Ditch Diet Culture: Step One in Disordered Eating Recovery

From overt headlines like “How sugar is making you sick!” to more surreptitious messages about fat bodies in movies and TV (Wall-E we’re looking at you!) diet culture is everywhere. Sometimes it is easy to spot, and other times it takes discussion and reflection to unlearn. Its pervasiveness causes untrue and hurtful internalized messages most of us carry with us for years. Often it has roots in the onset/ maintenance of Eating disorders, disordered eating, Body image issues and even anti-fat bias.

But wait! There’s good news: the body positivity movement is growing and through platforms like social media, people are detecting and rejecting diet culture more than ever! If you’re experiencing disordered eating, exploring how diet culture is upholding unwanted behaviours and learning how you can identify and ditch diets and the mentality it breeds is often step number one in recovery.

What exactly is diet culture?

Diet culture can be defined as “A system of beliefs that equates thinness to health and moral virtue, that promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, and that demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others” (Harrison, 2017 as cited in Faw e t al., 2021). Importantly, it’s a cultural phenomenon that fosters the beliefs that fat is bad, thin is good and if you are not actively seeking to become thin (sometimes masked as “healthy”) you must be indulgent, lazy, have low motivation/ willpower/ discipline, etc.

*Note: wanting to lose weight is not inherently bad. Your body, your choice. Additionally, research supports that people in larger bodies do experience higher rates of stigma and prejudice (Hunger et al., 2015). Therefore, it is the harmful messages diet culture perpetuates and its effect on mental and physical health that is the issue!

The Impact of Diet Culture

Diet culture significantly impacts psychological health by promoting unrealistic body standards, leading to dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, and distorted body image. The pressure to be thin fosters anxiety, depression, and obsessive behaviors around eating and exercise (Jiménez-Morcillo et al., 2024).

Diet culture encourages practices such as calorie restriction, elimination of food groups, and unsustainable eating patterns, resulting in both physical and psychological negative side effects. For instance, research finds that engaging in food restriction- including amount of food (Hello Weight Watchers and intermittent fasting…), or types of food (we see you Keto, paleo, whole30…) or any other restriction physically or psychologically- causes preoccupation with food, binges when restricted food is available, and more (Polivy, 1996).

Socio-culturally, diet culture perpetuates weight stigma and harmful societal norms. The valorization of thinness and the stigma against higher body weights lead to discrimination and marginalization based on body size. This weight bias affects employment, healthcare quality, and social interactions (Hunger et al., 2015).

Challenging and Overcoming Diet Culture

It’s time to fight back! As pervasive as it is, diet culture is also easy to spot and disentangle from our beliefs through learning, unlearning and practice!

Following some of these options can help get you started:

Explore and get curious about your own beliefs and messages you’ve heard and how they affect your attitude towards food, your body, exercise, etc. *Note: there’s no right or wrong answers. The goal is curiosity over judgment!
Learn more about diet culture through books, podcasts, talking with friends, etc.Here are two of my favorite podcasts on diet culture: Maintenance Phase & Food Psych
Do a diet-culture cleanse and go through your social media accounts, podcasts, books, etc. and determine: are the messages helpful? How do they affect your mental health? *Pro-tip: Consider unfollowing unhelpful accounts with messages that negatively affect your mental health. And replacing them with accounts that offer weight neutral nutrition or exercise advice, who speak out against diet culture, or who provide you with joy (like funny memes or cute pictures of cats), etc. Some of my favorite instagram accounts include:
Find.food .freedom
Thenutritiontea
Sydthedietician
Tallyrye
Theshirarose
Nondiet_trainer
Hannahtalksbodies
Chat with one of our therapists. Unpacking diet culture’s impact and learning how to identify and reject its harmful messages is hard work and takes time. We’re in your corner to help you every step of the way!

Diet culture’s pervasive influence affects mental, physical, and social well-being by promoting harmful and unrealistic standards. However, the growing body positivity movement, fat-positive spaces, and research supporting weight-neutral care are helping individuals identify and reject these damaging beliefs. By exploring personal attitudes toward food and body image, engaging with supportive resources, and seeking professional help, it is possible to begin unlearning diet culture’s toxic messages. Recognizing the impact of diet culture is the first step toward fostering a healthier, more accepting mindset and creating a more inclusive environment for everyone.

References:

Harrison, C. (2017, October 23). Food Psych [Audio podcast]. Retrieved July 29, 2024 from https://christyharrison.com/foodpsych

Hunger, J. M., Major, B., Blodorn, A., & Miller, C. T. (2015). Weighed down by stigma: How weight-based social identity threat contributes to weight gain and poor health. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 9 (6), 255–268.

Jiménez-Morcillo, J., Ramos-Campo, D. J., Rodríguez-Besteiro, S., & Clemente-Suárez, V. J. (2024). The Association of Body Image Perceptions with Behavioral and Health Outcomes among Young Adults. Nutrients, 16(9). https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16091281

Polivy J. (1996). Psychological consequences of food restriction. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 96(6), 589–594. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-8223(96)00161-7