Demi Lovato getting mad at a frozen yogurt shop offering and clearly labeling their sugar-free, gluten-free, vegan, whatever else options so their customers are able to safely fill their own frozen yogurt bowl without having to guess or ask the teenagers or new employees or unmotivated part timers what foods are safe for them to consume and risk the employee going “I think it’s OK” and then later find out that that employee had no idea what they were talking about so now the customer is sick or in pain or suffering a potentially life-threatening medical emergency because she has an eating disorder reminds me of the time Halsey tried to make a stink about hotels not offering hair care products for Black hair types and everyone came back with “Hotel hair care products aren’t even good for any hair type.” But at least Halsey was asking for more inclusivity and not less. At least Halsey wasn’t putting anyone else’s health at risk when she wanted to address an issue she thought was worthy of attention.
This could’ve been a great opportunity for Demi Lovato to practice some exposure therapy. Don’t let the “health food” labels stop you. You know they’re there. Walk past them. Don’t choose the sugar-free options or whatever it was that triggered you. Know those options are there and deliberately choose the options that your brain demonizes and then work through the negative self-talk your brain starts up after eating those options.
And if you can’t do that, you have every right to walk out. You can’t force someone to heal before they’re ready and they’ve processed all they need to process. But if you know that you need to eat three times a day, or whatever the regiment is, go eat somewhere else. Go eat something else. Work through the negative self-talk you’re already experiencing from being triggered by the labels and do what you need to do to take care of yourself and keep yourself from going off the rails for longer than it takes for you to calm yourself back down. You owe that to yourself. And if you truly feel you can’t do that on your own, I hope you have someone that loves you, has your best intentions at heart, is able to put their foot down and make those hard choices with you, and is someone that you trust, there with you to help you go “It’s OK. We’re going to look away from the sugar-free options. We’re going to pick something else.” Or “we’re going to leave and take some time to work through what’s running through your mind. We’ll either come back here and get the food you want or we can get the food somewhere else or we can get you a totally different kind of food. But we both know that you need to eat. We both know that skipping this meal could very easily lead you to skip more meals and neither of us want that for you. So we’ll work through your anxieties and get you back where you want to be.”
I’ve never had an eating disorder myself, so I don’t want to sit here and be like “It isn’t that hard. Get over yourself.” But I do have anxiety and depression and I’ve had to use exposure therapy to get myself to a healthier place, a more functional place. I can’t go the rest of my life and not be able to work with or interact with men. I can’t go the rest of my life having a panic attack every time I go grocery shopping. I can’t make it the rest of my life without making phone calls. I have to work on those anxieties and those fears, because they can’t stay with me forever. I’m going to have to work through them, because they’re regular occurrences that would negatively affect other people if I were to try and mold the world to what I consider to be my ultimate safe space.
Labels like “sugar-free,” “lactose-free,” “vegan,” et cetera are necessary labels that we can’t remove and just hope for the best. So while I sympathize with Demi Lovato’s mental health struggles, I also know from my own experience that there are things in our world that we have to come to accept and we have to figure out how to heal from certain traumas and triggers, so that we can function and live the happy and healthy lives we deserve while making sure we don’t make the world a less safe place for those who are struggling or dealing with their own issues.
And I just think Demi Lovato mishandled the situation. She acted rudely and selfishly by disregarding others’ needs and by targeting the frozen yogurt shop for a common, accepted, and necessary practice in the food industry. It would’ve been nice if she could have worked through what she was feeling and shown her fans what it looks like to be able to work through an eating disorder one meal at a time, one food at a time, like “it was hard and uncomfortable, but this is what I did to work through those emotions and this is the advice I would give to you.” But even if she was just like, “it was hard and uncomfortable and I’m in a place in my healing journey where I had to walk away from the things that were triggering me,” that would’ve been totally fine. It probably would’ve been easier on her mental health, because whether you think the backlash she is getting is deserved or not, she is getting it and it has to be messing with her.
I hope she gets better. I hope she apologizes to the frozen yogurt shop and their employees. I hope she apologizes to those people who need those labels on the food for invalidating or diminishing their own struggles. And I hope we all learned something about diet culture, eating disorders and the never-ending healing journey, and respecting those who have restrictive diets due to medical issues and/or ethically-motivated beliefs.
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