The Damage of Diet Culture

Are you fat, or do you have fat? It’s a simple question, and produces a different answer compared to if someone asked: are you muscles, or do you have muscles? Why do people who have more fat get charged more for larger clothing sizes when different shoe sizes are charged the same prices? Why are certain parts of our body discriminated against?

The History of Demonizing True Wellness

Diet culture has become a celebrated, deceitful reality in our day and age of rampant social media activity, health and wellness advocacy, and redundantly labelling foods as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Especially since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic, many online have used memes and (in)direct fat-shaming commentaries to deem gaining weight to be the worst thing that could happen to us, leading fat-phobia and eating disorder victims to be affected the most.

Make no mistake, diet culture is ‘at the root of fat-phobia’. Dieting is mostly not about true health; it’s about avoiding fat and having ‘correct’ BMI measurements, which itself is a factually flawed system of interpreting one’s health stemming from, amongst other things, back when slave owners justified themselves by claiming large black men are ‘stupid, lazy, or slow’, linking physical size to criminality.

Dieting is one of society’s many systems of internalized oppression - it promotes hate towards people with fat whilst creating a genuinely dangerous fear of food. During the Renaissance Era, having body fat was normal; our view of fat only changed after the Second World War as the trend of thinness spread in Western countries. Now, thinness is still illogically equated to health, happiness and moral virtue.

Who Really Gains From Our Diet Culture?

‘There is perhaps no woman in modern culture more simultaneously celebrated and reviled than the woman who eats whatever she wants and doesn’t gain weight.’ This notion applies to men and other genders as well.

Diet culture normalizes people propelling our own self-hatred, no matter our age, body size, gender and background. We have all heard others, and perhaps ourselves, say things like: ‘I can't eat that’, when really they don’t want to eat it for the wrong reasons; ‘I was bad today because I ate this’; ‘You lost weight - you look better!’, when they may not actually feel better; ‘I’ll be more confident once I’m slim enough’, and many more.

Women are encouraged to be thin, and men are told to look more ‘masculine’ by working towards ‘gains’ in the gym whilst following meat-rich diets. Vegetarian and vegan diets also suffer: these can be viewed as ‘crash diets’ rather than thoughtful lifestyle changes. People who eat any food category can be victims of our inappropriately-dignified diet culture and develop eating disorders. The ‘certain foods = bad’ and ‘weight = wellness’ mentalities are toxic for everyone - for people who have less fat and those who have more.

Body Mass Index (BMI) is often used to equate weight to overall wellbeing, despite being a European measure of health that often discriminates against BIPOC and different genders like trans people and non-binary people, whose body shape and chemistry don’t fit into a system rooted within a system of colonialism, racism, anti-Blackness, misogyny and white supremacy. BMI doesn’t take into account muscle mass (which weighs more than fat), ‘bone structure, water, heart rate, genetics, body type, or any other real health factor.’ It doesn’t indicate where fat is located, proving dangerous as people may depend on certain fats in certain places to live.

Aside from idealizing unrealistic beauty standards, our diet culture has become so toxic that certain foods - food being something that is meant to nourish and celebrate us, body and soul - are demonized, shamed, and used to guilt-trip people into ‘doing better’ for the sake of their health, affecting both our actual mental and physical wellbeing for people of all cultures, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations, socioeconomic status, genetic history, mental health and more. Diet culture also conditions people to believe they do not have control, especially within the female-identifying population.

We shouldn’t overeat, or under-eat, if it’s bad for us. But we are led to believe that only with less fat can we somehow be more attractive, more worthy, more deserving, and morally superior to those who are larger than us. Today, the epitome of ‘health’, propagated by movies, clothing stores, pharmaceutical industries, food brands, gyms, social media like TikTok’s ‘#WhatIEatInADay’ videos, magazines, our healthcare system and more, is usually and misguidingly portrayed by able-bodied, small, white cis-gendered people to ‘profit off of the hatred and shame people have for their bodies and capitalize on these insecurities’. The US earned $72 billion in 2018 as people were convinced of the diet industries’ narratives to spend time, money and energy trying to follow a ‘socially constructed ideal of beauty’.

Diet culture propels weight bias, resulting in weight stigma and the normalization of society judging people for who they are based on how they look when appearances do not provide a comprehensive picture of an individual’s health. That is the definition of discrimination. Weight stigma has mental and physical health repercussions, such as pushing people to develop chronic dieting, eating disorders, and a decreased desire to exercise. People relate food to shame: we are scared to eat, scared of gaining fat, and fearful of how society will judge us for it - both for gaining fat and for pursuing certain diets.

Trust The Science

There’s nothing wrong with seeking health by losing weight or gaining it: what’s wrong is the idea of pursuing certain methods in the belief of moral values such as ‘beauty is pain’, when beauty should only ever be about happiness and self-fulfilment. Diet culture may seem scientific, but it is anything but logical, comprehensive and trustworthy. The goal is mostly avoiding fat, not prioritizing your wellbeing; we are being ‘sold a false sense of freedom’, when in reality dieting is synonymous with deprivation, restriction and misery.

Dieting fails in producing long-term results 99% of the time. One-third to two-thirds of people end up weighing more than before they dieted. People are discriminated against medically, due to weight biases and stigma, because of the lack of personal care tailored to every aspect of their identity. Aside from socio-economic factors, ‘genetics variations in metabolism, resting heart rate, a “hunger hormone” called leptin, and a number of other factors contribute to someone’s ability to lose or put on weight easily’.

When dieting is a success, people can pursue disordered behaviors to keep the weight off, such as by constantly weighing themselves, measuring foods, exercising excessively, under-eating, binge-eating, self-harming and self-shaming. These often result in social isolation, the development of anorexia nervosa (an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat), malnutrition, orthorexia (when people care more about the ‘virtue’ of eating specific ‘clean’ foods whilst denying themselves the pleasure of just eating) and more.

Changing Our Mindset

Diet culture ‘tars everyone with the same brush’ instead of embracing how diverse we all are. It’s so hard to change our views because it is deeply ingrained into and promoted, both directly and indirectly, within a lot of our day-to-day lives. Thus, ‘Given the strength and pervasiveness of the injunctions of diet culture, trying to get out of the dieting world and loving one’s body is a radical activism act.’

Intuitive eating, healthy ‘body positivity’, and self-education on why we glorify diet culture encourages us to literally love and embrace ourselves and our needs as we should. Body acceptance means ‘rejecting cultural standards about weight’ and focusing on true wellness. Body positivity doesn’t mean ‘loving your body every minute of the day, but rather developing skills like self-compassion and mindfulness so that you can respond to your inner voice with kindness instead of shame’.

If you find any flaws within these ideals, then you need to assess your mindset on our diet culture.