The pretty pictures of dietitians posing with fruit need to go

I’m wearing bike shorts and an oversized t-shirt, my hair is in a messy ponytail, and my hands smell like an insane mix of four different lotions from Bath & Body Works.

It was a Thursday evening and I wearily wandered through the mall searching for a pair of earrings to wear to my friend’s wedding.

I was so tired that the thought of leaving seemed daunting. I browsed more than usual, putting off the walk to my car.

As I approached the food court, I heard the clanging metal spatulas and smelled the mix of smoke and steam as chicken skin and teriyaki sauce hit the grill at Sarku Japan.

I’ve been eating this exact chicken in this exact mall since I was a kid. My grandma would bring me here every time we visited the mall together, to the point where you might say I’m conditioned in a Pavlovian way to expect to eat it when I come here.

I approached the counter and ordered chicken teriyaki with fried rice.

When my hands reach the plastic box sitting on the glass counter, I know that there is no way I am going to survive the 10-minute ride home with this in my car. It smells too good. I need to sit in the food court and eat this right now, so I grab some utensils and find a table at the periphery of the room.

My mouth is at the edge of burning from the hot teriyaki sauce as I strategically take forkfuls from the overflowing container, trying not to let anything spill out.

Here it is!

Just a few bites into my dinner, I began to feel self-conscious.

I’m wearing bike shorts and an oversized t-shirt, my hair is in a messy ponytail, and my hands smell like an insane mix of four different lotions from Bath & Body Works. My fresh tattoo is aching on my left arm as I shovel teriyaki chicken into my mouth with my right.

I looked around the room and wondered if people could actually see me since no one was looking in my direction. Then I wondered if imagining myself as invisible in crowds is some kind of sign of social anxiety and took a mental note to Google it later.

I began to rehearse my lines for when I run into someone that I know. “Hi! What a nice surprise (*a lie*)! I had a really long day and I was so hungry so I had to grab something to eat.”

The fact that I am sitting here making up excuses indicates that I am not comfortable with being seen in public eating fast food.

I began to wonder where this intense wave of shame just appeared from. Because actually, I want to be completely okay with this entire experience. I want to be able to eat fast food in public and feel relaxed about it.¹

I think it was around 2005 when I first saw the movie Supersize Me: the same movie where I learned that being a “nutritionist” was a job that people can do, when my views on fast food began to change. We’re meant to leave that movie feeling disgusted at the sight of fast food and cast judgment on the people who eat it. Soon I’d be nodding along to Michael Pollan’s books and feeling cool about memorizing the lines: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

My feelings of shame around eating fast food, or anything that anyone might call conventionally “unhealthy”², grew stronger when I began studying nutrition and became a Registered Dietitian. If you do a Google image search for “dietitian”, you’ll see lots of thin women posing with fruit.³ And yes, I have even been that dietitian posing with fruit.

Photo from 2018, a time when I was tracking everything I ate on MyFitnessPal.

Being a dietitian is one of those jobs where it feels like there is no boundary between your personal habits and your professional capabilities.

To be a dietitian seen enjoying fast food is to break the character that many people believe you are meant to be playing, like an oncologist smoking a cigarette.

It’s completely exhausting, and worse, it’s setting an unrealistic standard for people to look up to.

In the book Atomic Habits⁴ by James Clear, he’s explicit about the link between our habits and our identities, saying, “Your habits are how you embody a particular identity. When you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. When you study, you embody the identity of someone who is studious. What identity are you embodying today? Who are your habits helping you become?”

For me, the identity of the “healthy eater”, the identity implicitly tied to my professional title, does more harm than good - both to me AND the people who interact with me as a dietitian.

I’d rather you know me as someone who loves food of all kinds, and perhaps even think I’m decent at cooking it. In order to be that person, I need to unapologetically eat and cook the foods I enjoy and let everyone see that.

I think if you see me eating teriyaki chicken at the mall, it’s a better representation of a work-in-progress towards a healthy relationship with food than if you were to catch me posing for a picture with two pomegranates.

1. I want to acknowledge that for people in larger bodies, this is much more difficult because of weight stigma. If you find yourself casting judgments on other people’s eating habits, that is a very good sign that you need to take a look at your own relationship with food and your body.

2. Labeling foods as “unhealthy” is not something I do anymore, you can read more about that here.

3. And very strangely, many of them have stethoscopes, which is not a tool that dietitians use even in a hospital setting, but alright!

4. I think this book has some helpful ideas, but it’s also full of some strange nutrition “tips” and discussions about weight loss, so I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re not in a place where you’re feeling able to ignore those parts.