Diets and dieting
sioneva frequently makes posts on her syndicated journal relating to fat acceptance. I don't really intend to say anything about the movement of itself here, but for the record, I broadly agree with its while also strongly agreeing with the argument made under the social criticism section of that Wikipedia page (I don't, on the other hand, agree with the criticisms oriented around health issues; frankly anyone who doesn't realise that you can be Unhealthy At Any Size needs their heads checking, so focusing on obesity as a critical factor strikes me as kind of ludicrous).
Recently she posted a piece entitled "Semantics and FA" that had as part of its premise the following:My husband [claims] that the word "dieting" is not, by necessity, "calorie restriction" but can just mean healthier eating habits. I know my husband also has tried to convince me that even if it IS about calorie restriction, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.
Which is all well and good - except for the fact that I've never said anything of the sort.
I don't necessarily disagree with the fact that "dieting" usually boils down to calorie restriction: the word means to deliberately control your intake of food and drink, and regardless of your ultimate goal, the end result of so doing is usually a reduction in calories. Nor do I recall a single occasion when I've outright stated that dieting does not mean this. I have said that a diet does not have to refer to such a regimented intake - although it obviously can - because even when it's referring to a weight-loss programme, diet is simply a catch-all term for the food and drink that is ingested and imbibed. Semantically the two terms are quite distinct.
Regardless of how it's couched, however, the real issue here is that this is not and has never been a discussion about semantics. What I fundamentally disagree with is the scope. A diet, in the sense of calorie restriction, is defined as (and I'm taking my definitions from dictionary.com, because it's free and I'm not fortunate enough to have access to OED) "to select or limit the food one eats to improve one's physical condition or to lose weight". There are no conditions or restrictions on what that entails; if you deliberately choose to restrict your intake in some fashion for the specific purpose of improving your health or weight, then that is, semantically, dieting. For example - and I mention this example because it is the one that led to our disagreement in the first place - quen_elf at some point in the past decided he needed to lose some weight, which he did by not drinking soda and eating less junk food for a period of time. He referred to that as going on a diet, and I concur with that description.
sioneva does not. Having spent most of her teenage years being told she was overweight, being unfavourably compared to skinnier relatives and moving from one diet to the next in an effort to lose weight that, in reality, never needed to be lost, the concept of dieting holds far more significance. As she puts it:Dieting means that now, in this moment, you are no longer eating all the foods that scream your name the loudest, because if you do, you are a failure and no one will love you ... You dust off the diet scale (you already have one in your cupboard from the last diet) and put it up on the counter. You pull out your measuring cups, which instead of being exciting tools to create delicious meals become fixed, immovable sentinels guarding your food intake ... When you start dipping your fork into salad dressing before taking a bite of bare lettuce, to cut back on calories consumed from dressing, or just eliminate salad dressing altogether and dump vinegar all over your lettuce, you will feel virtuous, beautiful, light, and clean. When you fail, backslide, or give in to your hunger and actually eat something that tastes good but goes beyond your calorie limit, you will loathe yourself and know that you are the ugliest, fattest failure ever to set foot on this planet.
I know all this, and I know how hard it's been for her, how hard it still is. I freely acknowledge that I'm not always as supportive as I could be, because I find the stubborn mental block regarding self-image and the perceived lack of effort and motivation immensely frustrating to deal with at times; yet I also understand that dieting is something that has scarred her more deeply than any physical wound ever could, especially where that wound was inflicted by her own family. There's not much to be gained from being critical, nor does it often feel as if proactive support is particularly productive, so those issues really something that she needs to deal with at her own pace; which is essentially what HAES is about.
HOWEVER.
This is not what "dieting" means. This is what dieting means to her. This is the significance that she attaches to it. This is the connotation that is conjured in her mind by the word diet and the lifetime of nutritional treadmills that it entails. No-one is disregarding the importance of that to her (and really, I wonder whether the perception that those associations are being blithely dismissed is what led to this becoming a bone of contention in the first place), but semantically it's irrelevant, because those associations are separate and apart from the semantic definitions. Linguistics can be cold like that.
That's not to say that the idea of connotation does not crop up within semantics, but when it does it is as a counterpoint to denotation. Every word can have a connotation, but it is entirely dependent on context; in isolation, it's "just" a word (I can feel a whole world of linguists waiting to jump on me for saying that...), and any meaning we ascribe to it is entirely personal. Normally context is lexical, but it doesn't have to be. For example, in the following three sentences the context - and associated connotation - comes entirely from the delivery:She's so thin. (denotation - statement of fact)
She's so thin! (ostensibly positive connotation, with thin being a good thing)
She's so thin! (negative connotation, e.g. anorexic)
Negative connotations are readily apparent from sioneva's posts about dieting: "dieting is a mini-death"; "dieting sucks you in and takes over your entire world"; "Diet culture" is probably about as close neutral as it gets, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that we're not talking about a good thing.
Those sentiments are unsurprising and understandable, and it is not my intention to gainsay them. But the suggestion that such connotations are inherent to the words - that the definition of a diet and dieting is contingent upon someone's personal opinion of what constitutes one - is simply not true. "Dieting never, ever means that you are eating healthily because of an existing health condition OTHER than something you perceive as being weight-related. If you reduce sugar because you have PCOS, you are not "dieting." You’re just eating less sugar." Err, no; if you are deliberately following a regimen of any sort, regardless of the purpose, you are dieting. Any other interpretation is a cultural/societal judgment, not an objective assessment. Foodstuffs that are prepared for such a purpose are dietetic. You could even make the case that someone who is deliberately intaking a specific range of food and drink to put on weight is, strictly speaking, dieting (granted this does rather fly in the face of what I said earlier about calorie restriction, but I'm only positing it as a hypothetical situation). The semantics are unequivocal, and the fact that the most common usage of the words relates to intentional weight loss is ultimately neither here nor there - as is any personal baggage that brings.
Recently she posted a piece entitled "Semantics and FA" that had as part of its premise the following:My husband [claims] that the word "dieting" is not, by necessity, "calorie restriction" but can just mean healthier eating habits. I know my husband also has tried to convince me that even if it IS about calorie restriction, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad.
Which is all well and good - except for the fact that I've never said anything of the sort.
I don't necessarily disagree with the fact that "dieting" usually boils down to calorie restriction: the word means to deliberately control your intake of food and drink, and regardless of your ultimate goal, the end result of so doing is usually a reduction in calories. Nor do I recall a single occasion when I've outright stated that dieting does not mean this. I have said that a diet does not have to refer to such a regimented intake - although it obviously can - because even when it's referring to a weight-loss programme, diet is simply a catch-all term for the food and drink that is ingested and imbibed. Semantically the two terms are quite distinct.
Regardless of how it's couched, however, the real issue here is that this is not and has never been a discussion about semantics. What I fundamentally disagree with is the scope. A diet, in the sense of calorie restriction, is defined as (and I'm taking my definitions from dictionary.com, because it's free and I'm not fortunate enough to have access to OED) "to select or limit the food one eats to improve one's physical condition or to lose weight". There are no conditions or restrictions on what that entails; if you deliberately choose to restrict your intake in some fashion for the specific purpose of improving your health or weight, then that is, semantically, dieting. For example - and I mention this example because it is the one that led to our disagreement in the first place - quen_elf at some point in the past decided he needed to lose some weight, which he did by not drinking soda and eating less junk food for a period of time. He referred to that as going on a diet, and I concur with that description.
sioneva does not. Having spent most of her teenage years being told she was overweight, being unfavourably compared to skinnier relatives and moving from one diet to the next in an effort to lose weight that, in reality, never needed to be lost, the concept of dieting holds far more significance. As she puts it:Dieting means that now, in this moment, you are no longer eating all the foods that scream your name the loudest, because if you do, you are a failure and no one will love you ... You dust off the diet scale (you already have one in your cupboard from the last diet) and put it up on the counter. You pull out your measuring cups, which instead of being exciting tools to create delicious meals become fixed, immovable sentinels guarding your food intake ... When you start dipping your fork into salad dressing before taking a bite of bare lettuce, to cut back on calories consumed from dressing, or just eliminate salad dressing altogether and dump vinegar all over your lettuce, you will feel virtuous, beautiful, light, and clean. When you fail, backslide, or give in to your hunger and actually eat something that tastes good but goes beyond your calorie limit, you will loathe yourself and know that you are the ugliest, fattest failure ever to set foot on this planet.
I know all this, and I know how hard it's been for her, how hard it still is. I freely acknowledge that I'm not always as supportive as I could be, because I find the stubborn mental block regarding self-image and the perceived lack of effort and motivation immensely frustrating to deal with at times; yet I also understand that dieting is something that has scarred her more deeply than any physical wound ever could, especially where that wound was inflicted by her own family. There's not much to be gained from being critical, nor does it often feel as if proactive support is particularly productive, so those issues really something that she needs to deal with at her own pace; which is essentially what HAES is about.
HOWEVER.
This is not what "dieting" means. This is what dieting means to her. This is the significance that she attaches to it. This is the connotation that is conjured in her mind by the word diet and the lifetime of nutritional treadmills that it entails. No-one is disregarding the importance of that to her (and really, I wonder whether the perception that those associations are being blithely dismissed is what led to this becoming a bone of contention in the first place), but semantically it's irrelevant, because those associations are separate and apart from the semantic definitions. Linguistics can be cold like that.
That's not to say that the idea of connotation does not crop up within semantics, but when it does it is as a counterpoint to denotation. Every word can have a connotation, but it is entirely dependent on context; in isolation, it's "just" a word (I can feel a whole world of linguists waiting to jump on me for saying that...), and any meaning we ascribe to it is entirely personal. Normally context is lexical, but it doesn't have to be. For example, in the following three sentences the context - and associated connotation - comes entirely from the delivery:She's so thin. (denotation - statement of fact)
She's so thin! (ostensibly positive connotation, with thin being a good thing)
She's so thin! (negative connotation, e.g. anorexic)
Negative connotations are readily apparent from sioneva's posts about dieting: "dieting is a mini-death"; "dieting sucks you in and takes over your entire world"; "Diet culture" is probably about as close neutral as it gets, but it doesn't take a genius to realise that we're not talking about a good thing.
Those sentiments are unsurprising and understandable, and it is not my intention to gainsay them. But the suggestion that such connotations are inherent to the words - that the definition of a diet and dieting is contingent upon someone's personal opinion of what constitutes one - is simply not true. "Dieting never, ever means that you are eating healthily because of an existing health condition OTHER than something you perceive as being weight-related. If you reduce sugar because you have PCOS, you are not "dieting." You’re just eating less sugar." Err, no; if you are deliberately following a regimen of any sort, regardless of the purpose, you are dieting. Any other interpretation is a cultural/societal judgment, not an objective assessment. Foodstuffs that are prepared for such a purpose are dietetic. You could even make the case that someone who is deliberately intaking a specific range of food and drink to put on weight is, strictly speaking, dieting (granted this does rather fly in the face of what I said earlier about calorie restriction, but I'm only positing it as a hypothetical situation). The semantics are unequivocal, and the fact that the most common usage of the words relates to intentional weight loss is ultimately neither here nor there - as is any personal baggage that brings.