We are sharing this chapter of Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat by Katie Hodgetts for members of our Hopeful Book Club.
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Chapter 14
I began this book speaking candidly about my eating disorder, and it’s also how I will end it. In my early twenties, I had mastered the art of diet failure. It was the time when glossy magazines irresponsibly peddled the latest silver bullet for losing weight. I tried them all. Beyoncé’s maple syrup diet – 4/10; calculating points with WeightWatchers – 6/10; even the Cadbury’s Curly Wurly diet, which is exactly what it sounds like – 2/10. Like most fad diets, the trajectory became predictable. I’d start feeling empowered. In the first week I was full of energy and resolve, excited to write down my routine and do my supermarket meal plan. Each restrictive meal I ticked off was a win, with the strictness of my intentions rewarded by tipping scales. But by week two or three, I’d be tired, grumpy and hungry. As with most fad diets, weight loss begins to plateau, and I wasn’t seeing the weight loss that I would be expecting from such an enormous amount of effort and willpower. Physiologically I’d be lacking the necessary nutrients for adequate functioning. The scales didn’t smile back at me, and neither did the woman in the mirror. I grew impatient and my willpower slipped. “One bagel will be fine, right?” would turn into a total food relapse. My body called out for the nutrients and calories it was deficient in and the comfort I’d been deprived of. I’d sit in self-loathing until I found my next dietary method of torture, and the cycle would repeat. Ultimately, nothing ever lasted, and I blamed it on a lack of determination and discipline. I took it as a personal failure and I’d end up heavier than I started, both in weight and in spirit.
Little did I know that buried between the pages of those diet magazines would be a lesson for bettering the planet. Beyond “five ways to beat belly fat”, diet culture revealed an integral lesson about human behaviour in that “what feels good is sustainable”. The diet that will last is the one that makes you feel like your best self. It is the slow and kind lifestyle change that isn’t a diet at all – rather, it becomes an integrated approach to your life. For me, that involved a series of fundamental changes. I started to eat intuitively and properly to fuel my body and I began exercising for my mental health rather than to change my aesthetic. I started de-shaming chocolate and ice cream, which alongside my five-a-day, remain core staples of my diet. I resisted the compulsion to sort my days into “green” and “red” days, depending on whether I’d achieved a faint-worthy calorie deficit or eaten three meals and some sugar. “Success” stopped being a physical metric on my body but the days when I stayed faithful to basing my self-worth being on qualities beyond how I look.
Discipline was replaced with radical encouragement. Rather than, “You should eat a salad today because you’ve eaten like crap this week and you’ve let yourself down”, radical encouragement said, “Hey sweetie, wouldn’t it be wonderful to treat your body to some nutrients, spend some you-time slowly and mindfully assembling a full-bodied salad and maybe invite someone over to share it?” Radical encouragement boosts rather than berates.
An integrated lifestyle change might have started as fervent questions about my meal planning, but it ended up with three square meals of self-love and acceptance, with plenty of snacks in between. Food became a doorway to learn to love and respect myself more. These shifts took a long time and involved a huge amount of repeat, growth and relapse, creeping forward and marching back. I learned that it’s much easier to skip lunch than to engage in the deeply uncomfortable work of learning to love oneself in any shape or size. Yet the latter has been profoundly important.
What Feels good is Sustainable
There are parallels here to bettering the world. Just like a fad diet, there is no one silver bullet to bringing about your desired change. Our campaign may start energizing us with a sense of rigour and purpose, but without seeing the wins or fuelling ourselves appropriately, that energy can start to wane. We begin to question our enormous effort and feel fatigued. We start to have the realization that there is no quick fix, no matter how hard we push.
I began activism with a diet mentality – restriction and discipline. That looked like restricting my carbon emissions as much as possible: no flights, no dairy and no cars. I would say no to holidays, like I’d say no to friends’ birthday meals that could compromise my diet. I would be strict – if there was no vegan option, I’d go hungry or go without water rather than buying a plastic bottle of water. At first, I had feelings of both empowerment and taking a stand. I thought I was taking control of what was within my control, living a life of integrity to change the world. But after a while, I started to envy friends going on holiday, just like I grew envious of those eating cake. I became grumpy and alienated from others, unfollowing on social media my dear friends who were travelling the world. While my individual emissions were down, I was starving myself again, but now of joy and connection.
Like dieting, this restriction led to binges. After a particularly difficult break-up I sat at home wondering where the metaphorical ice cream tub was. I decided, “Screw it! I’m going to Portugal” and flew there for a week of sunshine and surf, but unsurprisingly I didn’t find the desired healing out there. Any voids within aren’t filled by losing weight or hiding in a holiday. I’d packed my sadness in my suitcase. I was still single, still sad, the world was still burning but now I had a tan.
Lifestyle Change Rather Than Fad Diets
Let’s use the example of the climate crisis. Controversially, our climate doesn’t need a diet. We’re taught that decreasing CO2 emissions is the solution to tackling global warming, but how we get there is equally as important when thinking about long-term effectiveness. If our focus is solely on CO2 emission reduction, sure, current technologies, innovations and negative emissions technologies can move us toward this goal. At first glance, that’s awesome, we did it, we won. But I can’t overlook that we’d still exist in a world with widening inequality, a refugee crisis, right-wing extremism and fracturing social relations. Is that winning? Moreover, emission reduction could be effective for a few years, however the capitalist drive for attainment, production and perpetual GDP growth inspires forever striving for “more, more, more”. Conspicuous consumption is the act of purchasing and displaying goods and services primarily to signify wealth, social status or economic power, rather than meeting practical needs. Conspicuous consumption, paired with social media, exposes a broader hierarchy of have and havenots. It is likely that lowering emissions without confronting the psychological drivers of consumption would simply lead to further increased consumption. Emissions would rise again.
The dietary equivalent here is inventing sugarfree alternatives as a solution to increasing rates of obesity – problem solved. Our obesity rates will decline. Not quite. The logic is that fewer calories will result in weight loss, without understanding the psychological drivers behind overconsumption. In reality the advent of zero-calorie drinks and zero-sugar foods has not led to a decline in obesity. The prevalence of severe obesity among US adults increased from 7.7 per cent in 2013–2014 to 9.4 per cent in 2021–2023, highlighting a steady upward trend over the past decade.43 This is for many reasons, but one is that zero-calorie alternatives can give permission for higher rates of overall consumption – for example, thinking if the biscuit is sugar free, then I’ll have three.
If we don’t simultaneously take stock of our widespread societal values and lifestyle choices, technological change and quick-fix diets have a muted impact. Carbon offsetting can be considered our zero-sugar alternative. Carbon offsetting is the process of companies or individuals offsetting their emissions, often by funding tree planting to remove CO2 out of the atmosphere. On paper, a victory. In reality, offsetting can legitimize higher rates of consumption overall – for example, thinking if the flight is carbon free, then I’ll take three. “Offsetting” doesn’t address the underlying consumption driver, nor does it interrogate the winners and losers of the offsetting intervention. Offsetting forests has historically displaced or denied access to Indigenous communities. Where plantations exist, monocultures degrade biodiversity. So, we could end up with lower objective emissions but sustained levels of production, ecological degradation and land-grabbing in the Global South. A victory? Or another failed diet?
What the planet needs is a lifestyle change. What I mean by that is that collectively, societies, mostly in the Global North and in market economies, need a lifestyle change – one where worth is not rooted in material possessions and we aren’t anaesthetizing ourselves with the addictive sugar of the modern-day we call convenience.
Toward Sustainable Changemaking
Changemaking becomes more sustainable when we approach it like a lifestyle change rather than a fad diet. One example here is slow travel, opting where possible for an alternate public transport to flying. Under diet mentality, I saw slow travel and the hours I spent on the train as one of my climate commitments. It was a sacrifice of time, money and productivity. Objectively, it is. What first felt empowering and morally superior, melted into bitter resentment as I sat on a 24-hour bus from Barcelona to London, questioning what on earth the point was. Shifting to a lifestyle-change mindset enabled me to ponder: when do we ever have the time and permission just to do nothing? When can I sit and stare out the window for eight or more hours? If I did this at home on the sofa in my lounge, my housemates would stage an intervention.
Now, slow travel feels like personal maintenance and an investment in myself. If I were to fly, I would move swiftly from one experience to the next without any space or time to reflect. I’d deny myself the opportunity to marinate in the memories, alchemize the learnings and reflect on where I would place this experience in the tapestry of my life. I would instead immediately move on to the next thing, and the next and the next, without drinking in the absolute wonder and diversity of right now. Life may feel like it’s moving too quickly and passing me by. Intentional space for reflection is almost impossible to come by in our extroverted, high-paced modern world, so I reframed the time spent not flying as “internal activation” time. It felt like a gift rather than a sacrifice. I used the time to journal, to think, to sit, to be. And it felt good. This was still a decision grounded in climate, but this reframe was in service to me, rather than just in service to climate.
Fad diets are rooted in the misery of giving something up, whereas making long-term, sustainable changes, while uncomfortable, can come with the Changemaking is a joy of abundance. Changemaking life of abundance. is often positioned as a life with limits. This is a diet mentality. But changemaking is a life of abundance. I am a more fully realized person since joining the climate movement. I am a more balanced human: slow travel offers a rare opportunity to escape the rapid pace of the modern world. I am a better cook: plant-based diets will teach you to hunt for flavour in international cuisines. I am a more content person: rejecting conspicuous consumption has forced me to find my worth beyond material success. I have a bigger heart: constantly facing what we are losing and the suffering around the world has made me infinitely more grateful for what I have.
A final key point to “what feels good is sustainable” and the lifestyle change it engenders is unlocking what works for you. Your place doesn’t need to be centre stage, and it doesn’t even need to be at a march. Where you land might be seasonal. My last half decade of what feels good and authentic has not been spent organizing direct-action work. It has been being backstage, supporting others. This role is no less valid. I’m sure one day I will return to organizing, because campaigns and mass-mobilizations are essential democratic functions and like energetic fault lines for me, but for now my fire is elsewhere. Your place could be delivering speeches, but equally it could be designing compelling communications, making films, hosting book groups or even doing the accountancy for a campaign group. We each have something to give, so find the thing that fits you. Chase the roles and formats that feel nourishing.
Changemaking as a Way of Life
I thought I’d failed at diets, but it turned out that diets failed me. They are set up to fail, so that you buy that next magazine to find another one. You’re not the problem, diet culture is. It is not sustainable by design. In a changemaking setting it’s probably not that you’re not doing enough, it’s that active and meaningful participation can be made extraordinarily difficult by government and structures. Only when I reframed my changemaking toward something that felt good did it start to become not just about the end goal but the path I was walking. A new blueprint for changemaking, reframed as a long-term lifestyle change, nourishes not only our campaigns but our relationships, wellbeing, sense of self and life satisfaction.
