, it can make you pretty angry. “It is easy to take out this anger on others who are engaging in diet talk,” Ackerman says. “In time, you realize that taking diet talk as a personal attack can be a waste of your energy. You realize that it is not the fault of the dieter or the person speaking diet talk.
The second way to change the subject is to state your discomfort and ask the people you’re with if you can talk about something else. “With close friends and family, I say it makes me uncomfortable and that I’d rather not hear about their new abs/diet/weight loss goals,” Lewis says. The experts agree that setting a boundary like this can get your message across in a productive way and bring the conversation back onto safer ground.
Unfortunately, of course, you can’t always physically leave the room, in which case you might find it useful to just disengage. “My immediate reaction is to be quiet,” Faulkner says. “I listen as a means of being polite but I’ll not pass comment or state anything about my own diet or health. Ideally, I would like to leave the conversation altogether but in certain circumstances, it’s not always possible without seeming rude.
Think about all the time, effort and unlearning it took for you to give up on dieting, or aspiring to the “perfect body.” Chances are you wouldn’t have listened to anyone who told you to just eat the damn cupcake when you were in the thick of diet culture yourself — try extending that understanding to those around you. “My first recommendation is to try not to convert anyone,” Bonano says. “Some individuals are not in the same place or on the same journey and that is OK.
“Becoming defensive, argumentative, or combative generally does not go well,” Bonano continues. “Letting go of dieting is very counter to our culture and there is a big learning curve. You can always ask if the person is interested in hearing your perspective, offer to explain what your journey has been like, or offer to provide resources about the topic.