Diet Culture: What is It?

           Diet culture defined by dietitian Christy Harrison is a system of beliefs that:

 1.Praises thinness equating it to health, meaning people spend their lives thinking they are not worthy because they do not fit the thin ideal being advertised. 

2. Weight loss is a way of gaining higher status, leading one to devote time, energy and money trying to reach this ideal, regardless if research shows it is not sustainable. 

3. Certain ways of eating are wrong ,and others are right making a person feel ashamed, and guilty about eating a certain way. 

4. It puts down people who do not match this high ideal of what health looks like harming people belonging to different communities namely females, transgender, people who inhabit naturally larger bodies, people of color and people with disabilities.

Diet Culture

 Diet culture is the backbone of most “health” industries, like gyms that advertise you’ll lose x amount of weight if you sign up for their 8-week trial, or foods that imply being guilt free with advertisements like “clean” or literally saying “guilt-free”. Now can going to the gym make you feel better and change your appearance? Yes, but the key is promoting being healthier and enjoying yourself not that shrinking your body is healthy, because size does not equal health status. Ever hear the term “skinny fat”, it’s the term nutritionists and dietitian use when helping someone understand that skinny doesn’t mean healthy, the person could be skinny but have a high body fat percentage which is not healthy and on the contrary someone who is “bigger” could have a low body fat percentage and be mostly muscle. Every person is not created the same so their bodies will act differently, it is an independent thing that should not be compared between people. 

Clean and Guilt Free Eating           

Now on the topic of “clean” or “guilt free food”, even if something is considered a “clean” food it still may not be good for you, and depending on the person different foods can be “guilt-free”. Now are some foods better for you than others? Yes, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have the “bad” food. Truthfully, any food has the potential to be bad for you, the key is moderation. Moderating the amount of one food you eat is the best way to maintain a healthy eating style. Looking at certain foods as “clean” or “guilt-free” can cause a spiraling effect, because if you look too much into it and begin focusing on what is “guilt-free” here’s an example of how it may spiral:

You learn a bag of chips is not the healthiest snack choice so you decide switching out a bag of chips for an apple is a good idea, but then you start looking into the nutrition facts of an apple an realize how much sugar is in it so you start substituting carrots instead of apples, so you’re looking at the nutrition facts for carrots and realize they’re high in carbs, doesn’t matter if they’re good carbs, carbs are carbs right? So then you decide to do you research on snacking and hunger and find that you may just be thirsty, so you begin just drinking water instead of snack so now your body is not getting any calories or nutrition just water, so now you’re essentially starving yourself, and that is the most unhealthy thing you can do. 

The Spiral

See how that “guilt-free” eating can spiral out of control to quickly? They switch out one “unhealthy” thing for a “clean” healthy option, and it spirals because it can become an obsession. This is what diet culture is, it is the backbone of promoting one way of eating, one body image, one life style as the healthy ideal with no regard for the differences between people because no one person’s body is created the same.

The two blogs linked are run by registered dietitians and this is all they post about, so if you are looking to find out more about diet culture I highly suggest using them as resources. They are accredited and reliable for information regarding diet culture.