What Is Diet Culture?

If you were asked the question, “are you on a diet?” it used to be reasonably easy to answer.  You’d know because:

You were following a specific plan like Atkins, Weight Watchers, or South Beach 

You were counting your calories, macros, or points

Weight loss was the ultimate determiner of success

It was for a specific amount of time – “I’m doing this for the next six weeks”

What you were doing was obvious, and the label of “dieting” was the agreed-upon descriptor.

But over the last several years, this has started to change.

The word “diet” or “dieting” developed a bad rap and became loaded with baggage. Many people have dieted and experienced that it didn’t work long term.

Enter Diet Culture

Diet culture isn’t about being on a specific diet, but it still prizes weight loss. It values thinness and a specific kind of beauty ideal which equates appearance with health and wellbeing. Pursuing health is about morality and those who spend time doing so are seen as more virtuous. Let’s see how this plays out in a number of different areas.

Focusing on “Healthy” Food

Society has shifted how it talks and thinks about food. Rather than “dieting,” which was mostly about weight loss, we now focus on:

• Nutrient density, phytonutrients, and flavonoids
• Increasing healthspan
• Lifestyle disease prevention
• Hormesis
• Longevity or life extension
• Biohacking
• Improving cognition and mental performance 

How someone eats has also become part of their identity. Whereas before, diets had a start and end date, this is now a “lifestyle” and becomes indefinite. 

Even if someone is eating Atkins or paleo or low fat, it’s not even thought of as a diet because they have no intention of stopping it.  Diet culture turns it into “a way of life”. 

Exercise And Movement   

The same kind of shift has also occurred in the area of exercise. 

In the dieting days, exercise was mostly about losing weight (or maintaining weight loss). You’d find the way that most helped and then keep it up. 

But in more recent years, the fitness industry has grown in its reach. It changed from being a niche that a minority was into, becoming a ubiquitous part of living a “healthy life.” 

With the fitness industry’s growing role, the goal has changed from weight loss and being “skinny” to something else.

Strong is the new skinny

Fit is the new skinny

Thick is the new skinny

Curvy is the new skinny

Ultimately, it’s still body manipulation; there’s just a fresh new aesthetic that people are aiming for. 

These changes to exercise have also taken on the same rhetoric and made the same pivot that diets have made. Rather than being solely about weight loss, it’s about “increasing healthspan,” “chronic disease prevention,” and “longevity.” Again, diet culture is just as problematic but uses terms that make it sound helpful and aspirational. 

Saving The World

If you follow the news, the message you get is that the world is going to hell. We are constantly told that:

Climate change is leading to an increase in natural disasters – fires, floods, rising sea levels, hurricanes/typhoons – and this is a fixable problem. 

The health care system is buckling under the burden of chronic disease, and many (maybe even most) of these conditions are preventable.

Our food system is a disgrace and is intimately connected to both of the issues above. 

We are farming in a way that is destroying the planet and it’s leading to more volatile and extreme weather conditions.

The food industry is creating “Frankenstein” food that is calorie-dense, highly palatable, and devoid of nutrients. This culture of convenience and snacking led to a decrease in health and longevity, and an unsustainable burden on the health system. 

The goal of this article is not to analyse the truth of the above statements. Instead, I want to emphasise that when this is what we are continually reading and even experiencing (e.g. more volatile weather conditions), this can impact our decision making.

It can lead someone to become vegan or vegetarian for environmental reasons. 

It can lead someone to take up the mantle of people like Michael Pollan, focusing on local, organic, sustainable farm-to-plate eating and following his maxim of “eat food, not too much, mostly plants.”

It can lead to an all-out focus on health and chronic disease prevention, and using this to justify only eating certain foods, not snacking, fasting, one meal a day or other similar behaviours.  

And what is troubling about the above is that it can easily allow someone to see disordered behaviours through another lens. 

It’s not restriction; it’s about life extension.

It’s not orthorexia; it’s about caring for the planet and my body. 

It’s not obsession; it’s following a calling and being an activist.

Diet culture allows someone to hide in plain sight and to use their “values” and “principles” for why it’s the right thing to do.

Separating True Health From The Appearance Of Health

What’s so insidious about this evolution of diet culture is it can make it difficult to see it as a problem.

What’s wrong with wanting to live longer?

Why wouldn’t I want to be stronger and be able to run around with my kids?

Shouldn’t I try to prevent chronic disease and avoid burdening the healthcare system?

At the core is the question: “why wouldn’t I want to be as healthy as I can be?”

The answer comes down to our definition of health, and it’s where I see the difference between true health and merely the appearance of health:

True health is about:

• Physical, mental, and emotional well-being and knowing that these things happen on a spectrum. Some things are in your control and some things aren’t. 
• Being in alignment with your body and truly listening to and supporting it. 
• Accepting your body regardless of what the diet culture is saying you have to look like. 
• Moderation and balance (and knowing that this won’t always happen). 
• Appreciating the company of others and being present to be able to enjoy social connections.
• Realising that food and exercise are a small part of a very big equation.
• Knowing that the above is a constant work in progress and there is messiness in being human. 

True health isn’t some fairytale where we’re all going to live to 100. It’s realising that there are real health inequalities (that do need to be fixed) and that these are largely societal and systemic. Which means that people are starting from different places and are going to have different experiences. 

The definition I’ve laid out above differs significantly from what I see most people pursuing: the appearance of health (AKA diet culture). Which ends up looking like:

• Forcing your body to look a certain way irrespective of your natural shape and size. 
• Becoming detached from your body and following arbitrary rules and recommendations because you’re told they’re “healthy.”  
• Having your identity wrapped up in the pursuit and aesthetic of health. 
• Hiding how you physically feel because it doesn’t match up with the image you want to project.
• Pretending you don’t think about food as much as you do because you want to seem carefree.
• Obsession, overthinking, anxiety, shame, regret, and feeling trapped when you think about food and your body
• Being mired in comparison and feeling like others are doing so much better than you.

The culture we live in makes it nearly impossible to completely embrace true health, without the pressures of keeping up appearances creeping in.

But the goal should be to recognise this and strive to leave it behind. Or when thoughts do occur, to see them simply as thoughts and move on. Not getting sucked into the distraction and life-sucking pursuit of “health,” but instead doing the things that mean you experience true health. 

Escaping The Clutches Of Diet Culture

Here at Seven Health, we work with people trying to break free of the constant drag of keeping up appearances and having their life dominated by thoughts of food and exercise. 

Whether you spend your time going from one diet to the next, find yourself trapped in disordered eating, or are struggling with an eating disorder. Life on the other side of all this is unimaginably better, and we’d love to help you get there. 

I’m a leading expert and advocate for full recovery. I’ve been working with clients for over 15 years and understand what needs to happen to recover.

I truly believe that you can reach a place where the eating disorder is a thing of the past and I want to help you get there. If you want to fully recover and drastically increase the quality of your life, I’d love to help.

Want to get a FREE online course created specifically for those wanting full recovery? Discover the first 5 steps to take in your eating disorder recovery. This course shows you how to take action and the exact step-by-step process. To get instant access, click the button below.