What is Diet Culture?

TLDR: What is Diet Culture? Understanding Its Impact and Moving Beyond

This article explores the concept of diet culture and its effects on society. Key points include:

Definition and manifestations of diet culture
How diet culture differs from healthy eating habits
The harmful effects of diet culture on mental and physical health

Key takeaways:

Diet culture prioritizes appearance over overall well-being
It manifests in institutional, media, food industry, and interpersonal contexts
Diet culture can lead to disordered eating and poor relationships with food
The anti-diet movement has emerged as a response, but may have its own limitations

Wise Mind Nutrition's stance:

Acknowledges the pervasiveness and harm of diet culture
Distinguishes between critique of food corporations and promotion of diet culture
Encourages awareness and critical thinking about diet culture messages
Promotes a balanced, nuanced approach to health and nutrition
Supports finding a personalized, sustainable path to food freedom

The article concludes by highlighting the importance of recognizing diet culture in various forms and developing a critical perspective. It emphasizes the need for a balanced approach that avoids extremes and prioritizes individual well-being over societal expectations.

[Read full article for detailed examples of diet culture, its effects on health, and strategies for combating its influence]

What Does Diet Culture Mean?

Diet culture can be defined as the pervasive belief that appearance and body shape are more important than physical, psychological, and general well-being. It is the societal messaging that narrowly defines what an acceptable body and appearance are.

In recent years, thinness has been valued above all else and equated to being beautiful, attractive, healthy, and happy. It places the pursuit of this “thin ideal” above other dimensions of wellness. A thin ideal then shapes attitudes toward food. Food is frequently categorized as good or bad and becomes something people need to “earn.” These distorted and harmful messages are extremely pervasive, as evidenced by the examples below.

Institutional:

People living in larger bodies experience weight-related discrimination when receiving medical treatment. Studies have found that those living in a larger body are less likely to seek medical care due to fear of stigmatization [1].
Public health entities use fear and stigmatizing language (e.g., “obesity epidemic", “the war on obesity”) to promote behavior change.

Media:

Advertising, TV, and films exclusively portray those who fit the thin ideal.
News and magazines monitor celebrity weight changes and dieting behavior.
Observing the most popular social media influencers will reveal what the current beauty ideal is (in good news: this is finally changing a bit!).

Food industry:

Products like “slimming teas” and appetite-suppressing supplements and language used in food labeling (e.g., guilt-free, clean, tempting, zero).
Programs that encourage restrictive eating (or eating less than a person needs).

Interpersonal:

Compliments and comments around weight changes (e.g., “Did you lose some weight? You look great!”).
Comments around controlling food intake (“Let’s go burn that cake off now” or “Let’s indulge tonight- we can worry about it tomorrow”).

Personal:

Having a mental list of foods you should and shouldn’t eat and feel guilty when you eat something forbidden.
Changes in body shape or the scale affecting mood and self-worth.
Using exercise to counter the calories consumed or to justify eating.

What Diet Culture Isn’t

Diet culture doesn’t necessarily equate to being on a diet. You may not be on an official diet, but your food choices may be based on internalized diet culture messages (e.g., no carbs after dark, feeling guilty after eating certain foods). On the other hand, you may be on a lactose-free diet due to intolerances, a Mediterranean Diet for health reasons, or a Halal diet for religious reasons, without being influenced by the restrictive and punitive messages of diet culture.

Secondly, being critical of large food corporations is not the same as promoting diet culture. Large food corporations exist to maximize profits. They utilize neuroscience to engineer highly palatable ultra-processed foods, market them heavily to children, and make them accessible and cheap.

Food companies know their products are linked to poorer health, such as elevated cardiometabolic risk profile and depressive symptoms [2]. However, this also serves their interests because many ultra-processed food producers also produce diet products (e.g., Heinz owns part of Weight Watchers; Unilever, which sells Ben & Jerry's owned Slim Fast; Nestle once owned Jenny Craig, and so on).

Thus, big food corporations escape corporate responsibility by controlling the diet industry and the discourse around health, particularly by espousing that health is entirely a product of personal responsibility. Therefore, one can critique large food corporations that place private profits above public health and perpetuate distorted narratives around health while also upholding the belief that diet culture is harmful.

How is Diet Culture Harmful?

Diet culture rests on the premise that our bodies are fundamentally inadequate as they currently are, and it is up to the individual to take action and become the right size or weight. Thus, diet culture plays a huge role in promoting eating disorders and disordered eating.

Nurturing a healthy relationship with food becomes difficult when riddled with guilt and fear around certain foods. Another issue is that diet culture promotes disconnection from our body’s natural hunger and fullness cues. Diet culture encourages inconsistent eating patterns and inadequate intake by limiting the variety of food groups people feel safe eating and the amount they eat (e.g., predetermined portion sizes).

Diet culture is also harmful because it ties our self-worth to our physical appearance, an impermanent, ever-changing part of us. Ultimately, consumed by a near-constant awareness of how we appear, we waste precious energy, time, and money to pursue something that cannot be deeply fulfilling.

How to Identify And Combat Diet Culture

To combat diet culture, we must first develop the ability to identify it. This can be difficult because diet culture is not a single, clear entity we can pin down. It is a shapeshifter.

Diet culture may be easily identifiable in diet programs and shows like The Biggest Loser, but today diet culture tends to hide subtly under the guise of health and wellness. We are encouraged to make “lifestyle changes,” eat “clean,” and stay “strong.”

If you are not sure if something is influenced by diet culture, consider these factors:

Does it make you feel dissatisfied with your body?
Does it ignore your internal hunger and fullness cues in favor of external metrics?
Are there whole foods you are told you should avoid?
Are other markers of health considered (e.g., mental health, sleep, social connection)?

Next, start identifying how diet culture appears, from day to day, in your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. If you are still determining whether you are influenced by diet culture, consider this question: is my intention based on self-care or perceived self-control?

For example, am I exercising today because I would feel energized moving my body in a way I enjoy after a long day, or do I want to exercise because I want to “burn off” what I just ate because I feel uncomfortable?

Along with reflecting on internalized diet culture, it is also vital to observe and even note what you see and hear in the world around you, whether it’s on social media, TV, advertisements, labels on food, or conversations between friends and family. Awareness is paramount because once you see the many faces of diet culture, you can’t unsee it.

Has the Non-Diet Movement Gone Too Far?

The growing anti-diet movement has begun to shift the societal narrative around beauty, health, and our bodies and has released a great burden for many. There are some factions of the anti-dieting community, however, that, in their conviction and enthusiasm, generate black-and-white thinking and even guilt for not aligning with their principles.

For example, the belief that all intentional weight loss is bad is often reinforced. Any discussion examining the relationship between weight and disease risk is shut down as it is believed to promote weight stigma and diet culture. Thus instead of listening to clients’ genuine concerns and desires and supporting them to make informed decisions, they make them feel guilty about even thinking about wanting to lose weight.

Other statements like “restriction is always the precursor to a binge” dismiss other potential links, like the relationship between binge eating and addictive eating behavior.

Ultimately, the trajectory of the anti-diet movement is one where rigorous dialogue is not encouraged, and context and nuance are lost. You may be made to feel that if you are not fully aligned with the non-diet principles, you are against them, which is the same black-and-white thinking that the anti-diet movement has helped people move away from.

Conclusion on Diet Culture

Diet culture is the pervasive societal messaging that has come to dominate how we view our bodies. It is vital to recognize what diet culture is and isn’t, so we can better deconstruct our internalized diet culture and that of the external world. While the anti-diet movement has been revolutionary in liberating many men and women from the shackles of unrealistic beauty standards, there is still a great need to be critical and only take on the parts of various philosophies that truly resonate with you.

At Wise Mind Nutrition, we are here to help you find a sustainable path. A path that you create rather than one that was created for you. Is it time for food and body freedom?

Blog Collaborator:

Misa Mojarrabi, Graduate Dietitian

References

1. Wu YK, Berry DC. Impact of weight stigma on physiological and psychological health outcomes for overweight and obese adults: A systematic review. J Adv Nurs. 2018 May;74(5):1030–42.

2. Pagliai G, Dinu M, Madarena MP, Bonaccio M, Iacoviello L, Sofi F. Consumption of ultra-processed foods and health status: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Br J Nutr. 2021 Feb 14;125(3):308–18.