May 6 is International No Diet Day
The first ever No Diet Day was held in the UK on May 5th, 1992. British feminist Mary Evans Young started it after struggling with anorexia and body acceptance. Back then, it was but a small picnic held by twelve women between 21 and 76, all wearing stickers saying "Ditch that Diet". Originally planned to be held in Hyde Park, London, the group had to use Young's flat instead because of the weather. [1, 2]
Young aspired for it to become an international holiday. Supporters from the US warned her that it might clash with Cinco de Mayo, so the date was moved in the following years from May 5th to May 6th. [2]
In 1993, Lee Martindale coordinated the second celebration of International No Diet Day in the US, bringing the event to an international audience. Nine countries as well as 35 US states participated. [1]
In 1995, Fat Girl published an article in their fourth issue about a group who had used International No Diet Day to protest for fat liberation. The group, called Fat Guerillas, spread warning labels and bookmarks about the dangers of dieting in their local library, bookstore, health food store, and drug store. Afterwise, they drove all over town and removed all the "Magic Diet" ad posters they could find. When they were finished, they celebrated with ice cream. [3]
(The article also came with a recipe for wheatpaste, which was recommended if you wanted to hang up your own posters and make it hard to remove them. [3])
Cooties, a zine from 1998, described International No Diet Day as an opportunity to "draw attention to the fact that the diet industry preys off of people of all sizes, by making them fear fat with misleading & harmful propaganda which falsely states that fat is unhealthy, ugly, wrong, and results from gluttony, laziness & lack of moral character". It therefore encouraged readers to use International No Diet Day to protest against this and raise awareness. [4]
Nowadays, International No Diet Day is sponsored by the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA). It has a social media campaign that often includes statistical graphics or pictures of food, tagged as #NoDietDay. Australian public health educators, too, use it as a chance to educate. Some restaurants also use the day as advertisement. [2, 5, 6]
Dieting has been associated with physical and mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, decreased attention span, hair loss, heart and other muscle weakness, various forms of skin irritation, dizziness, eating disorders, menstrual irregularities, various problems of the digestive system, and weakening of the skeletal system. [3]
The diet industry profits off of selling people insecurities about their bodies. [3, 7] Don't buy into their arbitrary standards; stop giving them more money and power.
Most diets fail within 5 years, meaning that even if you manage to lose weight, you will almost certainly regain it. This, too, impacts health negatively. [8, 9, 10]
Your worth as a person does not depend on your weight or on what you eat or on a clothing size.
While thin people are often treated better, it is not because they are "better people", it's because we live in a fatphobic culture. We should work on changing the system, not starve ourselves to fit in it. Stopping to diet both frees mental capacities as well as time and energy that can instead be put into trying to achieve this change.
[1] fatlibarchive.org/fat-feminist-herstory-1993
[2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_No_Diet_Day
[3] fatlibarchive.org/fat-girl-4/
[4] fatlibarchive.org/cooties-7-1998/
[5] nationaleatingdisorders.org/no-diet-day/
[6] YouTube - No Diet Day
[7] fatlibarchive.org/proceedings-of-the-first-feminist-fat-activists-working-meeting-1980/
[8] fatlibarchive.org/more-women-are-on-diets-than-in-jail-1974/
[9] fatlibarchive.org/health-of-fat-people-the-scare-story-your-doctor-wont-tell-you/
[10] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17469900/
