Saying Goodbye to the Life Thief
I hadn’t heard of the term ‘Diet Culture’ until fairly recently. I had no idea how deeply ingrained it was in my own life, my behaviours, and my thoughts until I started following body positive Instagram accounts and first discovered the term
Growing up, dieting and fitness were fairly normal things – it seemed like my mum and other family members were always complaining about their bodies, wanting to lose weight or start a new diet. Family members would talk about how hard it was to keep the weight off. When dessert was served words like ‘naughty’ or ‘treat’ were thrown around, even though everyone would end up eating it anyway. Women were always ‘watching their figure’, being thin was something that was praised to high heavens. In the teen magazines I started reading as a child, celebrities would talk about what diet plan they followed, what food group they cut out, what workouts they were doing. The magazine covers would lure you in by claiming to share the celebrities ‘secret’ to staying fit, as if finally, this would be the diet, the workout that would keep the weight off for good. But there were so many secrets – everyone had their own method, everyone was constantly talking about new diets – the Atkins diet, keto, cutting our sugar, cutting out gluten, cutting our carbs, constantly cutting things out. It was all so painfully normal – this was just a part of life it seemed, and as I grew up dissatisfied with my body, I started to diet and watch what I ate, because this was just the normal thing to do.
I probably started dieting at around 14. I was unhappy with my body as it did not match up with what I saw on TV or magazine. I was slightly chubby and short, and even though I still had hope that puberty would see me blossom into a tall, leggy goddess with an hourglass figure, I wanted a flat stomach, I wanted a thigh gap. The trend at the time was being super skinny with visible bones. Body trends obviously come and go (we are currently in the trend where having small waist, big bum, flat stomach and abs is popular) highlighting the fact that there is no ideal body – they are just trends. However it has taken me years to notice this fact, and 14 year old me certainly hadn’t cottoned onto the idea.
Dieting was hard. It was so hard – I was used to eating pretty much what I wanted, and suddenly restricting myself was something my body did not take well. I now know that this is because bodies are not designed to lose weight, it works for while but then our bodies go into survival mode to stop us from starving. For hundreds of thousands of years humans biggest worry was getting enough food, ‘plumpness signified prosperity and well-being. Fat on the body meant higher social status, a better chance of weathering famine and disease, and a greater likelihood of fertility. Thinness meant poverty, illness and death’ (Christy Harrison, Anti- Diet). Yet over the course of a century or so we have as a society become obsessed with thinness – we equate it with health, beauty and moral virtue. Fat people are lazy, thin people have control over their bodies. At least this is the rhetoric that diet culture has taught us, so deeply woven into the fabric of our society that it seems incredulous to think of a time when being thin meant poverty. Well, it still does in many parts of the world, and yet ‘each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world’ (Yuval Noah Harrari, Sapeins). Diet Culture is so ingrained that the Western world quite literally spends more money on trying to eat less food and shrink themselves than trying to make sure the world’s poorest have enough food to survive.
When dieting wasn’t really working for me as a teenager (I tried to hide this from my mother, who would still cook full meals for dinner that I couldn’t resist) I would blame myself. I blamed my lack of self-control – I was too weak willed. Other people could do it, other girls were skinnier than me, why didn’t I have the self-control to lose weight? I remember wishing I had an eating disorder. I used to try and be anorexic – I’d starve myself at school and scroll through Tumblr (the most trendy social media platform at the time) which was filled with romanticised images of girls with protruding hip bones and collar bones that jutted out. My phone home screen for a while was a photo of a girl with the body I wanted with the words ‘Don’t eat’ overlaid. I read tips on Tumblr on how to be anorexic. I hated my sister for having a body that naturally stored less fat than my own, not realising it would never be genetically possible to have the same body type as her. I ‘failed’ at being anorexic in my mind, I could never resist food as it was too hard at home, and I blamed myself for this. My body stayed the same, and I felt jealous of girls that had anorexia and had successfully shrunk their body. Anorexia was not the eating disorder for me apparently (I know now that I did have anorexia, even if it wasn’t accompanied by weight loss).
I gave up on this eating disorder desire for a while, and when I was 16 I watched a documentary on sugar. It talked about all the negatives of eating sugar (which yes, over consumption of sugar is not good for you, over consumption of anything is not good for you), but the one thing that really stuck was weight loss. The man in the documentary started eating sugar for 30 days after not eating any for years and started to gain a lot of weight. It was like a lightbulb went off in my brain, I could do that. I could give up sugar I thought – I don’t even eat much sugar anyway; I much prefer carbs. So, I gave up non refined sugar for over a year and started following a ‘bikini body’ workout program, exercising 3 times a week for the sole purpose of trying to change my body. It worked, I lost a lot of weight (although I did not really have much weight to lose, I am naturally very petite). I was so happy – it worked! I was a successful healthy dieter! I successfully shrank my body and started to receive compliments for my abs and toned arms. I was genuinely happy as I’m sure a lot of dieters are when they first lose weight.
I then went to university, where it became a lot harder to maintain the no sugar policy whilst drinking copious amounts of alcohol and cooking for myself. I put on a lot of the weight I had lost, which led to periods of severe dissatisfaction with my body. I loved my abs, and went they weren’t there anymore I felt more insecure than I’d ever felt. I wouldn’t eat dinner before nights out so that my stomach was flat, resulting in getting blackout drunk more than once a week. After a bad breakup in my second year I had bad anxiety for a few weeks and lost my appetite which led to weight falling off me. Once I regained my appetite I was terrified of putting the weight back on, but enjoyed food too much and so started throwing up after most meals. I’d throw up in restaurant toilets, sometimes in other people’s houses, I even had a friend who was going through the same thing and we’d laugh about going to go and chunder up our meals after eating. It was like discovering a hack – I could eat all the food I loved, enjoy it, then go and erase the damage.
This went on for a few months, and while I knew that this wasn’t good for me I didn’t really care – it meant that I could stay at my desired weight, and this was the most important thing. Sure they teach you about the negative impacts of eating disorders in school, but those few hours do not even begin to weigh up against the lifetime of toxic diet culture BS that is constantly thrown in our faces. Unlearning what we have been taught since we were children is an incredibly hard thing to do. We think it’s normal to be dieting, for some people they do this in a ‘healthy’ manner, but for some of us this results in eating disorders or disordered eating, as we want to be skinny no matter the cost. We talk about the negatives of eating disorders, but it’s like we forget why people have them in the first place – it’s not because we are more obsessed with losing weight than anyone else who diets, it’s because we are taught from an early age that diet culture is normal, and disordered eating is sometimes the easiest way for people to achieve the results they have been taught to desire.
So, what is diet culture? It’s hard to sum up in one blog post, and I implore you to read more about it (Anti- Diet by Christy Harrison & The Fuck It Diet by Caroline Dooner are excellent), but I’m going to use the term from Christy Harrison to sum it up : it’s a life thief. It robs our thoughts, energy, happiness and time by encouraging us to devote everything we have to the cause of trying to be thinner, or trying to reach the ideal body type. Over 90% of people who lose weight regain it within 5 years, and yet we don’t give up on dieting, we blame ourselves. Diet’s do not just mean the antiquated diets of yesteryear by the way– they now have new forms, clean eating, lifestyle changes, counting calories, giving up sugar – in fact much of the wellness industry is built upon ‘healthy’ lifestyles that ultimately result in weight loss. These are still diets.
‘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.
- Demonises 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 colour, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health’
Christy Harrison, Anti- Diet.
Diet culture is the reason that moving away from dieting and choosing to respect and work with your body instead of constantly trying to change it is so radical. We’ve all been subjected to diet culture messages and have been conditioned to believe that not only does thinness and dieting equate to health, but that the pursuit of health makes one person morally superior to another. We get envious of the people on our feeds that devote their lives to fitness and clean eating, wishing we had their will power. Or we buy their fitness and diet plans in the hope that this plan, this will be the one that works, we will look like them.
The diet and fitness industry in the US alone is worth a staggering $72 billion. This is largely an industry that tells you that you are not good enough, and sells you a solution (that we know does not usually ever work in the long term). It quite literally profits from your insecurities, and because diets do not work, keeps you coming back again and again, and instead of blaming diet culture we blame ourselves, and are constantly told that this new plan will be the one that works. I’m not saying that all fitness plans are part of diet culture – I pay subscriptions to two different workout programmes because I love the workouts. Leaving diet culture behind means changing the reason you exercise, focusing on the vast physical + mental benefits that have nothing to do with diet culture and the way you look. There are dozens of fitness pages online that are dedicated to being anti diet culture and can help you shift your attitude towards exercise and food.
Recognising what diet culture is and leaving it behind is scary and not an easy process. It constantly calls back to us and takes strength to push back and keep walking away. It took me a long time to recognise Diet Culture for what it is – a life thief, and I still sometimes get drawn back in when I see a fitness influencer with an ideal body selling a plan of some kind. It is hard to unlearn a lifetime of diet culture influences but living without it hanging over me has made a world of difference to me mentally. I hope you can free yourself from it too.
