What is diet culture?
What is a diet?
According to the Cambridge dictionary, a diet is the food and drink usually eaten by an individual or group. For example, you may follow an omnivorous or vegetarian diet.
How does diet culture differ from a diet?
Diet culture isn’t being on a specific diet per se, diet culture is the culture of dieting with the intention of weight loss. More specifically, it’s a belief system that values thinness and a socially constructed ideal of beauty above our health and wellbeing.
You can be on a diet without being caught up in diet culture e.g. a nut-free diet if you’re allergic to nuts, or you may not be on any specific diet, but be caught up in diet culture! Like with all things nutrition, it’s nuanced.
What is diet culture?
As a rule of thumb, diet culture is anything that equates health and beauty to slenderness and links food and eating to morality.
It’s the system that tells you that you are what you eat, that you need to earn your food and that you “should” spend time, money and effort into making your body smaller or stronger or look a certain way, or that you are “good” when you eat certain types of foods, and “bad” when you eat others.
Christy Harrison describes diet culture as a system of oppression, which represses those who don’t match up to the ideals of beauty and health. It also disproportionately harms women, ethnic minorities, individuals with disabilities and those in larger bodies to name but a few.
Diet culture is a shapeshifter
One of the scariest things about diet culture is that it’s a shapeshifter, it’s sneaky and has continuously invented and reinvented itself over the years.
From the popularity of weight watchers and slimming world, diet culture now presents itself under the guise of “health” and sells us clean and pure eating, juice cleanses, detoxes, enemas and free from diets – goodbye gluten, dairy, carbohydrates etc.
Forget low calories and cigarettes, diet culture is now fast and furious boutique exercise classes, intermittent fasting and keto. Yet, whichever way you look at it, demonisation and scaremongering around food and eating are at the centre, and the pursuit of a certain physical appearance – strong, skinny or toned – the goal to which we must all be tirelessly striving.
How to spot diet culture?
The other thing about diet culture is that it’s pervasive. It can be right in front of us such as on our food packaging or in magazines, or it can be entrenched beliefs we hold within us.
I want to stress that you are not a bad person for having these beliefs. They have been taught to us through socio-cultural conditioning throughout our lives. For example, take a Disney film like the little mermaid, Ursula, the villain is in a bigger body whilst Ariel is small. It may be that we overheard weight or diet chat from our parents, teachers or significant people as we were growing up, or had negative comments made about our bodies.
Some examples of diet culture from the external world:
Skinny teas, appetite suppressing lollies, carb blockers, detoxes, cleanses etc
Food labelling - labelling food as good, guilt or sin-free, or saying something like “finally chocolate you can enjoy because it’s free of X, Y and Z ingredient”.
Teacher after a gym class saying that “you’ve earned your breakfast now!”
Women’s magazines promoting a certain beauty ideal e.g. abs, thin waist and large bum.
External ways of tracking our nutrition and energy requirements e.g. tracking macros and my fitness pal.
Hearing people constantly talk about food and dieting – e.g. overhearing people in a café talking about the gym or someone commenting on your weight or theirs. People saying “gosh I’ve eaten rubbish all weekend”.
Some examples we might feel internally:
Guilt from eating something deemed “bad”
Needing to eliminate foods of food groups for no clear medical/religious/ethical reason.
Avoiding social situations due to the fear of certain foods.
Feeling more or less worthy depending on body shape or weight
Allowing the number on the scale to determine your mood or self-worth.
Needing to earn food
Using exercise to burn off what you eat or to justify eating rather than because it feels good.
Being praised if you’ve lost weight rather than people asking if you’re ok
Feeling like a good or bad person depending on your food choices.
So what’s the problem with diet culture?
Before I launch in with my thoughts on this, I invite you to take a look at the list above and consider any that resonate with you?
How have they made you feel about food, eating and yourself? Have they enhanced your feelings of wellbeing and actions? Or have they take away from this?
Spend a moment to reflect on this.
Other reasons diet culture is harmful:
It promotes disordered eating and eating disorders e.g. restricting, skinny teas, over excising which may result in binge eating or clinical eating disorders. None of these enhance our “health”.
It promotes one ideal of beauty that will be unachievable for the vast majority of individuals – it’s impossible to measure up to surgery, airbrushing and just one body type.
It equates who we are as people to our dress size and the contents of our plates. Who you are, what defines you, your values and what you put out into the world is totally distinct from this.
It wastes our energy, our time and money – energy, time and money that could be so much better spent on so many other wonderful endeavours.
It takes some “health” endorsing behaviours like enjoying fruits and veggies and exercise and turns them into toxic rigid rules that can backfire.
It sells us a lie, dieting is a $60 billion industry with an 80% failure rate, in fact, the majority of dieters will regain the weight plus more in 12 months.
It stigmatises marginalised bodies including black, ethnic minorities, gay and queer folk, individuals in larger bodies and those who are disabled.
It makes negative emotions like fear, shame, anxiety and guilt implicit in eating, eating being something we need to do to stay alive.
It reduces our self-worth down to our physical appearance.
It’s classist and disregards those who may not be able to invest in fancy supplements, expensive gym memberships and who may be dependant on food banks.
And many more…….
To wrap up:
I understand that not everyone is at the stage where they are ready or even want to unsubscribe from diet culture. It’s all we’ve ever known, and its rules can offer the illusion of safety and purpose. It’s also the social norm and going against it can feel a lot like swimming upstream.
As a Registered Associate Nutritionist, I am far more interested in “health”, and that’s a broad definition as the World Health Organisation intended which includes physical, mental, social, emotional, spiritual and psychological health. I don’t believe diet culture has a place in this at all.
If you take one thing from this article, have a little lookout for diet culture – in the streets, on the pages of magazines, on Instagram or even thoughts and feelings that arise from within you.
