Care as Anti-Diet Practice: Unifying a Fragmented Movement

In this chapter, I explore how women’s anti-diet practices—manifesting in diverse radical self-care and anti-diet talk practices—all have one important feature in common: they are unified by care. This includes care for oneself, care for others, and care for society at large as a broader ‘anti-diet’ project. Drawing on (Yang, Educational Philosophy and Theory 46:1522–1540, 2014) discussion of the conditions that facilitate social change, adapted from Bourdieu’s theory of practice, I explore how women’s anti-diet practices are made possible by their investments in care, manifesting in the following conditions: (1) Cracks in the field(s) where diet culture thrives, (2) interrupters coming into the field, or those already at the margins of a field, becoming aware of its unspoken rules through sustained reflexivity, and (3) branching out to become experts of one’s own experience through broadening one’s knowledge on the topic (via explicit pedagogy).