Since writing about diabetes, Megan Whelan's inbox has been filled with advice: from plant-based diets to pasta replacements. In this week's Diabetes and Me, she asks why people are in such a rush to share.
Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King
I remember the first time I got unsolicited diet advice. I was 13. There was an envelope in my mailbox at boarding school with my name on it. I thought it would be a letter from my mum or my grandmother, who I missed to the point of crying myself to sleep some nights.
It wasn't a letter from home. It was a glossy pamphlet advertising a diet supplement. I can't remember exactly what it was, but I vaguely recall it being the sort of thing that involved milkshakes as meal replacements.
Thirty years later, I can still recall the hot shame flushing my face as I pushed the pages back into the envelope, hoping no one had seen. I remember wondering who would do such a thing. I remember the defensive reaction (I play sport three times a week!), but most of all, I remember understanding for the first time in my life that my body was something that people hated.
If you want to know why I ended up a fat adult with type 2 diabetes, I'd lay about 40 percent of the blame at the feet of the person who put that pamphlet in my mailbox.
As well as all the research that says that diets don't work, there are plenty of studies that show behaviour like anonymously sending a diet pamphlet to a teenager is counterproductive. (It's also just very bad manners.)
Here's how it worked for me. I took that shame and ran with it. I learned at an early age that my body was a thing to be reviled. I've been yelled at in the street, I've been told that everything that is wrong with me, from depression to my hair being frizzy, was because of my size.
I tried for many years to 'fix' my body, but all that ever happened was that it got fatter, and I cared progressively less. I don't have diabetes because I am fat, but the ways I neglected my body are because I learned, and it was repeatedly reinforced, that my body wasn't worthy of being looked after.
This isn't a column about diet culture, but to me, all these things are linked. I didn't do the things I needed to do to prevent the diabetes because I was taught that my body was already toxic. The diet industry taught me if I just tried hard enough, I could be different, and in doing so, probably made it even harder to make the changes I thought I wanted. If I just avoided fruit juice, or took a pill, or drank a tea that is actually a laxative, I'd be acceptable.
For people who look like me, diet advice is a daily occurrence that happens in the work cafeteria and the changing room in clothes shops. It happens when we pick up magazines and in the doctor's waiting room. It comes from our parents and workmates and yelled from cars.
I can't imagine it ever being helpful, when what it is essentially saying is "I know your body, and how you live your life, better than you do." While clearly it isn't only fat people who get diabetes, and diet is by no means the only thing that will help manage it, fat people are experts at diets.
At last count, there are 180 emails in my inbox offering diet advice to help with my type two. Whether it's intermittent fasting, keto, diets with so few calories I'm pretty sure I would pass out the second I tried to lift a kettlebell, or plant-based diets, people are very keen for me to know what has worked with them on their personal journey with type two, weight loss, or general health.
I want to believe this comes from a good place - and I love that people are engaging with this column. I love that it's helping people and encouraging people to think. I love that people want to help.
But I wonder where that instinct comes from. The first thing I did when I got my official diagnosis was Google. I found the popular books and websites. I am a gigantic nerd, so I read medical papers. I asked people in my life, and my GP gave me what limited information was available. I booked appointments with doctors, dietitians, optometrists and podiatrists. Did you think I didn't know?
You and I could eat the exact same diet, do the exact same fitness routine and drink our 8 glasses of water a day. And your outcomes would be very different to mine. Because our genes, stress levels, sleep patterns and hormones are different. Maybe your pancreas has a bit more oomph than mine. Maybe my muscles are a little better at using glucose. Diabetes is a complicated beast, and diet is only one part of managing it.
So, call me cynical (I am, professionally), but books advertising that you can reverse diabetes in 12 weeks seem like just another fad diet. And maybe they have worked for people, and helped people, but that doesn't mean they will help everyone.
My aim in writing this column was to help people, but it was never to offer advice. I hoped people might feel more seen, and more like they weren't alone. But I also hoped to arm people with questions they could ask, to help find a balance that works for them.
Like, if you eat a very low calorie diet for 12 weeks, what happens at the end of that period and you go back to eating normally? Or, if I want to vomit if I haven't eaten within a couple of hours of lifting weights how would fasting work for me? If roasted potatoes bring me joy, and make me feel connected to my Irish whakapapa, why would I give them up?
Or why is the advice that my dietitian and my personal trainer and my doctors have given me in the past six months so very different to the messages I've been getting about my body since that envelope in my mailbox?
Or even, what is it that makes you offer people diet advice, if you're one of the people who do it? Is it because you want to help, or is it because, deep down, you think if people just knew what you do, they wouldn't be the way they are?
