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(CNN) --
Ending diet cycles and learning to accept the body you're in sounds great, but it can seem like a fairy tale.
How can you control how you eat without counting calories?
How should you stop planning for the day you are thinner?
How do you wake up one day without those embarrassing and petty thoughts knocking on the door of your brain?
It's tough, said Bri Campos, a Paramus, New Jersey-based body image coach.
The goal might not be to fully celebrate your body or rid yourself of all the negative thoughts about weight that come from diet culture, she said.
It could simply mean making progress in feeling less shame or self-criticism.
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Diet culture is the pervasive social messages that small bodies are better, bigger bodies are embarrassing, and restricted eating is the key to an "ok" body.
Taking credit for those messages is harmful to people of all body types, especially when you consider that it can encourage eating disorders and make recovery even more difficult, according to the National Eating Disorders Association.
The promise of achieving (and maintaining) the ideal body is empty, since a person who loses weight drastically in a short period of time is likely to gain it back.
Slow, sustained changes tend to be more successful, according to a 2017 study. And while some studies recommend losing weight to reduce your risk of conditions like heart disease and cancer, it's also true that health is determined by many factors: Shame doesn't aid.
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There are ways to unlearn diet culture, Campos said.
The process is different for each person, but it can help to find community with others with similar goals, he added.
Here are several stories of people trying to push back against diet culture, and what they've learned along the way.
Fusing the personal and the professional
Shanea Pallone said her experience navigating the healthcare system has informed how she talks to patients.
Lesley T. Lastufka
Shanea Pallone began to question her experience with diet culture after being date-shamed by a doctor.
It has been hard being a patient in a medical system that has caused her great harm.
“I am being actively undermined by providers who don't see me as more than my weight on the scale,” Pallone said.
But Pallone, who lives in Houston, Texas, also works as a nurse;
Her work has required her to assess the weight of her patients, mark if they were considered obese in their medical records and teach them the very diet tactics she herself was trying to unlearn, she said.
Pallone recalled constantly asking herself, "How do I manage my own care and provide good care while still working to understand some of the ways that diet culture still impacts me?"
His response included going back to the research that showed the diet was ineffective and confirmed that he could live healthily and provide care without shame.
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Learning about intuitive eating—an eating philosophy that is based on the body's natural hunger and satiety cues—helped her on both her personal and professional journey.
Changing your thinking doesn't mean intrusive thoughts about food and diet go away completely, but it has become easier to see and try to calm them down, Pallone said.
Pallone now works to help her patients achieve their health goals in a way that doesn't keep them from eating the foods they love or make them feel like they've failed, she said.
But while he was able to make a significant impact on his patients, he had to accept that he couldn't rescue everyone from diet culture.
"It's really hard to walk away from an 80-year-old woman, moving into a hospice, who (is) like, 'It's great that I'm losing weight, I've always been a little fat,'" Pallone said.
Leave the toxic soup behind
Amanda Mittman said the process of ditching the diet culture is ongoing.
Divine Witchcraft
Amanda Mittman, a registered dietitian in Amherst, Massachusetts, began to move away from diet culture after the birth of her son.
She couldn't bring herself to go back to a restrictive way of eating as a new mother, but she still felt ashamed of the weight she hadn't lost after childbirth, she said.
“We are all still swimming in the same toxic soup,” he said.
Mittman's first step was learning to identify the diet culture around her, in the entertainment media, in advertisements and even in conversations with friends and family, she said.
And once he realized it, he found that he couldn't go back to seeing things the way he used to.
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This did not mean that she was ready to give up on the diet and fully accept her body.
Her diets had always offered her a magical solution: lose weight and you can have everything you've ever wanted.
It was scary to give up on that dream and face the possibility that by living another way, she might gain weight instead of losing it.
But as she found a community free of diet culture and modified her social media to not value weight loss, Mittman said accepting the pain and grief that comes with giving up those goals became a big part of her life. process.
"I still have thoughts of 'wouldn't it be great if I could lose weight?'" she said.
But she reminds herself, "We've been down that road, and that's no longer available to me."
The job of accepting her body and loving herself is not glamorous, she said.
There are no “caps and gowns, you don't graduate, this is constant work,” Mittman said.
"But it gets easier all the time."
writing on mirrors
Sandra Thies' mirror was a big trigger and now it's part of her healing.
Victoria Harder
After years on her university's varsity rowing team and trying to shape her body to meet expectations, Sandra Thies found herself a bit lost without a strict diet and exercise routine.
“The easy way out is to go on another diet, accept the online diet culture, restrict eating,” Thies said.
"It's the easy way to feel like you're in control."
Much of that desire for control would be reflected in reflective surfaces, he said.
Whether it was the windows he passed, the mirrors in the bathroom at work, or even at home when he got out of the shower, they were all places for Thies to poke his body, to see if he needed to exercise or if he could eat a little more. in the dinner.
And days wrestling with her reflection of her would lead to nights spent staring at the ceiling, wondering what she could do better the next day to get closer to her "ideal" body of hers.
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Thies, now an intuitive eating coach in Kelowna, British Columbia, came across the concept in college and remembers thinking, "Wouldn't it be nice to be at peace with food and your body?"
Four years later, she feels that she is still learning how to move in a way that feels good to her, how to eat what her body needs, and how to stand up to her reflection without tearing it apart.
But the mirror has actually become part of his solution, he said.
Now you have questions written on the mirror at home: “What is the feeling?
Where do you feel it in your body?
How bad is it?
Can we sit in this discomfort?
What do you need right now?"
Now try to take time to sit with those feelings.
Sometimes you can answer all the questions.
But on the days that she can't, Thies said he gives himself permission to do what he can to maintain a positive self-talk.
“I think about my body and food very often,” Thies said.
“But the voice that I use has really changed.
It leaves me feeling confident and empowered instead of destroyed."
End the unwinnable war
Dani Bryant said she saw her own body in the women who came before her.
Divine Witchcraft
Dani Bryant thought her experiences with her body would threaten her creative dreams, but instead they turned out to be a pathway to getting there.
As a child with a passion for theater, Bryant heard similar messages from her directors, choir teachers, and wardrobe: You're very talented, but your frame has to be smaller if you want to make it big.
She was just 9 years old when she first showed signs of disordered eating.
In her sophomore year of college, pursuing a career in theater, she had developed anorexia, Bryant said.
As part of Bryant's recovery, he began writing and developed a theater company in Chicago focused on experiences with body problems and eating disorders, Bryant said.
There she found the support that she felt was key to developing a relationship with her body.
“My healing lies so much in sharing the lived experience, building a community around it, and that slow unlearning,” she said.
A big moment in Bryant's healing journey came when he went with his mother on a trip to Ellis Island in New York City, where they came across a photograph of his family coming to the United States generations ago.
In the photo, he saw his great-grandmother, whose body was the same shape as his grandmother's, his mother's and his own, Bryant said.
There she realized that her body was more than her choices or her diet: it was the result of her family, her genetics, and her history.
She wished she could go back to the girl she once was to show him that photo and ask him to stop fighting the "unwinnable war" for a smaller body he was never meant to have, she said.
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