How are you upholding “diet culture?”
Two people enjoying a feast of bruschetta, pizza, pasta and drinks.
Diet culture is as pervasive as air pollution.
None of us is protected from it, nor fully immune to its repercussions.
We’ve partaken in the conversations, watched friends succumb to its promises — heck we’re bombarded with diet culture messaging everyday in some shape or form.
All that to say, it’s dead easy to uphold diet culture.
Rejecting it, on the other hand, feels like you’re swimming upstream against a torrent of hot, sticky sludge: messy, tiring and nonconforming.
And because its sneaky AF, some of us (myself included) have participated in diet culture without even realizing it.
So let’s look closer: what is diet culture?
I love this definition by Christy Harrison, Food Psych Podcast Host and Certified Intuitive Eating Counselor*:
“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 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.”
*documented in the book 'Intuitive Eating' by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch.
Person measuring width of hips using a tape measure.
There’s no question that diet culture - which is inherently a product of white supremacy, patriarchy, racism, colonialism and capitalism - is harmful.
Not only are we obsessed with thinness, having a “snatched” bod or unrealistically firm ass; but now we’re also too distracted to challenge these systems designed to oppress us.
And we’re ALL guilty of having upheld diet culture at some point in our lives.
👉🏽 We do it when we comment on someone's weight (yes, even congratulating them on losing weight).
👉🏽 We do it when we compare our body proportions to someone else’s.
👉🏽 We do it when we label a food "naughty" or "junk" or even "clean."
👉🏽 We do it when we judge a fellow passenger who can't fit comfortably in their airplane seat, or another enjoying a large milkshake and fries.
We need to do better.
Diet culture promotes oppression.
And because I want us all free, I ask:
How are YOU personally contributing to diet culture?
Where do you notice diet culture showing up in your life? (social media, your family, job, movies, food choices, TV shows. As an added challenge, notice how many days you go before you hear someone discuss weight loss, "healthy" or "clean" food, their latest diet or super food, calories or macros).
What are the unintended consequences of you upholding diet culture? (on yourself, your relationships, your kids)
The thing is, once you see diet culture play out, it’s impossible to unsee it.
But starting to notice, challenge and reject it is imperative - to heal your relationship with your body and your food.
Love, xo-
Mux
Suggested reading:
Fearing the Black Body: the racial origins of fat-phobia (2019) by Sabrina Strings
The Body is Not an Apology, 2nd edition: the power of self-love (2021) by Sonya Renee Taylor
The Diet-Free Revolution: 10 steps to free yourself from the diet cycle with mindful eating and radical self-acceptance (2021) by Alexis Conason
Intuitive Eating, 4th edition: a revolutionary anti-diet approach (2020) by Evelyn Tribole & Elyse Resch