Diet culture

I often get asked, what is Diet Culture?

Diet culture shows up in many ways, every day, and it impacts us all. It tells us that we’re not good enough just as we are. It teaches us ways to constantly control and shrink our bodies by restricting ourselves, over-exercising and ignoring our body’s wisdom. Diet culture promises that when we’re thinner, we will finally be acceptable; we will fit in; we will be worthy and loveable; we will be desirable; we will be smarter and healthier; and ultimately, we’ll be happier.

Diet culture imposes rigid rules, inflexible all-or-nothing thinking, should and shouldn’t statements, and perfectionism when it comes to food, body and health. It intrudes in our minds to try to convince us to rely on an external system or method for how to take care of our bodies.

Diet culture has taught us that food is the enemy and has trained us to ignore our body’s internal cues of hunger. It reinforces the idea that exercise is a way to earn, punish or compensate for the food we eat, rather then for enjoyment and celebration of what our bodies can do. Diet culture makes us believe that choosing to not engage in dieting means that you’ve give up or letting yourself go.

Christy Harrison, a non-diet, weight-inclusive dietitian and host of Food Psych Podcast, has shared one of the most comprehensive definitions of Diet Culture. She indicates that diet culture is:

“A system of beliefs that:

* Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin ‘ideal’.

* Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years.

* Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power.

* Oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of ‘health’, which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.”

Recognize

How can we recognize diet culture?

Healing from the harmful messages of diet culture is hard work.

But what makes it even harder is living in a culture that idealizes and overvalues certain body types and sizes, communicates daily that in order to attain this body type we need to diet, restrict food, over-exercise and, it intertwines our body worth with our health status.

What I want you to know is that there is no shame if you are affected by diet culture – it impacts us all.

To move toward healing your relationship with food and making peace with your body, it is imperative you break up with diet culture. To begin, the first step is to recognize messages that influence our thoughts, feelings and behaviors, as well as lived experiences that represent diet culture’s beliefs and values.

Below, I’ve listed a few of the many examples where diet culture’s influence can be found. As you’ll see, diet culture’s influence can lead to weight bias, weight stigma and discrimination:

• A person coming in to see their doctor because of a broken bone, a cold, or pain in some area of their body, and is told by their doctor to lose weight. The doctor may even refuse to do any further testing when warranted, as they would do with someone in a thinner body.

• Weight loss challenges at work can be very harmful. They reinforce the idea that a thinner/smaller body is more desirable, valuable and healthier. They also send the message to people in larger bodies that there is something wrong with their bodies, and therefore they need to participate in the contest at work to be fixed.

• Going to the gym and participating in group classes where fitness instructors talk about “burning off” a certain food or food you ate during a holiday, by workout extra hard. This insinuates that some foods are bad and cannot be consumed and enjoyed, that their calories need to be “burned off” so we can maintain a thinner body, and that exercise should be used for the purpose of weight loss and even to punish ourselves when we dare to enjoy anything outside of rigid rules and restrictions.

• Going to eat a restaurant with family and having the experience of a family member express they should not eat a specific food or make comments about the quantity of food they’re consuming. This suggests that the person is being “good” or “bad” for eating certain foods and amounts of food.

• Have you ever paid attention to children’s cartoons or movies and how people in larger bodies are portrayed? At best, they are the fat silly and funny character and at worst, they are represented as lazy, messy, foolish, unintelligent or even as the villain in the story.

• Going clothe shopping to a well-known store and not finding one thing that fits you because the store does not carry you size. And the person is told that they can try finding their size online, although they do not get the luxury of trying the close before purchasing it. And they are also charged more money for their clothing because it is considered “plus-size”.

The list can go on and on. I encourage you to tune into how and when diet culture is influencing your thoughts, feelings and behaviors, and identifying other examples of diet culture appearing in your life and the lives of others. This can help you identify your own biases, and prevent stigma and discrimination against yourself and others, while promoting equality for ALL bodies. The good news is that once we see and learn, we cannot ignore and forget. We need to work on dismantling diet culture’s messages and reduce its influence on our society.

Disrupt

How can we disrupt diet culture?

As you start to dismantle and question the messages that diet culture has enforced on you throughout your life, ask yourself how buying into these beliefs has been destructive to attuning to your wants and needs, your body’s cues and your trust in yourself.

This can be a difficult self-exploration and I encourage you to be self-compassionate and begin to externalize some of the blame you’ve put on yourself – diet culture wants you to think it’s your fault that yet you failed on another diet, that you gained back the weight, that you don’t have the “ideal” body, that you are not “fit” like the bodies depicted on magazines and TV.

I want you to know that you haven’t failed.

What has failed is our society’s system, which tries to sell us a “thin ideal” that should be obtainable with diet and exercise. A system that does not share that diet mentality is harmful and does not work: research indicates that approximately 95% of people who are able to lose weight intentionally, gain back the weight within 2 to 5 years. And about 60% gains more weight than they initially lost. A system that sold you the fantasy that you could only have an amazing life and do all the things you want to do, when you are finally thin.

It is ok to give up this lie and mourn the loss of this fantasy. It is ok to embrace your body as it is and do the things you have been waiting to do with the body you have now.

So the next time you identify the feeling of shame over your body, what you eat, or how you move, take a moment and consider if that shame is rooted in or reinforced by diet culture and its messages. And if you realize that your shame is embedded in diet culture, call it out and externalize it onto what has planted those seeds.

Give yourself space to consider that the rights to the pursuit of happiness, freedom and being treated with dignity and respect should not be size-dependent. Give yourself the option to move away from diet culture and embrace the belief that your body is worthy of care, appreciation, trust and liberation.