BE-Friend Yourself: Breaking Free of Diet Culture

The following is an excerpt from the new book, BE-Friend Yourself... Finding Freedom with Food and Peace with your Body. The author, Marla Mervis-Hartmann, is also the creator of Love Your Body, Love Yourself. She guides women toward embracing self acceptance.

Marla Mervis-Hartmann, Author of BE-Friend Yourself...

Finding Freedom with Food and Peace with your Body

On a scale of one to ten, one being Absolutely not, and ten being Hell yes, tell me, how much do you love your body? Vulnerably speaking, I have lived most of my life in the lower digits: the twos and threes. Although my God-given body was strong, fit, and healthy, I spent decades lamenting that it was not perfect. Those years of grief catapulted me into a toxic relationship with my appearance that resulted in decades of compulsive eating, restricting, bingeing, purging, and dieting.

Some people are surprised to hear this. "Really, you?" they'll ask. "But you always seem so confident; I had no idea you were struggling with body and food challenges too!"

Yes. Me.

My journey through self-acceptance has been the most plaguing and rewarding lesson of my life. Because I have existed within the same fifteen-pound range, it's been easy to hide my struggles with the scale and obsession about my body.

Like most women, my grievances with my weight were seeded at a young age. I grew up as one of those curvy little girls that people would make comments about — words that later influenced me to believe I needed to look a certain way.

In my teenage years, I played sports, which put a great deal of demand on my body. Then, I was an actor and a dancer, so once again . . . different expectations, but more physical demands. Although, I, for the most part, had body confidence in my high school years, these consistent messages and experiences regarding my appearance left me confused and vulnerable to a disordered relationship with food and my body.

Marla Mervis-Hartmann delivering her TEDx Talk

The Secret Ingredient to Feeling Good in your Body (Click to View)

So, by college, the cocktail of unrealistic body standards and societal pressure around dieting thrust me into a sea of toxic beliefs, negative self-talk, and destructive behaviors around my weight. Diet culture is so invasive and rooted into the fabric of our existence that it is rarely visible until you step back to take a thoughtful look at it.

So, what is diet culture?

Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, author of The Anti-Diet, defines "diet culture" as: "a belief system that worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, promotes weight loss and maintaining a low weight as a way to elevate social status, and demonizes certain foods and eating styles while elevating others."

According to Harrison, diet culture also "oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of 'health,' which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities."

My tools to deal with these pressures, in addition to the traumas and emotions of life were adversely handled by dieting and eating. I will go into these stories with open honesty in this book. I created this book to share my experience so that you don't have to suffer so long and hard.

The trouble with diet culture is that only about 5 percent of women can actually live up to that standard of beauty, and the rest of us are left to feel bad about ourselves. Furthermore, I didn't realize how deeply anchored the fear of being "fat" is woven into the fabric of our culture. Its roots primarily stem from racism and religious pressures for pious eating.

Harrison covers this as well in her book: "As important as evolutionary theory was when it came to explaining how we all came to be on this planet, it was also used in overtly racist ways, to justify the white Anglo-European male domination of other cultures and genders that had been going on for centuries. Evolutionary theory became a 'scientific' way of upholding the status quo. White, Northern European women were deemed to be a step down from men on the evolutionary ladder, followed by Southern Europeans (again with the women a step down from the men), then people of color from countries that early biologists and anthropologists considered 'semicivilized' or 'barbaric,' and finally, at the bottom, Native Americans and Africans, whom they considered 'savages.'"

Therein, the positive body image, anti-diet, and fat liberation movements are fighting back against deep systemic racism and privilege. Finally, women are standing up and saying No more. No more ancestral trauma. No more generational oppression. We will evolve past our grandmothers and mothers through the radical embrace of our bodies. We will be unapologetic about eating delicious food that nourishes our body — knowing we are doing something revolutionary.

It is my intention with this book to help people feel better in their own skin, to make peace with food, and to have a thriving life. As a thin, white, privileged, cisgender woman, I will do my best to make this message serve you, the reader. I don't pretend to understand the sufferings of transgender, binary, and other marginalized cultures. But I do hope you feel my highest desire to support those loving themselves deeper. Throughout this book, I address my readers as "women." I mean any sister who identifies as a woman: cis women, trans women, women who have yet to reveal their internal gender to the external world. I also invite non-binary and male readers into the fold. After all, fatphobia, diet culture, and systemic body shaming impacts everyone in deeply personal ways. I pray that you feel welcome here and supported by my journey.

BE-Friend Yourself... Now available on Amazon.com

From an early age, I didn't know why it was so hard to like my body. I wasn't aware that loving and caring for myself was an act of power that challenges a damaging societal view to girls and women. When we take back our power around our weight and bodies—when we heal—we become activists in the fight against diet culture and its toxic origins. Every time we acknowledge our worth has nothing to do with our appearance, we revolt against deep systemic beliefs that tell us being a certain size matters.

The benefit of our culture growing into new knowledge is being able to articulate these issues with new terms. My disordered eating likely would have gone undefined prior to the 1990s. I took my inability to be perfect to the extreme to something we now call exercise bulimia. While bulimia is a bingeing and purging cycle, exercise bulimia is working out until complete exhaustion if you eat . . . anything. My logic was: what goes in must be burnt off. I was obsessed with food, diet, and exhausting myself.

From the outside, it appeared as though I loved to be fit; that I loved going to the gym and eating healthy. In reality, my mental health was in the toilet. All of my motivation came from feelings of disgust about myself, the belief that my body was not good enough. I believed the lie diet culture was teaching me: I cannot be happy unless . . .

Unless I'm the perfect weight.

Unless I'm the ideal size.

Unless I burn a certain number of calories.

I had support. I had a privileged life with an amazing family. I was loved, popular, and mostly liked myself, but at times—peace wasn't present. I might have one good week, become stressed by something, then spiral into being unkind to myself. There were certainly days I felt stunning, scxy, and in shape—but if I had a second cookie, my feelings would instantly shift. Having an erratic relationship with my appearance set the stage for keeping a tight grip on my food intake and giving airtime to an inner critic who loved to tell me all the ways I fell short.

Back then, there wasn't a popularized term for this pattern of behavior. Today, I would most likely have been identified as an orthorexic: a person who is preoccupied with healthy rituals to an unhealthy measure. Researchers now see this with women who become overly concerned with nutrients, ingredients, and chemicals—taking their tunnel vision about calories, carbs, and fats too far. The condition is a complete addiction to finding the healthiest way to do everything—from eating, to grooming, to self-care. In reality, it creates a lot of mental noise that serves no one.

This thinking robbed me of years of satisfaction and joy. I missed out on so much, including learning how to celebrate my womanhood and femininity. It resulted in an inability to really enjoy my relationship with food, scx, and myself.

Through years of misery that landed me at my own dark night of the soul, I decided it was time for a change, and took a vested interest in the way I spoke to myself. This is when I adopted the concept of Be-Friending myself—which ultimately broke the seal of wild possibility in every area of my life.

Once I could show up and give myself what I deserved, there was no room any longer to settle for anything below my worth. I'd ask myself, "Marla—would you speak to a friend the way you're speaking to yourself right now?"

If the answer was no, I'd use my tools ( that you will learn in this book) to make myself feel better.

It wasn't easy, and it took a while to get used to my own inner dialogue changes, but over time I learned to enjoy being nice to myself.

Soon, I began exploring new ways to celebrate my life. I started practicing movement, energy work, creative self-expression, and healing from the inside out. Eventually, I was able to divorce myself from societal concepts that were not serving me—things like toxic diet culture, shame around my scxuality, the no pain, no gain: American mentality, and the notion that I didn't deserve nourishment or rest unless I checked all the boxes.

Where I was once overly concerned and regimented, I now respect my attempt to show up for myself as a practice. I'm evolving. It doesn't always come naturally. I still have to work at it, but this process has been integral to my establishing a sense of peace.

By stepping into my enoughness, and deciding against all odds I am going to partner with myself, I became my own best friend.

Throughout that time, this is what I realized:

• A good friend listens. So, I learned to listen to my body, be more attentive to its cues, defend its boundaries, and grant its request for nourishment, food, water, movement, and pleasure.

• A good friend is there for you.

• A good friend doesn't even have to say anything. In fact, she senses your need for silence, and she's good with that. She wants to be there for you. Because she loves you.

• A good friend prioritizes your comfort.

• A good friend is respectful of boundaries around your time, space, and energy.

• A good friend forgives. Can we forgive ourselves?

• A good friend accepts our greatness and our flaws.

• A good friend speaks the truth in love, kindness, and compassion.

I knew, more than anything, I wanted to love myself like that. I wanted to embrace all the things that made me Marla, and all the things I'd not yet explored about my femininity. I wanted to speak kindly to myself, to accept my greatness and my flaws, to unapologetically prioritize my needs, and above all—to heal through radical self-forgiveness while giving my own heart and mind the benefit of the doubt. Through this new sense of liberation and profound self-compassion, I also realized—I wanted to teach what I was coming to understand. I wanted to help other women learn to embrace the nourishment of food and the joy of celebrating their bodies.

I remember sitting on the floor in my friend's bedroom in Kauai. I was nine months pregnant with my son, sharing the beauty and labors of womanhood with someone safe, who wholeheartedly understood. There, I was struck with: This is your purpose, Marla. Take all of your fears, wisdom, struggles, and triumphs and share them with others.

Finally. My pain had a silver lining. Finally. I felt like I could let go of restriction, and encourage others to do the same.

I'd already been very committed to sharing what I knew about women's health. But at that moment, I knew my purpose was to combine my knowledge as a Reiki master, tantra teacher, yogi, and somatic trauma specialist to help people heal their relationship with food and their bodies.

Now my life's work is encouraging women to quiet the militant inner critic that lives inside their heads. My body still gets covered in goosebumps when my clients and friends choose freedom over restriction. As I sat there, beaming with my happy, pregnant belly I heard the words, love your body, love yourself. I knew then that would be my business and my mission. I was pregnant with Aspen, and the seed of a second growing, vibrant, perseverant dream.

I don't know about you, but I think women are pretty phenomenal. And when I say "women," I mean this for every person who considers themselves a member of the sisterhood. We all bear our unique scars when it comes to femininity; which is why I'm dedicated to working with women of every shape, size, color, and background. There's one thing in particular about women that I believe makes them amazing: they are healers.

Women are empathetic.

Dynamic.

Kind.

Feminine.

Daring.

Beautiful.

And beyond that—they love and partner with intention. If something's broken, they want to talk about it, learn from it, and heal it. A woman's resiliency is usually her strongest attribute. It didn't take long in this work to realize I had everything I needed to heal myself already wrapped up in my own femininity.

It all began with going inward: tuning in, turning on, and listening . . . first to the cues of my body, then to my intuition, childhood wounds, quieted dreams, bold inspirations, and the sound of my own vibrant heart. There are so many layers of ourselves to celebrate if we will just take the time to listen.

The more we hear our inner truths, the more we create synergy within our body. As we step into flow, we position ourselves to expand—to experience pleasure, to have fun, and to thrive in our fullest potential.

And so, I invite you to be honest with yourself. On a scale of one to ten, how much do you love yourself?

Maybe right now, you are at a one or a two when it comes to loving your body. You know what? That's okay! Take a moment to live in your authentic experience. But by the end of our work together, my hope is that you will be able to enjoy the glorious sensation of basking in your own magnificence. It may seem counterintuitive at first—after years of being hard on myself, it took time to establish a sense of safety and trust. But that's why I'm here: to remind you of your own brilliance when you aren't quite sure of it yet, and to support you on your journey to becoming your own best friend.

About Marla Mervis-Hartmann

Marla Mervis-Hartmann is a dedicated life coach, author, and speaker known for her work in women's health, freedom with food and body positivity. She is the creator of the initiative "Love Your Body Love Yourself," which aims to empower women to embrace their bodies and cultivate self-love.

Having struggled with her own body image and food challenges, Marla transformed her experiences into a career focused on helping others. She is the author of BE-Friend Yourself: Freedom with Food & Peace with Your Body which reflects her journey toward self-acceptance and healing.

"Marla is a certified practitioner in Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy with specialized training in women's scxual wellness and is a Reiki Master. At Ai Pono Eating Disorder Recovery Center, she leads Body-Love Reiki Circles, offering a unique blend of healing and body positivity. Featured at TEDx Salinas, Marla's work continues to impact women's wellness and holistic healing."

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Phone: 310-926-9163

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