When I was in college, I declared Diet Coke my enemy. My reason was the only good reason to declare something an enemy: someone wrote a bad blog about it.
A girl I didn’t know published an op-ed in the school newspaper telling all the reasons why she was truly and deeply devoted to Diet Coke. It wasn’t anything serious, but it pissed me off so much that I started fighting with the girls in my sorority kitchen over it. Couldn’t they see that he was making us all look like idiots by posting something like this?
I was a newly converted gender studies major at an SEC sorority, which is a little like being Snow White in that scene where she runs through the haunted forest and keeps getting harassed by scary faces, except the faces Terrifying were the racism and misogyny that I could see and name clearly, for the first time. Fortunately for all of us, any evidence of this article appears to have been scrubbed from the internet, so all I’m left with is the outline of my outrage from that moment and a deep hatred for Diet Coke.
My opposition to Diet Coke was political, a vehement objection that reflected everything that reeked of “diet,” and there it was, right in the name of the can. To diet explicitly was to admit that I had succumbed to the miasma of feminine self-loathing. If I was going to have a soda, I would proudly order Coca-Cola whole with sugar, a political act of self-love that defied the collective ritual of “watching what we eat,” even as I watched what I ate, constantly.
I lived in an uneasy truce with my body, vowing to avoid diets and diet foods and, in return, believing my body would never get sick, gain weight, or go rogue. This was magical thinking, of course, but I was denying the ways in which I allowed this to control me; Constantly reflecting on the ways I wasn’t dieting still took up a lot of space in my brain and I often ended up paralyzed in front of the open refrigerator, unable to make a decision about what to eat for lunch that fit the bill. countless rules that intersect and contradict in my head. I didn’t allow myself to explicitly live by the dietary rules I knew, but they constantly loomed in the background, a yardstick against which every decision was measured.
Last year I finally began eating disorder treatment that focused on intuitive eating, a framework that discourages assigning morality to foods and food groups and encourages paying close attention to hunger cues and cravings as a way to guide eating habits. Little by little I put aside the thousands of food rules that I kept cataloged in my mind and for six months I felt freedom. Then came prediabetes.
I was finishing up putting on my makeup the morning of my partner’s graduation in May when I got the news that my A1C was in the prediabetic range. I didn’t have time to panic Google because we had to pick up my in-laws and begin a highly choreographed routine of ticket management, sun protection, and snacks that would last all day. But after it was all over, as I lay in bed, drunk on red wine and my phone glowing two inches from my eyes, I read deeply into the prediabetes subreddit. I learned that prediabetes is a condition in which blood sugar rises above healthy levels and, if left uncontrolled, can develop into diabetes. As with diabetes, prediabetes can develop through a combination of genetics and lifestyle; According to the CDC, one-third of American adults have prediabetes. I have a strong family history of diabetes on both sides, and Asians are also among the groups of people most at risk for prediabetes and diabetes, so in retrospect it seems overdetermined.
Before that day, my relationship with the world of diabetes, blood sugar, and insulin was distant, but I had a vague awareness of the morals assigned to the different types. Type 1 diabetes was the one I had when I was a child: the one Nick Jonas has. Innocent. Innocent. Type 2 was the type one “gave to oneself” after living an indulgent life. It conjures up images of men in their 60s refusing to stretch or drink water despite their wives’ pleas. Blame. Immorality.
I thought I was above blaming people for their health conditions, even in the privacy of my own mind. But the tendrils of ableism are cunning, and sometimes only reveal themselves when directed toward the only viable target: oneself. I realized I had been hiding deeper, unpleasant feelings beneath the surface.
The strongest was shame, which did not cling to any thoughts but rather contaminated the way I looked at and related to my body. My thoughts bounced from shame at what I had done to my body (of course, it was my fault), to fear at how quickly this could turn into type 2 diabetes (Reddit said 3-6 months). ) and confusion over how it had happened.
I was wondering if intuitive eating was responsible. Surely, the snacks I indulged in with abandon over the past year were responsible for my high A1C. Could I even trust the dietitian I worked with last year? I didn’t know what was safe to believe.
I read articles about managing prediabetes and felt like all the old dietary rules were coming back. My new priority from now on was to try to keep my blood sugar from rising for long periods of time. Your blood sugar always rises after a meal, but there are a variety of things you can do to make sure that spike doesn’t get too high for too long: go for a walk after eating, prepare half your plate with vegetables, prioritize protein Carbohydrates, combination of proteins and fats. with carbohydrates, and always remember that sugar is a carbohydrate and sugar is in basically everything in this country, so good luck.
I decided to give myself three months to see what lifestyle changes alone could do for my A1C and reluctantly committed to my new diet.
I spent the summer experimenting with low-carb recipes, drinking a ton of mocktails with apple cider vinegar, and chopping up raw vegetables. Meanwhile, Oprah, Lizzo and Kelly Clarkson debuted new, lithe bodies after taking weight-loss drugs, and Ariana Grande received concerned comments about her health in the Wicked press tour. I switched from oat milk to dairy in my lattes and smoothies and Kourtney Kardashian’s supplement brand Lemme launched a GLP-1 Ozempic dupe. I ate a lot of salads and discovered glucose-friendly foods that didn’t feel like a sacrifice. Chicken wings and Caesar salad became my new go-tos when eating out at restaurants. Influencer Liv Schmidt was banned from TikTok for posting content promoting eating disorders.
Eliminating sweets was the hardest part because I have a huge sweet tooth. I love sour candies, I love chocolate chip cookies, and I love cherry Coke. In the first weeks of my new diet, I dreamed of eating whole cookies and cakes and even in the dreams I felt the shame of knowing that my blood sugar was spiking, ruining everything.
I felt uncomfortable because I was hungry all the time, but also because what I was doing felt so much like a diet. I refused to call it that at the time, favoring euphemisms like “my new lifestyle” and the vaguer “you know, all the changes” while waving my hands. I was horrified that I could so easily slip into Diet Woman mode, examining the nutritional information for every food and logging my meals in MyFitnessPal to count my macros.
Once, in a cafeteria in front of a normal gossip live show, I saved a yogurt when I realized it had almost 30 grams of sugar. I made sure to make it clear to the acquaintance I was standing in line with that I was acting this way because I had prediabetes, not because I’m someone who actually cares about how much sugar I eat. However, writing this now, I wonder what the difference is.
After six weeks, I no longer felt so deprived. People told me I would lose a lot of my sweet tooth and they were right; I still crave chocolate, but my desire for sweets is much less pronounced than before. After three months, I had lowered my A1C, not quite out of the prediabetic range, but very close. The changes I made worked for me.
I also lost 13 percent of my body weight, a return to my pre-pandemic size. Clothes that used to fit me perfectly now fall off and I’m angry because I used to like the way they looked. My family members praised my weight loss and I muttered thank you, uncomfortable with the knowledge that the changes were visible enough for people to see on their phone screens across the country. By losing weight, I felt like I had betrayed the version of me that went through eating disorder treatment, that didn’t believe in “good” or “bad” foods, that wasn’t afraid of calories or carbs.
A couple of weeks ago, we got tickets to a late movie. When we got to the lobby, I saw that the theater had those Coca-Cola Freestyle machines. There were so many sugar-free options that I felt overwhelmed. I bought a 20-ounce mug and filled it with caffeine-free Diet Coke, half cherry and half vanilla. Look, I know about aspartame, but I also know how it felt to be able to have this candy without a blood sugar spike or a caffeine rush, and that feeling was fantastic. As I sat in the darkened theater, I couldn’t believe how excited I was to be drinking Diet Coke, that drink I made fun of for so long.
There’s been a lot of talk this year about how our cultural pendulum of preferred female bodies is swinging back toward thinness, and I was initially hesitant to write this essay because I worried I was contributing to the body positivity backlash. The hardest part of these changes has been finding a way to hold multiple truths in my mind at once. I believe in the political roots of the body positive movement, despite how distorted the modern conception has become, refracted through 50 years of capitalism. But I’m learning to forgive myself when I look and act like a woman on a diet, because my body is a little less efficient than the average body at processing carbohydrates. I know I will feel better when I am intentional about when and how much I consume. Sometimes that means some Diet Coke as a treat.