they had their own weather patterns and wild terrain to contend with. Healing happened in the sun-drenched scree slopes of the Rockies, as well as in years of therapy. Seriously, you should try it.

But lately, I feel an old, familiar ache creeping back. Diet culture is coming back like a nagging tendon injury—insidious, persistent, and always eager to take me out. (And, like an actual tendon injury, it’s the kind of thing that rest and ice alone won’t fix.)

The Quiet Hum of Normative Discontent

Normative discontent—the all-too-common phenomenon where dissatisfaction with our bodies becomes the status quo—is so deeply woven into our culture that it often goes unnoticed. The term was coined in 1984 in a study by Rodin, Silberstein, and Streibel-Moore, titled Women and Weight: A Normative Discontent. The study explored how dissatisfaction with our bodies had become so commonplace that appreciation, love, and even basic acceptance were the exception rather than the rule.

It’s the quiet hum in the background of so many conversations among women, even in spaces meant to empower us—locker rooms, team dinners, start lines. It often surfaces as self-deprecating comments about weight, body shape, or eating habits, tossed out like conversational small talk: “I shouldn’t eat that.” “I wish I had your discipline.” These words echo like a script, reinforcing a shared, unspoken understanding: to be a woman is to be at odds with your body. And worse—we’re expected to perform and reinforce this discomfort as if it’s a rite of passage into belonging.

At first glance, these exchanges might seem harmless, even bonding. But this shared narrative of discontent keeps us tethered to a culture that values our appearance over our strength, our weight over our endurance, our self-critique over our self-worth.

Trail running is a sport that celebrates resilience, grit, and guts. We train our bodies to climb higher, run farther, endure longer. And yet, even in this space—where our bodies are powerful, where they move us through the world—we are still encouraged to shrink. To take up less space. To disappear.

And I don’t want to disappear. (Unless we’re talking about ghosting a group text about a 4 a.m. sunrise summit. Then, I might consider it.)

Shifting the Narrative

What if, instead of bonding over self-critique, we bonded over self-celebration? What if, instead of shrinking, we took up more space—not just physically, but mentally and emotionally?

What if we talked about food like it’s fuel for adventure, rather than a moral tightrope to walk? What if we celebrated the strength in our legs, the lungs that carry us up mountains, the joy of movement? What if we replaced “I shouldn’t eat that” with “That sounds delicious”? What if we replaced “I wish I had your discipline” with “You’re so strong”?

This is exactly why Kylee Van Horn and I started Your Diet Sucks, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the noise of diet culture and giving female athletes the tools they need to fuel confidently, perform their best, and actually enjoy food. We were tired of the mixed messages, the restrictive mindsets, and the harmful myths about what it means to eat “right” as an athlete. We wanted to create a space where women particularly could hear conversations about real nutrition—without the shame, without the pseudoscience, and without the pressure to shrink themselves to fit an outdated mold.

On Your Diet Sucks, we bring in experts, break down nutrition science, and get real about the struggles so many female athletes face when it comes to fueling, body image, and performance. We laugh (a lot), debunk nonsense, and make nutrition feel empowering rather than overwhelming. Instead of prescriptions, we want to pass on frameworks for athletes to make better decisions for themselves – not add more noise to the cacophony of voices online telling you what to eat, how to exercise, and who to be.

If you’ve ever felt like the world is telling you to be smaller, to eat less, to do more with less fuel, consider this your permission slip to reject that script. Because “lighter” isn’t better. Your body is not your worth. Fasting won’t make you faster.

You just need the right tools, the right knowledge, and the confidence to trust your body. And that’s what we’re here to help with—one diet myth debunking at a time.