On Ditching Diet Culture: How Shira Rosenbluth Created a Life of Self-Love

Conversations around dieting, losing weight and eating often seem unavoidable. Eating is something you have to do every day, after all. In the Jewish world, we have Shabbat every week—a spiritual day but also one focused on large meals with tons of food. Unfortunately, greater society is heavily focused on diet culture and appearance, and these things don’t always go together.

Enter Shira Rosenbluth. She’s a licensed social worker who focuses on helping people with anything from disordered eating tendencies to full eating disorders. Both stem from the proliferation of diet messages permeating society and individuals. She has grown an Instagram following of close to 100,000 people, where she promotes Health at Every Size (HAES), inclusive fashion, and getting rid of the fatphobia pervasive in our world.

When you think about the images and messages we’re perpetually bombarded with, it’s not really a surprise these issues exist. The situation has somewhat improved, with more body diversity in the media, but skinny is praised both out in the world and internally, in our homes. When you lose weight, people say, “You look great!” (aka, thin is great, fat is not). These people mean well, of course, but it just goes to show how ingrained those messages are in our psyche. It’s hard to even notice that there’s something wrong with them or what they imply.

Shira, 31, knows this firsthand. She developed an eating disorder at age 10 that lasted most of her life, until she got treatment a few years ago that finally helped. There’s no way a 10-year-old thought to herself that she wanted to lose weight. “I think eating disorders have a biological component and then environment, trauma or stress can take things to the next level,” she explains. “I grew up with a lot of dieting messages. I was told from the time I was little that if I wanted to be loved, I needed to be thin.”

Things got worse when Shira was enrolled in a diet program at age 10. “That was the catalyst,” she says. Shira explains that dieting can actually be a huge trigger for people to develop eating disorders. “That’s what it was for me. Within two weeks, I started purging.”

Shira knew right away this wasn’t normal. At 11 or 12, she opened up to a guidance counselor about her eating disorder. “She basically looked me up and down and was dismissive because of my body,” she says. “I didn’t look like someone who would have an eating disorder. I wasn’t thin.” Because of that, she lived without treatment until she was 14. 

At 14, her disorder dipped to an all-time low. “It was Pesach and I was purging every single course. My mom was like, ‘Why does she keep going to the bathroom?’ She realized that I was actually throwing up,” Shira reveals.

After that, she was put in a treatment program, but even there, she was met with weight stigma. People didn’t take her seriously because of her size and they were nervous she would get “too big.” Because of that, she was in and out of treatment programs from ages 14 to 20. Nothing helped her create lasting health. Then, during her twenties, she improved while consistently seeing a therapist and dietician, but it still wasn’t a perfect match, and at 29, she had a severe relapse.

“This time, it was in front of the whole world,” she says. She had started a fashion blog a few years prior along with an Instagram account (@theshirarose) to post about fashion and the vibrant outfits she put together. Over time, the handle became really popular. The platform was what inspired her to get help again—this time, she couldn’t hide. “People saw my body shrink,” she explains. “They thought I was just losing weight but really, I was struggling. I realized that if I had this platform, I should talk about it.” 

Shira decided to share her story and be honest about what was going on in her life. The positive response was overwhelming. The support she got from her followers and community led her back to treatment.

This time, she finally found the right people to help. Instead of working with a team who was determined to keep her at a certain weight, and fearful of what freedom with food would do to her body, she had people around her who accepted whatever her body would naturally do through treatment. “For the first time, I was safe to just be in a body that I was meant to be in,” she says.

To do this, she moved in with a colleague in order to have “meal support,” or someone who could guide her in making sure she was eating enough food regularly. In doing so, she said they challenged the traditional eating disorder treatment model. “Depending on where somebody is in their eating disorder, someone might tell you, ‘Just eat.’” Shira shares. “That’s really overwhelming. It’s like telling someone with a fear of flying or heights to jump out of an airplane.”

To combat this, the colleague helped support Shira with meals and snacks until she was nourished and healthy enough to start making recovery decisions more independently. “Having an eating disorder is like living with constant noise in your head. It’s like someone is screaming at you 24/7. You don’t even know how to make decisions because the eating disorder is so loud,” she explains. “Once I was eating more and challenging the eating disorder, the noise in my head got quieter and I was able to make choices for myself.” 

Now, Shira is a social worker who helps others through treatment. She works from a Health at Every Size perspective, a movement focused on ensuring that all people are treated with respect, dignity, and equality regardless of their size. “Health at every size means that you can work on improving your health without focusing on weight loss or a number on the scale,” she explains. “People in that community also believe that body diversity will always exist and that all bodies are okay. We shouldn’t assume anything about someone based on their body. All people deserve respect regardless of what they look like.”

A False Reality

While still interested in fashion, Shira is now committed to working on reducing the “fat” stigma and proving that eating disorders never have to look a certain way to be “real.” She’s integrated that messaging on her Instagram account. “We have a ridiculous image of what an eating disorder looks like, which is a thin white woman,” she explains. “It’s just not accurate. I would go to treatment and my doctors would be praising me for losing weight or encouraging me to use behaviors that someone in a thin body would be in trouble for.”

A big part of her continued recovery is weaving through and tuning out all the dieting messages so pervasive in our society. Right now, many are talking about “intuitive eating,” or eating according to your body’s natural hunger cues. While Shira says this is important, she also points out the difficulty in getting in touch with that intuition again.

“We’re all born as intuitive eaters, but over time, through diet culture, we lose the ability to eat according to our own wants and needs, because we think, ‘This is bad,’ or ‘This is good,’” she says. “Intuitive eating really is us relearning how to reconnect to our bodies and getting back in touch with ourselves, without external messages telling us what is right or wrong.”

As a part of her mission, Shira is also focused on reclaiming the word “fat.” She uses it often in her content. “Sometimes, I catch myself trying to explain how I ended up in my fat body,” she writes in a recent Instagram post. “I do it in an attempt to protect myself from judgement and assumptions.”

These assumptions she says come from the associations with the word fat. “We’re so used to thinking of it to mean disgusting or lazy,” she explains. “Our culture has turned ‘fat’ into a curse word, but it’s just a description like being short or tall. There are so many people like me working to reclaim the word into a neutral description. I use it for myself rather than saying overweight, because who decided I’m over a certain weight I need to be at?”

She goes on to explain that the fear of using the word fat is just a result of the fatphobia in our society and the spread of diet culture. “I wouldn’t call someone fat unless they’re comfortable with it,” she shares. “But it can be empowering for someone to reclaim a word that was once used as a weapon against them.”

Make an Impact
It's harder than it has to be for someone over a size 12 to find something to wear. Shira explains that the average woman is actually a size 16, but only 3 percent of brands produce women’s clothing in that size or larger. She suggests women of any body type reach out to brands and encourage them to increase their size range. 
 
“There’s a huge market out there for people who want to buy clothes in those sizes. It’s a good financial decision to spend time making clothes for women in larger bodies. Some people are still fearful of people who are bigger representing their brands. Politely asking brands to expand their size range can help change that. We can all help change the conversation.” 

Shira's Favorite Stores: Ethos, Anthropologie, Madewell

If your mind is blown, keep in mind this is just the tip of the iceberg. Educating yourself further to identify the diet culture around us can help to break negative stereotypes and unrealistic pressures put on yourself to look a certain way. 

“The diet industry is worth 70 billion dollars. It’s literally invested in making us feel like we have bodies that are broken and need to be fixed,” she explains. “We shouldn’t accept that. We should be fighting back.”

Redefining Spirituality

Shira grew up in an Orthodox community in Brooklyn and attended Beis Yaakov schools. She loves her family and is close with them, but the surrounding environment became toxic to her self-esteem.

“Dieting is super mainstream [in the Orthodox community],” she explains. “Every conversation at shul or the Shabbos table is, ‘What diet are you on?’ or someone saying they need to lose weight. In the outside world, people are starting to realize this is problematic, but because the ultra-Orthodox community is very insulated, it takes a lot more time.” When you’re surrounded by tons decadent food all the time whether at Shabbat or Yom Tov, kiddushes or weddings, the messages can be all the more confusing.

She says when she was in high school, she had a teacher who would say, “You’re pretty, but you’d be beautiful if you lost weight.” She was told if she wanted to get married, she needed to be smaller. “The shidduchim [dating] element is a whole added layer of pressure that other communities don’t have.”

Luckily, Shira has overcome those damaging messages. “People in larger bodies get married every single day, yet we still get the message that women who are bigger are wrong and broken,” she says. “It’s really harmful.”

While Shira still lives close to home and her parents and siblings are still fully observant, she’s adopted a more traditional style of Jewish observance. She’s taking what she went through and working on her personal journey of what she wants her life to look like and taking time to reconnect with G-d in her own way. “I grew up learning that there’s only one right way to be Jewish,” she explains. “Discovering other communities and the beauty of Judaism there has been really cool for me to see.”

When it comes to experiencing food through Jewish holidays and Shabbat, she says her healing journey has completely changed the way she approaches these moments. “I love my family and I stopped going to Shabbos meals when I got really sick, because I couldn’t even sit near the food,” she shares. “As I gave myself full permission to eat, Shabbos became less charged. It wasn’t hard for me to be around food anymore. I can sit at a meal comfortably and make decisions based on what sounds good. Diet culture makes it so much harder than it has to be.”

How to Heal

Even if you’ve gotten to a good place with your own health journey, it can be difficult or triggering to be around people who are making comments about food or their bodies. Shira has worked to set boundaries to avoid conversations that could steer in a negative direction.

She will not engage in discussions about dieting and advises others to do the same. “You can say, ‘Look, this is just not a conversation I’m okay having. I’m really trying to work on my relationship with food right now.’” Setting a boundary will usually only evoke respect from the other party and allow you to continue on with your goals with support and without getting off course.

Want more information on body image and Health at Every Size? Shira suggests digging into these reads to learn and find more self-empowerment on your personal health journey. 
 
-Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight (By Lindo Bacon and Lucy Aphramor, BenBella Books, 2014)
-Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight — and What We Can Do about It (By Harriet Brown, Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2016)
-The Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating (By Christy Harrison, MPH RD, Little, Brown Spark, 2019)
-Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program That Works (By Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole, 1995)

If you’re lost and feeling overwhelmed and not knowing where to start when it comes to redefining the way you look at food, eating and body image, she suggests starting with the way you speak or view yourself. 

First, look at the language you use. Sometimes, we don’t even realize that we talk to ourselves with such negativity. “Instead of ‘I look gross,’ you can say, ‘I’m struggling with my body right now, but I’m still a valuable human,’” she shares. “You can also think, ‘Is this how I would talk to five-year-old me? Would I ever use this language? What can I offer her right now and how can I give her the compassion she deserves?’” 

By doing this now, we’ll be able to pave the way for younger generations to feel better about themselves. “Five and ten-year-old kids are crying about how big their bellies are. That’s heartbreaking to me,” she says. “We need to show the younger generation that all bodies are okay.”

When it comes to other people, it can be tempting to make a comment on someone’s recent weight loss or even pointing out a gain. She urges people to stop speaking about it at all. “There are a million compliments we can give; we don’t have to make it about someone’s body size,” she explains.

This type of thinking ideally will trickle down to yourself. Instead of pressuring yourself to love your body, Shira suggests focusing on things about yourself that you do already love. “A healthy body image is knowing that your worth comes from so much more than what your size is,” she says. 

Especially for women, whose bodies change often through pregnancy, aging, and other hormonal changes, it can be hard when you’re attached to a certain look. “You’re not going to be able to handle it when your weight changes, when you get wrinkles or age, because you’re so attached to your body. It’s about redefining who you are.”

Shira continues to work daily to create change in the world when it comes to Health at Every Size. She works publicly through her Instagram account and also has a private practice where she counsels individuals through their own health journeys. She dreams of opening a treatment center one day and creating an inclusive dress line from sizes zero to 40. 

“If we think about changing the world, it can be really overwhelming and seem impossible,” she says. “So, I focus on what I can do. If each person started changing the way they spoke about body image and dieting, our world would be so much better of a place. I just want to keep putting out messages that empower.”