Constantly setting the diet culture boundary with people I encounter can be exhausting. Particularly if the person I’m setting the boundary with is someone in the medical or mental health field. If you know, you know.

Processing through setting a boundary with someone new and trying my best not to internalize an experience as opposed to setting a boundary and just letting it be.

It’s rough when we know what is best for us mentally, physically, and emotionally on a specific topic, yet society is brainwashed from day one to believe the opposite. Particularly difficult task: setting a boundary with someone who’s aim is to assist you in mental or emotional growth. It often comes across to the other person as if you’ve set a ridiculous or arbitrary wall in the way of their ability to reach you.

It’s not, though. It’s an acknowledgment that not only do I know my body and my lived experiences better than anyone else can know them, but I’m also a fully capable person who researches and absorbs new information to help me make informed decisions. I didn’t just log onto the world wide web one day, see the word “body positivity”, and decide that everything I’d ever been told about dieting was a lie.

It took years of being open to learning about how diet culture is in everything that surrounds me. It took decades of living in my body and experiencing first-hand what it is to diet, fluctuate, feel miserable, and ultimately “fail” time after time. It took knowing in my gut that something was horribly wrong with diet culture messaging mixed with articles, books, research studies, podcasts, etc. educating on why that messaging is so pervasive and how it impacts my existence as a fat person on a daily basis. In short, it took fucking work. Lots of it.

So now the challenge is deciding whether it’s worth trying to explain myself to a development coach so that coach has a better understanding of my boundaries… or if I simply set the boundary and leave it there. As this isn’t a scenario in where I can choose the person I’m working with and I’m of the opinion this person has a lot to offer me that can be very helpful, I don’t have the option of simply moving along to another, potentially more suitable to my systematic beliefs, professional.

Just sharing the process, y’all.