International No Diet Day - History

History

International No Diet Day was created by Mary Evans Young in 1992. Mary is the director of the British group "Diet Breakers". After personally experiencing anorexia, she worked to help people appreciate themselves for what they are, and to appreciate the body they have.

Young, a British feminist, was motivated by her own experiences of being pilloried at school for being "fat" and by speaking with women who attended her management courses; Developing Women's Management Potential. She tells the story in her book Diet Breaking: Having It All Without Having to Diet. (Published by Hodder & Stoughton, 1995).

During one of the these courses in 1991 she became particularly irritated with the coffee break conversation about whether or not the women were going to eat a biscuit - "Oh, I'll just have one", "I shouldn't really", "Oh, all right then". When Mary Evans Young asked the group "What do you think would happen if you spent as much time and energy on your careers as you do on diets?" it was as if she had struck a match.

There were two other incidents that strengthened her desire to expose the futility of dieting. First, a television program in which three women were having their stomachs stapled in an effort to become thin. None of them received any counseling before undergoing this major surgery. One of the women had split her staples, regained the weight and undergone the operation again – three times. Mary found this program unbelievably distressing: the physical and emotional pain of these women and the depth of their self-loathing was more than she could bear. She started crying, and went on all night. It was not until the morning that it dawned on her; she was crying for herself too. She had experienced that deep self-loathing. Second, about a month later she read a newspaper report about a teenager who had hanged herself because she was bullied for being fat. She was size 14 (USA size 12).

In May 1992 Mary introduced the first No Diet Day. It was originally intended to be National No Diet Day; then, a week before the event, International Clear Your Desk Day was declared. This inspired her to declare the day International No Diet Day.

It was a small affair to be celebrated by a dozen women with a picnic in Hyde Park, London. Ages ranged from twenty-one to seventy-six and they all wore stickers saying: DITCH THAT DIET. It poured with rain, the same year Pavarotti was rained on at the open-air concert in Hyde Park, and so Mary held the picnic in her home. The media turned up in force, queuing outside, sheltering under umbrellas, and jostling to get interviews and take photographs.

The first International No Diet Day was held on 5 May, but by the following year people in America had joined the campaign and those in California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona were concerned that the date clashed with the Cinco de Mayo celebrations in those states. For Mary Evans Young there was no particular significance to 5 May so she agreed to change the date to 6 May, which coincidentally is her birthday.

Feminist groups around the UK celebrated the INDD, and as the years went by, groups in other countries around the globe started to celebrate this day, especially in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Israel, Denmark and Brazil.