What Ease Isn’t
When you explore ease from a weight-inclusive lens, you see that diet culture keeps selling you a shit-ton of work dressed up as easy.
You know that feeling when you can take a real deep breath and just put your worries down for a minute. That’s ease. And for most of us, it shows up about as often as a free Saturday.
I want to talk about ease today because it’s been sold to us as so many different things that it’s hard to recognize the real one when it shows up. Diet culture has been especially busy in this department. It has trained you to push past exhaustion so you can “eat right,” to treat punishment as virtue, and to believe that if you just tried harder, ease would somehow be waiting at the end of all that trying. Sound familiar?
Where We Are on the Roadmap
We are in Step 4 of the NWLR Roadmap, Sustainable Self-Care. Within Step 4, we’re working through what has to be in place for self-care to actually be sustainable. We just finished a stretch on belonging. Now we are looking at ease.
In the next article, I’ll walk you through a practice for seeing and hearing the feelings that have been blocking ease (the stuck, tired, and embarrassed feelings most of us know well). But before we get to the practice, I want to make sure we are on the same page about what ease actually is.
Thanks for Reading NWLR
You’re reading this newsletter because you want to prevent or manage diabetes without diet culture. Hi, I’m Megrette, a weight-inclusive dietitian and diabetes educator. If you are looking for one-on-one support, you can work with me at Nourish.
If you missed the recent articles on belonging, here’s the short version.
Belonging is part of being human.
It is in your DNA.
You already have it.
Society has framed belonging as something you have to purchase or perform, which is the lie at the center of so much of this work.
You don’t earn belonging. You have belonging (and it’s okay to reclaim it.)
Ease is different. Ease is a basic human need, and like all basic needs, it arrives when you release what is blocking it, not when you push, run, or try harder to grasp it.
What Ease Actually Is
Let me start with the relatable stuff. Ease is:
Being able to take a deep breath and put down your worries
Having enjoyable, healthy-promoting foods within reach
Having time to think
Space to function
Notice that none of these require you to do something extraordinary. Ease isn’t a reward you earn for being good. It is a basic human need, the kind of thing your nervous system actually requires to function.
What Ease Isn’t
Here is where it gets tricky, because so much of what we’ve been told is ease isn’t actually ease. Ease isn’t:
Pushing past exhaustion to “eat right.”
Punishing yourself mentally, physically, or emotionally
Skipping work to play on your phone
Avoiding dishes, laundry, or personal finances
Ease is space to function. It isn’t dodging the necessary tasks of your life.
Why the Counterfeits Are So Convincing
Matt Willis made a reel that I keep thinking about. He lists all the ways things get sold to us as one thing when they’re actually another. Scrolling is sold as rest when it’s actually distraction. Fast food is sold as a pleasure, even though it doesn’t always taste great. Alcohol gets sold as fun when it’s really escape. The full list is worth a look.
The pattern is selling you a counterfeit offer that provides a small relief, just enough to feel like something, but it doesn’t actually deliver what it promised. You scroll for twenty minutes, and you don’t feel rested. You eat the fast food, and you don’t feel nourished. The counterfeit is doing something, but it isn’t doing what it was sold for. And because we keep reaching for it, expecting the real thing, we keep coming up short.
The Dark Playground
Tim Urban has a TED Talk in which he describes a place called the “dark playground.” It’s where we go to avoid what needs to be done. The dark playground is where I end up when the task at hand feels too big, too undefined, or too heavy, and my brain reaches for a small relief instead.
I know that the dark playground isn’t me being lazy; it’s me being overwhelmed. If the thing you are avoiding has been made impossibly heavy by diet culture, by weight stigma, by years of being told you are doing it wrong, of course, your brain reaches for the scroll or the snack or the fifth tab of online shopping. That isn’t a moral failing. That’s a person trying to find a small piece of relief in a system that has set them up to be exhausted.
Why This Matters for Sustainable Self-Care
Sustainable self-care isn’t possible if it is always hard. Ease is the key. The counterfeits keep you cycling between effort and collapse, which is the opposite of sustainable. Ease is what makes sustainable self-care possible.
So What Does Real Ease Require?
Ease is what results when you align with your values. That’s the short answer. The longer answer is that alignment becomes possible when three conditions are in place.
Basic needs met. You can’t have ease if you are hungry, exhausted, or in pain. The body has to be tended to first. This is where ease and food meet, and it’s why so much of NWLR is about adding food back to your day instead of taking it away.
Autonomy. Ease requires the ability to choose. If every food decision is dictated by a rule, you don’t have ease; you have compliance. Compliance isn’t ease, even if it looks tidy from the outside.
Agency. You can see that you are a bright and able person. Diet culture has spent years convincing you otherwise, and that messaging is loud. Seeing your own brightness and ability is what lets you actually use your autonomy. Without agency, even good choices feel like guesses.
When you’re in alignment with your values, ease shows up. It’s not a reward or a privilege; it’s the result of taking the steps to make what you need reachable. It’s not about being “good.”
What Comes Next
Now you know what ease is and what it isn’t. Remember to subscribe because the next article will help you overcome the familiar feelings of being stuck, tired, and embarrassed.
If you want one-on-one support while you work through this, you can find me at Nourish.