212. Weight, Worth, & The Diet Culture | Body Positivity Double Bind
212. Weight, Worth, & The Diet Culture | Body Positivity Double Bind
What happens when you let go of the scale after decades of daily weigh-ins? For Kayla MacDonald, it became a powerful 7-week experiment in self-trust, discernment, and detaching her worth from a number. In this emotionally rich episode, she breaks down the double bind between diet culture and body positivity—and why both extremes can keep women stuck.
You’ll learn:
The truth about tracking: how it can be neutral, healing, or harmful—depending on your intention
Why Elizabeth Benton’s quote, “Avoidance isn’t refuge,” became a turning point
How the observer effect from quantum physics might just apply to your relationship with weight
The emotional (and cosmic) lessons Kayla faced when the “math wasn’t mathing”
Why she no longer pedestalizes other people’s paths over her own lived truth
And how she’s rewriting her story—from frustration and stagnation to empowered devotion
Plus, Kayla shares journal prompts to help you rewrite your own relationship with the scale, health, and self-worth.
If you’re tired of being told there’s only one right way to love your body—or that weight loss automatically means you hate yourself—this is your permission slip to find your own damn middle ground.
Links Mentioned:
Embodied Activation | Journal Prompts
What has my own lived experience taught me about tracking and my relationship with numbers?
What story do I want to tell about my pursuit of health and weight loss (if that’s a goal)? What is my truth?
What are my values—and how can I infuse those values into my why for tracking (if I choose to track)?
How can tracking certain metrics—as decided by me—actually help heal a sticky, problematic relationship between those numbers and my self-worth?
Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Embodied Writing Warrior Podcast. So this is gonna be a raw episode about what it means to rewrite your story around weight, around worth, and it's also gonna be a cautionary tale to make sure you're not trying to live out someone else's narrative. We are gonna start by revisiting the body positivity and the diet culture double bind, and how this can keep us in a paralyzing, lose lose situation.
I'm also gonna share the results of my personal seven week scale free journey, and my top four lessons from this experiment. I talked about my reasons for taking on this challenge way back in episode 196, so I'll link that in the episode description if you're interested. But for those who didn't listen, I'll just say that this is the first time.
In decades that I have gone more than 30 days without a single weigh in. For the most part, I've been a daily weigh in person with maybe a couple breaks, but I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could let the scale go for a prolonged period of time and what would happen. And then I'm gonna share my process for rewriting old SCR scripts that leave you equating weight with worth feeling like you have to choose between loving your body and wanting to change it, as well as letting go of the belief that anybody else knows you better than you.
Okay, let's start by revisiting this diet, culture and body positivity. Double bind, which in my opinion is one of the biggest things that keeps women stressed, stuck, and unhealthy. It's basically this lose lose situation when you're looking at it from these two binary camps. So you have Diet Culture camp, which is founded on ideas like.
There's an ideal weight and size for everyone. Thin is always better. You should strive for the perfect body and the perfect diet. If you aren't size X, then your willpower weakling, your worth is tied to how your body looks. Health equals weight loss every single time. No nuance, no exceptions before and after.
Photos are the ultimate proof of success. Weight loss is the most impressive and admirable kind of transformation, and being obsessed with food, body and control is just being healthy. So this camp is gonna keep people stuck in shame, fueled strategies, perfectionism, all or nothing, behaviors and comparisonitis.
When you're in this camp, it feels pretty gross to do the Sunday healthy grocery shop, so you can start again on Monday. And also there's probably donuts in the shopping cart, and you're going to eat them all in one day so they're out of the house before you start being good again at the beginning of a new week.
That is diet culture through and through. Now what about the body positivity camp? Let me start by saying that this camp has done some beautiful things and brought a much needed alternative voice to that toxic diet, diet, culture, but it can be taken to an extreme when you encounter messages like if you wanna smaller body, you must automatically hate yourself if you're making changes to your workouts or nutrition.
It better just be for the sake of health, not because you wanna be smaller. You don't love your body. If you want to change it, you don't value yourself as you are now. If you wanna make improvements to your physique, your a bad feminist and furthering the patriarchal wounding of women everywhere.
If you dare try to lose weight. And wanting to feel sexy in your body is just internalized misogyny, and you should also never feel uncomfortable in your body. And if you do, it's always just a mindset issue. As you can see, we're in a world where we're going to make a wrong move in someone's eyes no matter what.
We're either weak, lazy, or indulgent. If we subscribe to diet culture, but the minute we try to make any change, the body positive extremists will see us as shallow, fat phobic, and just another woman brainwashed by the patriarchy. I wanted to share this at the beginning of the episode to remind you that these are only two stories.
They're two loud stories, but not the only ones. And one of my mentors, Elizabeth Benton once said that binary is the opposite of creativity. We're gonna be quoting her twice today, by the way. So this episode is my thoughts on stepping out of the binary and embracing creativity, which looks like telling the story you want to be telling.
And all of this came from my own hard won lessons, from my scale free experiment. And I'm gonna be honest, this challenge was very uncomfortable. It was unsettling to let go of the scale for this length of time. And my mind told me all kinds of stories about how I should step on it again before the seven weeks was up.
Okay. I remember early on in the challenge, my inner drama queen came out to play and she was crying to my husband about how enormous I was. Really, I was just about to start my period and hormonal, but you know, so my husband goes, well, why don't you just weigh yourself in check? And I ped and I crossed my arms over my chest and said.
I can't do that 'cause I literally just released an episode about how I'm not weighing myself for seven whole weeks. So I'm still so proud of myself for doing this because it was a big growth edge and at the end of the seven weeks I was only up five pounds. And this proved to myself, Hey, I actually am at a place where I don't need the scale.
To keep me in relative homeostasis and as I'll share shortly. This was not always the case, so I learned four powerful lessons from this experiment. The first lesson I learned was to let go of my patterns of pedestal, other people, and blindly trusting their guidance more than my own lived experience.
The scale free experiment was heavily inspired by an amazing guest I had on the show a few months ago. She had so many valuable things to say. Things that were working for her and her clients, and I'm going to admit it, I have a toxic trait of giving too much authority to people who are further ahead, whether that is in business, followers, impact, whatever.
There's a part of me that starts to believe that because they've built more, they must know more that they're right and. Maybe I've been wrong all along, so I entertained the idea that maybe I was wrong for pursuing weight loss, and maybe I should let go of the scale altogether. Almost as a way to weirdly show gratitude to this guest for taking time out of her schedule to come on my show, which is tiny compared to the magnitude of her reach and her influence on her personal platforms.
It was honestly a bit of a fond response because here's the thing, it's beautiful to stay open to someone else's wisdom. But not at the cost of overriding your own. As I share my journey with the scale, what I've learned, what I've let go of, and what I've reclaimed. I want to invite you as you're listening, to do what I did not, and that's to be curious.
Have that experimental mindset take what resonates. And leave, what doesn't? So I want you to always listen to this episode and any other, through the lens of your lived truth. So let discernment guide you, not any type of hierarchy. 'cause at the end of the day, we're all equals, okay? The second lesson is that there is no form of tracking that is inherently good or bad.
Tracking is a tool, and any tool in itself is inherently neutral. So let's take a knife, for example. A knife is inherently neutral. You can use it to chop up vegetables and create this deeply nourishing meal, or you can really hurt somebody with it. Intention matters. Knowing your why behind using a tool matters.
I also find it interesting that we have a different perspective on tracking weight, especially for women than we do for other metrics. For example, you probably wouldn't tell a woman that she's greedy or hates herself for being richer. If she tracks her spending, you'd probably think she was responsible and organized.
But as soon as someone tracks the number on the scale, oh boy. Isn't it possible that the only reason they're doing it is because they hate themselves and are withholding love and respect until they hit X number on that scale? Throughout my seven week scale free experiment? I'll be honest, my habits weren't as strong as they usually were.
I made less aligned choices. I was less present, less intentional with nutrition in general, and as a result, my energy tanked. My performance in workouts declined running, started to feel painful instead of this really joyful experience that I always have loved, and my mood was less stable. Even my husband commented on this.
He pointed out that as soon as I stopped weighing myself. I wasn't as disciplined or focused with my choices. The reality is studies have shown that tracking consistently creates change. For example, there was this 2012 study that showed that daily wears were more likely to maintain their weight loss, and here's why.
Having that regular daily data point made them more conscious of their daily choices. Without requiring perfection. So regular weigh-ins and awareness led to aligned intentional tweaks and adjustments. Also, let's just get a little woowoo for a second. In quantum physics, there's this thing called the observer effect that says the act of observation alters the outcome.
So here's a simple version. When scientists take particles like electrons through a double slit, they behave like a wave until someone watches them. When observed they collapse into a particle and behave differently. And at the end of the day, we are all just energy. So the takeaway here is that just by witnessing something, you change it.
And this is why tracking can be one of the most powerful things you can do if you want to create change. It's why when I keep a spending log and track our net worth on a monthly basis, our finances always improve, and my husband and I have both noticed that when we're weighing daily, we're quicker to bounce back from an overly indulgent weekend.
But again, the intention behind the tracking matters. You want to ask yourself, is this coming from a place of self-worth or self punishment? I had to reflect deeply on my own reasons for weighing myself and even what a pursuit of potential weight loss means to me. And this is my story, my reality, it is not everyone's.
So again, please listen with discernment. I have enough data to know that for myself, lower weight means I'm taking good care of myself because I love myself. There's a balance and a consistency and a stability to my habits that actually feels really good. It also means I'm keeping the promises I make to myself around food.
Which is building self-trust and self-trust is one of the most important skills I'm building in my life right now, if not the most important. And because food has always been the biggest place, I've eroded self-trust, this is everything. I have struggled with food since the age of six. So if I can build self-trust in this arena, I trust that I can build it anywhere, and that is super empowering.
Here's what else it means. It's also a sign that I'm building emotional stamina by turning to non-food related ways of coping. So dance journaling with the divine daddies, meditation, breath work, somatic practices. This is not about me hating myself until I see a smaller number. It's about being the woman who shows up from a place of integrity, self-respect, who's in the pursuit of her own potential, because that's fun and exciting, not shameful or punishing.
All right, and lesson number three. This is a big one. If you want to rewire yourself for unconditional self-worth, regardless of numbers, you can't avoid the numbers. I'm gonna be honest again, one other deeper reason I stopped weighing myself a few months ago was because I was frustrated about my weight plateauing.
When I was doing all the right things, the math wasn't math, and I'm actually gonna dive deeper into this in next week's episode, which is gonna be so powerful. So I thought I could avoid the feelings by going seven weeks without weighing in, but I should have known better. 2021. Kayla knew better. I'm gonna share something I wrote in my book, your Body Is Not A Weapon, and I wrote this about four years ago.
I don't talk about this book often, but you can check it out if you're interested. Embodied writing warrior.com/books. This is what I wrote in 2021. Some people recommend you avoid the scale altogether. Because it can create an unhealthy relationship with your body and make you feel like your self-worth is dependent on the number you see on the scale.
My most recent counselor lived in this third camp. To her credit, her specialty was working with women who had extremely unhealthy relationships with food. By the time I showed up in her office, I had done a lot of work around body image, my weight, and my self-worth. My biggest remaining challenge was using binge eating as a coping mechanism.
This therapist gave me tools to manage my emotions without needing to binge eat, and I will always be forever grateful to her for that. And I also believe her advice to stop weighing myself altogether did not serve me. She claimed that weighing myself was a way I was trying to control my weight. It was, she said I should never weigh myself because it wasn't necessary.
At the time, I was struggling with many different emotional issues. I just had a falling out with my best friend of 14 years, and I was still trying to fight off my growing feelings for someone who was not my fiance and felt off limit in so many ways. When I stopped weighing myself, it was an additional stressor on top of all of these other challenges.
While weighing myself was a way I kept my eating habits in check and stayed in control, I personally don't believe this was a bad thing. Control is relative and you can have a healthy amount of control and an unhealthy amount of control. I dutifully stopped weighing myself for about three weeks. I spent that period crumbling under the additional pressure of losing what felt like a security blanket.
I also spent that period eating everything and anything under the sun because I had no immediate feedback for how my choices were affecting my body. By the time I weighed in again, I had gained about 10 to 12 pounds. I realized that there was being coachable and then there was doing things that created a negative impact.
Around that same time, I continued to be told by this counselor that the scale was bad or unnecessary, and it was going to make my binge eating habits worse. The thing was I found not weighing myself was what really seemed to make my binge eating worse during that time. Elizabeth Benton once said something that has always stuck with me.
Avoidance isn't refuge, and it felt like avoidance every time. I avoided looking at the number on the scale. It also wasn't refuge because whether I looked at the number or not, I was still gaining weight from nights of binge eating. The truth was. It wasn't like I ever intended to eliminate the scale from my life forever.
Usually I would set an intention to get my eating habits back on track and then step on the scale when I would most likely have a good number. Then I would delay diving back in and making the healthy changes necessary to my eating habits day after day after day. In my own experience, one of the biggest things that helps me out of a binge eating hole was stepping back on the scale, acknowledging the number, whatever it was, and moving forward to make some changes.
Since that time in 2019, I have experimented with letting go of regular weigh-ins a few times, and the results have always been the same. The funny thing is I never have the desire to let go of the scale when I'm taking great care of my body and spirit. The decision to stop weighing myself has almost always been made during a rough patch when I'm struggling.
So I realized something in 2019, just like every woman's relationship with food and their bodies is unique, so too. Is there relationship with the scale? I also believe to a large degree, that we get to decide what kind of relationship with the scale we have. I did not want to be someone who chose not to weigh themself because they were hiding from reality.
But I also didn't wanna be someone who let the mood they were in for the day. Be determined by a number they saw on the scale first thing in the morning. I wanted to be someone who had a curious, nonjudgmental relationship to the number I saw. I wanted to be able to look at any number without drama, without making it mean something about how good or bad I was.
I simply wanted to be able to look at the number. Acknowledge it. See if there was anywhere I might wanna make changes and move forward with my day. And the only way I knew how to build this skill in my own life was to put repetitions in over time. For me, that looks like a weigh in every morning, regardless of how the night went before.
If I had some pizza with my boyfriend, I still weighed in the next day. For me, it's a red flag. When I stop weighing myself, it's a sign I'm checking out on my body and my goals. My weigh in has become as natural and nondramatic as brushing my teeth. It's part of how I pay attention to my body. And adjust my choices when necessary.
I also don't let the number on the scale be my only measure of progress. Keeping a habit tracker and ensuring I'm staying consistent in my key habits is far more important than any number. It all goes back to prioritizing actions over results. This doesn't mean you're going to ignore your results altogether.
They're just gonna be secondary to where your attention goes. Everyone's relationship with the scale is highly personal. This is what works for me, and I'm not suggesting everyone do this, however, I am encouraging you to think about how it goes when you're weighing yourself regularly versus when you aren't.
Then start to think about the relationship you want to have with the scale. Do you want to stop being afraid of the number you see? Do you wanna stop feeling sick? When you think about weighing yourself? We are always going to be our own best authority. We get to create the relationship we want with everything, our food, our bodies.
Our sexuality and even the bathroom scale. It's a matter of deciding how you want to be figuring out what needs to be done to get there and taking consistent action over time. Alright, so I knew that in 2021 and I still decided to do a seven week scale free experiment again. I forgot the wisdom from my own lived experience.
And the adorably cosmic joke is now I'm in that same place. I am also experiencing the same interesting experience where the math is not mapping with stagnation on the scale when in any other season this probably wouldn't be happening. And what's also interesting is that now. In the past few weeks, I've had a few admittedly more dramatic weigh-ins.
There's been frustration, there's been confusion, and I have to wonder if part of that is taking those seven weeks off and losing that neutrality. I had bent built over time, so I guess I was always meant to learn this lesson. I was always meant to get even better at detaching my worth from numbers on an even deeper level because now this is not just about detaching my worth from my relationship with gravity.
Now it's about detaching my worth from being the woman. Who could once easily and effortlessly shift said relationship with gravity. It has been humbling, but I also know it's incredibly important growth because on the rare occasion, this has happened in the past, and we're talking maybe four days in a row, not 12 plus like it has been.
This time. I would get butt hurt. I would have Theit moment. I would go eat all the things to feel better because it wasn't working anyways. So this season is an opportunity to become someone who shows up because self-trust and integrity matter more than the result. This is a chance to still have faith when it looks like nothing is working.
It looks like showing up for myself anyways because it's more about the person I wanna become than the pace of progress, or even if there's visible progress at all. And this is the fourth lesson, is getting really clear on navigating this season. So this is how I'm navigating it. I am feeling the real emotions present.
I'm grieving that what used to work isn't working. At this point, I'm also grieving the momentum and the identity of someone who makes progress, and even the belief that if I just do the work, the results will show up. So I have ugly cried a few moments out of sheer frustration. I've had the sacred tantrums.
And I've been dancing every morning to release those emotions because here's the important thing, these emotions aren't just from right now. They're from every time. I didn't feel the emotions around this wound and ate instead. Every time it looked like it wasn't working and my hard work wasn't paying off, and I didn't let myself just sit in the discomfort and the doubt and the frustration and the sadness, I now get to do that emotional work to create a deeper level of healing.
And this is something I want you to think about on your own personal growth and your spiritual growth journey, especially when you're in a season where results aren't showing up the way that you hope or expect them to, and you're feeling a lot of emotions and they feel really intense and even overwhelming at times.
That probably means that you are healing old emotions and old events connected to this wound and this growth you're pursuing on a deeper level. So you're not going crazy, you're not overly emotional, you're just doing big processing that is gonna serve you so well in the future. So that's part one of the process, feeling the feelings.
And part two is rewriting the story. About what this means in this season. The rewrite means I get to become the woman who does it anyways, even when she's not seeing a payoff. I get to be the woman who still has faith and keeps going when it looks like nothing's working. I am being given the biggest opportunity for building self-trust and integrity and patience that I've ever been given, and sometimes it still sucks.
Sometimes I wish I saw more progress. I get to feel those feelings and then tell the new stories instead. For as long as I need to keep telling them until they become the new reality. And as I've mentioned, everyone's relationship with the scale with numbers is highly personal. But I would encourage you to reflect on these journal prompts, which you can always find@embodiedwritingwarrior.com slash podcast Number one.
What has my own lived experience taught me about tracking and my relationship with numbers? Number two, what story do I wanna tell about my pursuit of health and weight loss? If that's a goal, what is my truth? And number three, what are my values? And how can I infuse these values into my why for tracking if I choose to track?
And number four, how can tracking certain metrics as decided by you of course actually heal a sticky, problematic relationship between those numbers and self-worth? This. How you get out of math class and into erotic storytelling 3 0 1, and it's my loving reminder to you that you are so much more than a number, and also you're not a bad feminist or shallow if you choose to track certain numbers.
And if this stirred something in you and you are ready to rewrite your version of health, of body confidence and self-worth, and you're ready to stop trying to fix yourself and start truly nourishing yourself. With turn on with your truth, not someone else's, and the kind of power that you've been caging for way too long, then eat Your desire was made for you.
This is my 12 week private immersion for the bold, creative, wild hearted woman who's ready to heal her relationship with food, with her body, and her expression, not by playing nice. But by playing with her own damn fire. So in this container, you are gonna get one-on-one coaching. Somatic work. Super conscious healing sessions, voice note access.
You also get my full Food Freedom Fantasy Program, which is literally the best thing I've ever created. You get the course portal and access to any live rounds I run in the future. You get dance alchemy practices and oh my goodness, so much more. You will not be the same woman at the end of the 12 weeks.
'cause together we're gonna rewrite your entire story. So I will include the link for a complimentary call to adventure session if that speaks to you. And as always, thank you for being here. And until next time, take care.
