Diet Culture is a popular phrase these days but remains a confusing concept for many. Understanding Diet Culture requires doing a deep, often uncomfortable dive within ourselves to recognize and name our long-held beliefs about health and wellness. We have been taught to equate diets with health, thinness with desirability. Isn’t it a good thing to be “paying attention to your weight” or “watching what you eat?” Isn’t it a good thing to lose weight so you can “be healthy?”
Christy Harrison, M.P.H., R.D., C.D.N., author of Anti-Diet and host of the Food Psych podcast describes Diet Culture as a system of beliefs that:
Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue.
Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status.
Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others and 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 color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.
Diet Culture is a system of oppression that places greater value on thin bodies over all other bodies. We use terms like good genes to describe people who are thin. We describe thin people as lucky to be able to eat whatever they want. When thin people wear revealing clothing we may think, “wow look at their (*insert body part*) they look so good!” When large bodied or disabled people wear revealing clothing we may think “they really shouldn’t be out here like that. They need to cover up.” We must start to pay attention to these moments. This is how we recognize the judgements within ourselves that are often very painful to acknowledge.
Sonya Renee Taylor, awarding winning poet, activist and author of The Body Is Not An Apology, uses the image of a ladder to describe Diet Culture. The top of the ladder are people living in thin white bodies. These thin white people live with incredible privilege and their bodies are held as the pinnacle of what all other bodies should aspire to being like. The bottom of the ladder are folks living in non-white, large, disabled, or “othered” bodies. Diet Culture is not only a system of oppression for body shape, but it is also interwoven into systems of oppression targeting disabled people, trans people, and Black and Brown people. By continuing to adhere to Diet Culture we continue to adhere to all of these systems of oppression.
And this continued adherence, frankly, should piss us all off. But it doesn’t. We accept it because so many of us remain in the unconscious trance state of perpetuating Diet Culture. We are sucked into the lure of reaching a destination of supposed happiness and fulfillment. If we say we are committed to dismantling systems of oppression, then we can no longer allow ourselves to be in this trance state. By remaining silent, we are consenting to a system of harm, of deeming some human beings worthy and many, many others unworthy.
Folks living in large bodies are seen as less worthy, unintelligent, lazy, and unmotivated by medical professionals and their peers. In the article, Impact of weight bias and stigma on quality of care and outcomes for patients with obesity by S. M. Phelan D. J. Burgess et al, the authors write “The nature of healthcare provider bias encompasses endorsement of negative stereotypes of patients with obesity, including terms like ‘lazy’, ‘weak-willed’, and ‘bad’, feeling less respect for those patients, and being more likely to report them as a ‘waste of time’.” The authors point to a correlation with an increased weight bias seen by medical providers working specifically in weight loss related clinics. Because of these stereotypes and the painful shaming interacting with these medical providers, larger bodied people often put off making follow up appointments for their own health care. When you live in a larger body you are likely to get weight loss advice when you are seeking treatment for something as simple as a sore throat. This fear of seeking care contributes to high rates of disease and to the development of chronic health conditions.
Weight stigma is defined in the article How and why weight stigma drives the obesity ‘epidemic’ and harms health by Tomiyama, A., Carr, D., Granberg, E. et al., as the social rejection and devaluation that accrues to those who do not comply with prevailing social norms of adequate body weight and shape. Weight stigma is likely to drive weight gain and poor health. The research suggests that rather than focusing on the patient themselves, greater positive outcomes can be seen through efforts to train compassionate and knowledgeable healthcare providers to deliver better care and ultimately lessen the negative effects of weight stigma.
People living in large bodies continue to be ridiculed in jokes and memes. While we no longer allow jokes to be made about someone’s race, ethnicity, or sexual identity (because thank goodness as a culture we have come to recognize the pain and injustice of these jokes), we continue to permit the ridicule and targeting of fat bodies. It is common to see or hear jokes about weight gain on popular tv shows or while scrolling social media. We even say things to our friends like “God I feel so fat!,” when really, we mean we don’t feel good.
The term obesity, often used with great concern by medical doctors, mental health therapists, and fitness/wellness professionals, is a deeply problematic part of Diet Culture. This term refers to a descriptive category within the problematic body mass index (BMI). The BMI is an index developed over 200 years ago by a social scientist Adolphe Quetelet, who was NOT a medical doctor. Quetelet’s academic study was focused on the genetic superiority of white men. If you are interested in learning more about the creation of the BMI, then I highly recommend reading The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI by Aubrey Gordon, who wrote under the penname Your Fat Friend for Medium. The BMI is simply a mathematical equation based on height and weight. It does not measure bone, muscle, or fat mass, rather it measures physical appearance and it is not a good predictor of health. In fact, the majority of NFL players could be labled obese. Yet the BMI continues to be used by workplace wellness programs, medical and fitness professionals as a key measurement of health and wellness. There are many other measures that could be used to get a better snapshot of health, including cholesterol level, blood pressure, or insulin resistance. The use of the BMI only contributes to great shame and suffering. The BMI is interpreted as a measure of worthiness or a goal, often fleeting and unattainable, to reach and cling onto.
Lindo Bacon, PhD (formerly Linda Bacon), a leader in the Health At Every Size (HAES) movement, and researcher and author Amee Severson wrote in an article for Scientific American that “Health experts are sending incorrect and destructive messages about the relationship between weight and wellness” and “a quick glance at the weight research shows that, despite decades of trying, there is no evidence that efforts to prevent or reverse ‘obesity’ are successful.”
In 1998, the Adverse Childhood Events (ACES) Study was released. This study connected traumatic events, like experiencing or witnessing abuse or violence or parental substance abuse or mental illness, that occur in childhood (0-17 years) to chronic health problems, mental illness, and substance use problems in adulthood. It is understood that the human body responds to chronic psychological stress by going into a number of primitive defense mechanisms. One of these mechanisms is increasing hunger signals while slowing down metabolism. The storing of fat is a primitive mechanism for survival. There is therefore, of course, a correlation with adolescent and adult weight gain and a history of ACES. The medical community continues to fail those with a significant history of surviving trauma when it prescribes only weight loss.
And yet, despite what we know about trauma and weight gain and the ineffectual impact of Diets, weight loss continues to be heavily prescribed. There is very little evidence that diets lead to long term successful weight loss or emotional health. While, in fact, most evidence points to weight loss followed by weight gain. Many health researchers are seeing more risks associated with the impact that yo-yo dieting has on the body as compared to weight gain.
Dismantling Diet Culture can feel really hard and really scary. So many of us seek out diets for reassurance and for guidance on how to feel better. Of course we do! This belief has been hammered home for decades and passed down within our families, like beloved family traditions. We are conned into believing Diets are the answer. We are told that Diets = control. Diets = happiness. Diets = the long-unlocked answer to why we are so miserable.
But sadly, these are all lies. Thinness does not equal health, nor happiness. Diets do not bring us relief, rather they often prolong and perpetuate shame.
All bodies are worthy. All humans are worthy. Dismantling Diet Culture requires us to learn new ways to connect to our own sense of self and our bodies. We can learn to reconnect to food in a way that is nourishing, joyful, and intuitive. We can reconnect to our bodies through gentle exploration of what kinds of movement makes our body feel good. We can reclaim our worth through reparative therapy on life experiences that left us feeling unworthy. And yes, this is a more nuanced and, at times, confusing process than following a diet. Yet the outcome is profound freedom, liberation, and shedding of shame leading to healthier and happier you.
We need communities of care that support this work. We need whole health wellness programs, not based on weight loss, that are easily accessible within all communities. We need programs that teach tools to mitigate the impact of trauma and help us restore our sense of safety within our own bodies.
We need more community gardening programs and increased access to fresh, local foods. We need fitness spaces that celebrate and warmly welcome all bodies to move in ways that feel good and safe without weight loss being the goal. We need medical providers who listen with open hearts and collaborate in a trauma-informed way with their patients to develop care plans that address a whole-self model of healing. We need therapists who support full embodiment for their clients and who can provide healing spaces to address the trauma and impact that Diet Culture has had.
To begin however, we must look within ourselves and see where we may be hurting, where we may be holding onto beliefs that may have comforted us in the past and yet now leaving us feeling stuck and confused. We must have compassion for this pain and confusion and yet also begin the work to challenge our adherence to this system of oppression that holds us all captive. We can look for guidance with the communities of Health At Every Size (HAES) & Intuitive Eating. We can research and find therapists, dietitians, coaches who align with this work. We can kindly request the people in our lives not engage in talking about diets or weight loss around us. We can challenge misconceptions about health and body size. We can communicate with others that jokes and memes about large bodies are not funny.
I do believe in a world where Diet Culture will no longer be celebrated and where all bodies will be liberated and seen as worthy, no matter what. I hope you do too.