People-Pleasing and Diet Culture
Something that I regularly work with is people pleasing and “fawning” as well as challenging diet culture and fatphobia. While in a session where we were trying to dissect and dismantle this individual’s destructive people pleasing tendencies; I drew the parallel between people pleasing and diet culture. Stay with me…
Being a child of the 90’s, and growing up in the early 00’s, you couldn’t escape diet culture. There is one yogurt commercial that comes to mind that had the very catchy jingle about an “itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow polka dot bikini.” If you have not seen this commercial, the premise was a woman, who had a perfectly lovely and healthy looking body, ate lite yogurt in order to fit in this yellow polka dot bikini at the beach. Throughout the commercial it starts with her being embarrassed of her body and trying desperately to hide herself; until the floatie she is holding drops and it is revealed she is thin and is worthy of being perceived by other beach goers. Now, we could talk for days about so many different problematic themes and elements of that commercial alone. But let's talk about how we can use that to describe the effects of people pleasing.
There are many reasons we develop people pleasing as a coping skill; and a type I see most often is it is used to protect an individual from rejection and judgment. This is a very valid fear, especially in modern day society and there are definitely moments where people pleasing is adaptive and a good coping mechanism. However, if it becomes the only way we know how to resolve conflict or maintain relationships; it is incredibly destructive in many aspects of our lives.
When we fawn/people please, it is common to try to shrink ourselves in order to not burden or inconvenience other people. Sometimes we do that by shrinking and denying ourselves our thoughts and opinions, and therefore we can sacrifice our authenticity to make room for someone else.
What I see a lot, in both people pleasing and diet culture, is an individual who “has done all the right things” to accommodate others, or they now “fit into that tiny bikini” and they are left feeling unsatisfied and hollow. Like with pretty much all of the fad diets, it also is way more unhealthy for us in the long run, and people pleasing is no different.
It is a biological need as humans to be in community with other humans. If we are “restricting” that need by not being seen and understood, it is incredibly damaging to our mental and physical health. I will link a YouTube video that talks about the ramifications of loneliness if you would like to learn more: https://youtu.be/n3Xv_g3g-mA?si=n-pJ7r3wLUBO7vwn
Unfortunately there isn’t a perfect formula to working through this in a lot of cases. However, finding what works best for you to process through this and finding safety in setting boundaries and taking up more space in your life, is so much more satisfying than living off of “lite yogurt.”
-Elisa
