You Were Never the Problem. You Were Just Following a Religion You Didn’t Choose.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with decades of dieting.
It’s not just the physical kind — the hunger headaches, the energy crashes, the body you kept trying to shrink into someone else’s idea of acceptable. It’s the mental kind. The kind where every morning begins with a negotiation. Every meal is a moral transaction. Every bite carries a verdict.
If that sounds familiar, here’s what I want you to understand: you’re not lacking discipline. You’re not broken. You’ve been practicing a religion.
The Altar You Didn’t Know You Were Bowing To
I spent nearly 15 years working in the medical weight loss industry. I was a personal trainer, a nutritional consultant, a health and wellness coach — and the entire time, I was chasing the same thing I was selling: the idea that a smaller body meant a worthier life.
I turned down beach trips. I skipped parties. I avoided dates. Not because I didn’t want those things — I desperately did. But I had internalized a belief so deep it felt like truth: my body had to earn belonging first.
That’s not a diet. That’s a spiritual system.
Michelle M. Lelwica writes about this in The Religion of Thinness — how diet culture operates like a religion, complete with its own rituals (tracking, fasting windows, “clean” eating schedules), its own saints (before-and-after transformation stories), its own community (diet groups, forums, accountability partners), and its own moral hierarchy. Thin equals disciplined. Disciplined equals virtuous. Virtuous equals worthy.
The cruel logic runs all the way down.
This Isn’t New — It Just Has New Branding
For centuries, religious doctrine — particularly in traditions that framed the body as something dangerous, impure, or in need of taming — has told women that their bodies require control to be acceptable.
Diet culture inherited that script wholesale.
The names change. The SnackWell’s of the 90s became the green juice of the 2000s, became the intermittent fasting apps of the 2010s, became today’s GLP-1 prescriptions and “biohacking” content. The font changes. The packaging changes.
The message doesn’t: shrink first, live later.
And if you’re a Gen X woman who grew up counting fat grams while Cosmo told you that being a size 8 made you “plus-sized” — your nervous system was trained in this. Deeply. Early. The fact that it’s still running in the background isn’t a character flaw. It’s conditioning.
The Hidden Tax You’ve Been Paying
Let’s talk about the money, because sometimes the numbers land in a way that feelings alone can’t.
When you add up tracking app subscriptions, supplements and powders, gym memberships, workout gear, packaged diet foods, and equipment that ends up under the bed — most women are spending somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 a year on the religion of thinness. Often more.
That’s a trip somewhere that’s been on your list for years. Six months of therapy. A creative course you’ve been putting off. The start of something that’s been waiting for you.
The real cost isn’t just the money. It’s the attention. The mental real estate spent calculating, tracking, negotiating, failing, restarting. That’s not space you had to spare.
What You Were Actually Hungry For
Here’s what Lelwica’s work points to that I’ve seen over and over in the women I work with:
The hunger was never just about food.
Chronic dieting often fills three deeper needs that have nothing to do with body size:
Control. Especially for women who’ve experienced chaos, trauma, or environments where nothing felt safe — having rules about food creates the illusion of order. The meal plan becomes the thing you can manage when everything else feels unmanageable.
Belonging. In a culture that treats thinness as social currency, the pursuit of a smaller body is also a bid for acceptance. For love. For the right to take up space without apology.
Identity. When “I’m watching what I eat” or “I’m trying to be healthy” becomes woven into who you are, challenging it doesn’t just mean changing your diet. It means questioning a piece of yourself.
None of these are weaknesses. They’re all very human needs, pointed in the wrong direction by a system that profits from keeping you dissatisfied.
The Body You Have Right Now Is Not a Problem to Solve
For midlife women, this particular brand of spiritual captivity carries extra weight — literally and otherwise.
Menopause changes your body. Hormones shift. Metabolism shifts. The relationship between effort and outcome changes in ways that feel disorienting and, if you’re still inside the diet culture framework, like personal failure.
It’s not failure. It’s biology.
And the pressure to “fix” it — whether through newer medications, stricter protocols, or more aggressive tracking — is the same old system with updated packaging. One industry hands you the problem. Another rushes in to sell you the solution. The loop continues.
Meanwhile, the things that actually create a life worth living — connection, purpose, creative expression, joy, presence — keep getting deferred to someday.
What Sovereignty Actually Looks Like
I want to be clear about something: this isn’t about being anti-weight-loss or telling anyone what to do with their body. Sovereignty means you get to choose. That’s the whole point.
What I’m against is the moral framework that’s been built around our choices. The system that says eating a salad makes you good and eating cake makes you bad. That a thinner body means a more disciplined, more worthy, more deserving person. That you owe the world a smaller version of yourself before you’re entitled to your own life.
That’s not health. That’s punishment with better marketing.
True sovereignty looks like:
Eating in a way that genuinely nourishes you — not in a way that earns you permission to exist.
Moving your body because it feels good or builds something you care about — not as penance for last night’s dinner.
Living fully now, in the body you have today — not in the body you’re planning to earn.
One Question Worth Sitting With
What have you delayed, avoided, or quietly grieved — while waiting for your body to be “ready”?
Not to create guilt. But to get honest about the cost.
Because here’s what I had to reckon with: I wasn’t waiting to lose weight. I was waiting for permission to live. And I was looking for that permission in a number on a scale that was never going to give it to me.
The permission was always mine to give.
If some part of you already knows that — and is tired of pretending otherwise — that’s not recklessness. That’s wisdom. That’s your intuition, cutting through years of noise to tell you something true.
It’s worth listening to.
If any of this hit a nerve, here’s your next step.
Not a 47-point action plan. Not a complete life overhaul. Just one honest look at the pattern that’s been running the show.
The Unwaiting Audit takes five minutes. You’ll find out exactly which pattern is keeping you stuck — second-guessing, people-pleasing, waiting for the “right” time, or something else entirely — and you’ll get one clear next step that actually fits where you are now.
Because overthinking, body-based waiting, and readiness-chasing don’t all need the same solution. Naming your pattern is where it starts.
Holly Toscanini is a life and health coach who helps midlife women stop postponing their lives and start trusting themselves. Her podcast, How to Lose the ‘WAIT’, explores the patterns, beliefs, and conditioning that keep women stuck — and what it actually looks like to move forward.
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