Today I want to talk about how we can un-diet academia.
I'm going to preface this with a content warning here because I am going to be talking about diet culture, wellness culture and using an anti-diet approach to critique academic overwork culture. If this is going to be triggering for you, skip this one! I have plenty of other episodes that you can listen to instead.
Recently, I have been reading a lot about un-dieting, intuitive eating and Health at Every Size®. And I have to tell you, the anti-diet perspective is transformative. It's rooted in fat liberation, disability justice, and intersectional feminism. Anti-Diet is a book by Christy Harrison, and I'm going to be using it a lot today. I'm also influenced by Sonya Renee Taylor, and by the Health at Every Size® movement. The impetus for this episode is really how we can use an anti-diet approach to better understand the culture of overwork and burnout in academics. So academic grind culture is another way of saying that, or the kind of workaholism that we see within academia. The anti-diet perspective does really well critiquing diet, culture and providing alternatives, and I want to bring that perspective into academia.
I'm not an expert in intuitive eating or Health at Every Size®, so any mistakes that I make, I apologize in advance. I will have some links directly to Christy Harrison and to other resources, where you can learn more about this approach.
We are so caught up every day and what we should be doing and the expectations of our departments of our students of our institutions. We're so caught up in the habits that we've learned from grad school and the kind of precarity that we may be experiencing. I think it's really hard to get that view from atop the mountain, and to get that bigger perspective on how our experiences are part of a larger cultural context. What the anti-diet perspective can provide for us is a framework for thinking about that mountain view, that zoomed-out image.
I'm going to use the anti-diet lens to talk about how the values and the promises and the practices of academic grind culture keep us stuck in cycles of overwork. And I hope that this is going to help us better understand where to direct our critique, how to start making tiny changes in our everyday lives that can create new realities, where to experiment with and model new ways of being. And very specifically, I'll be using an anti-diet approach to provide three alternatives to academic grind culture: redefining success based on what matters to you, paying attention to your body's cues to work within your capacity, and developing and practicing skills to maintain a countercultural stance.
Following Christy Harrison, diet culture and wellness culture value thinness, yes, and also weight loss as an end in itself. And these two things—being thin and losing weight—are equated with health, and also with moral virtue. And I think this is really important. The morality that is overlaid on thinness and weight loss is part of why and how it functions to control us.
In academic grind culture, I would suggest that the number one value is productivity and the act of being productive. Now, of course, this is not only academia. Work in America in this moment is caught up in this dynamic. But of course, it's differently inflected in academia, because we are teachers, we are scholars, and in some part of ourselves, we deeply value the pursuit of knowledge. And I think that knowledge and especially wisdom are in conflict with productivity.
So if these are the values, what are the promises? Diet culture promotes weight loss as a way of attaining a higher status, and I actually love the bold way that Christie Harrison states this. I also think that acceptance, belonging, pride, love—these are all things that compel us to spend our energy and our time and our wellbeing on pursuing weight loss. And of course, part of the anti-diet critique is that there are whole industries devoted to keeping us engaged in weight loss and the pursuit of thinness. There's the diet and the wellness industries, there's big agriculture, the fitness industry, it just goes on and on, right?
In academia, the higher status promise is kind of built in. There are so many hierarchies that exist in academia: which grad school you went to, getting a job after grad school, getting a tenure track job, getting a tenure track job at an R1, right, all of these status markers. And also, I think that there is the promise of stability, of certainty of freedom, and yes, belonging, pride, love. Just as in diet culture, we spend inordinate amounts of our energy and our time and our money as well, in an attempt to achieve and maintain that status. And I say maintain because we are always being evaluated in academia. It's not just tenure and promotion, it’s grants, it’s peer review, it’s teaching evaluations. Precarity is really built in to what we experience on a if not day-to-day, certainly a semesterly or an annual basis. There's always something else, right? And so many faculty have told me, especially post-tenure, folks feel like, “Wait, I was supposed to have made it!” But there's a sense that there's always something more, there's always one more way to prove yourself.
Diet culture and academic grind culture each have a set of practices, approved behaviors and actions and ways of being, and those that are demonized. In diet culture, we're pushed to be hyper-vigilant about what we eat and how we move our bodies. Diet culture sets us up to either be shamed by others, or to shame ourselves when we depart from a narrow set of strictures, which of course, are oriented toward the diet culture values of thinness, and weight loss. And remember, of course, this is moralized.
I think that the practices around academic grind culture are about how we spend our time. The kind of approved behaviors of academic crime culture, are about how we should be working on our research, we should be getting it right—perfectionism about how we do things and how we do things until they're perfect, until they're right. We should be doing it alone. There's a very individualistic culture around academic productivity. We should be disciplined, we should be consistent.
So on the other hand, what are the discouraged activities and thoughts and behaviors and academic grind culture? So even though burnout is endemic, and rest is stigmatized, we don't rest. We don't take breaks. We don't ask for help. And we certainly don't allow for fluctuations in our energy or feelings or situations, whatever they may be. So what are the consequences to individuals in these contexts? In the Anti-Diet book, Christy Harrison puts it very concisely: diet culture steals your time, steals your money, steals your health, and steals your joy, which is such a powerful way of thinking about what sacrifices diet culture demands.
So what are the consequences of academic overwork culture on individuals? I think it creates scarcity or a feeling of scarcity. We are overcommitted, we're always falling short of what we think we should be doing or accomplishing. And our experience of time is that it's never enough. We are exhausted. And even though rest is built into the academic year, in the form of various kinds of breaks, we don't rest or if we do we feel guilty. We are disconnected, isolated, disempowered and dissatisfied. And we are desperately aware of the privilege of being unemployed academic, which creates this central tension.
Just like diet culture, which on a macro level creates health disparities and injustice and human suffering, academic grind culture doesn't just have an impact on the individual. By assuming impossible standards of work, it creates barriers that perpetuate inequities and injustice in our institutions, among our faculty, among our staff and among our students. And this whole way of being is directly opposed to the systemic change that we teach about and think about and work toward in our research and in our classes.
What does it look like when we're stuck in cycles of overwork in academia? Here are 10 examples:
Over-preparing for class
Accepting service commitments without regard to your energy or your capacity
Ignoring your body's cues on campus (not eating lunch, not taking time to use the restroom, for example). I talk to so many faculty for whom this is a reality.
Ruminating on your work when you are not at work
Feeling guilty for resting or having fun
Berating yourself for not accomplishing more during the day, the week, the semester or the break
Not celebrating your accomplishments because there's always more to do
Feeling obligated to do all the things yourself
Shying away from finishing or sharing your ideas or putting your research out there
Feeling frustrated that email and grading get in the way of what really matters
Simply not having fun or enjoying yourself
These all co-exist with caring deeply about your students, striving to honor your commitments, believing in the value of your research, desiring justice in your institution, and wanting to really revolutionize our relationship with our work so that we can do the work that we want to do of changing the world.
This toxic academic grind culture exists. What can we do instead? The anti-diet perspective, again following Christy Harrelson here, proposes a series of alternatives to diet culture. And these are Health at Every Size®, intuitive eating, and joyful movement. You may have heard of some of these approaches.
Health at Every Size® is about reorienting ourselves to a different understanding of good health. It's about divesting from the values, the promises, and the practices of diet culture and conceiving of good health differently. Health at Every Size® is a very complex, rich, exuberant, liberatory framework for questioning what health really means, for examining how diet culture has shaped medical advice and scientific research around health, and for collaboratively creating new cultural ways of being around health and body size.
Intuitive Eating is about listening to your body's cues. And what's really important here is that this is a practice. It's not just something to accomplish. It requires unlearning. It's a process of unlearning a lifetime of messages about diet culture.
And then finally, the third alternative to diet culture is joyful movement. This is movement that is not linked to exercise or to weight loss. So it's changing the goalposts away from weight loss as the goal of movement.
What I'm going to suggest for academia, for countering the overwork and grind culture of academia, is this notion of Good Enough: tapping into who you are already, being attentive to the multiple kinds of success that exist in academia, not only productivity, diversifying options for ourselves, and choosing intentionally what success means for you.
The analog to intuitive eating and academic overwork culture is tuning into your body's cues. It's noticing how you feel, attending to what kinds of obligations, what kinds of tasks, what kinds of activities, create fatigue or bring you energy, picking up on a need for rest and honoring that, working within your capacity. These all require us to pay attention, not just to what's happening in our minds, but to pay attention to our physical and our mental wellbeing. And as we practice noticing, we can begin to use these as guides to help us make decisions about where we want to spend our time and our energy.
The third alternative or antidote to academic grind culture is learning and practicing skills that support and maintain this countercultural academic way of being. Skills like letting go of getting it right, trusting yourself, reclaiming your joy in your work, and building networks of support, practicing self advocacy, embracing rest, experimenting with play.
Un-dieting is an ongoing process of self-examination and step by step divesting of diet culture, and it requires deep and constant self-compassion. And this is also true as you're recognizing and shifting your relationship to academia. Let yourself indulge in a little bit of optimism. You can change things. Give yourself the patience to notice where you'd like things to be different. And the flexibility to experiment to notice and to eventually find what works. You are not alone. We can un-diet academic life and we can do it together.
I want to leave you with some questions to help you start clarifying your own relationship to academic grind culture.
So first, what are some examples of toxic academic grind culture in your everyday life?
The second question: overwork is so pervasive in our campus spaces, where do you notice overwork on your campus?
And then finally, what's one place where you are really craving a different relationship to your academic life?
I hope that this has been a useful analogy for you. I am thinking of you and I'm with you on this journey.
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