Dear Diet Culture
Let’s set the scene:
You’re heading to the city for a fun day with friends. Outfit ready, a purse to match, and, if you’re anything like me, you have your food itinerary planned. After hours of crawling through Yelp photos and reviews, you know exactly what you’ll be ordering at every single spot you’re hitting: peach berry kouign amanns, red-bean mochi desserts, birria tacos, and so much more. But the day before you go out, you get a sinking feeling about what this elaborate food itinerary says about your morality. You push your planned thirty-minute full body workout just a bit longer, with a tad more focus on that one body part you don’t love so much—all so that you can feel less morally reprehensible.
Maybe I’m being too specific, but I’m willing to bet my annual university tuition that diet culture has invaded at least one area of your everyday life and thought process. Maybe it’s the types of workouts you do, or that food group you recently cut out because that’s how the Instagram influencer whose body you envy eats. Or maybe it’s that sense of guilt that creeps up when you’ve eaten something that the media industry demonizes (basically anything that isn’t green and leafy). Journalist and anti-diet dietitian Christy Harrison refers to diet culture as a system of beliefs that does the following: reveres thinness as the epitome of health and moral virtue, advertises weight loss as a means to ascend social ranks, diminishes certain ways of eating while promoting others, and oppresses individuals that don’t align with this manufactured standard of health—especially women, trans folks, people in larger bodies, BIPOC, and people with disabilities. Diet culture is no longer about being on a formal diet. Its rhetoric sings the same tune as fatphobia and has permeated social media, casual conversation, food labels, and even healthcare.
As someone in recovery from an eating disorder and who lives in a body that society does not marginalize, this piece was hard to write; it feels fraudulent to discuss the toxicity of this culture, especially since I still see it seeping into my everyday life. I still categorize foods as ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ The first thing I wanted to do after committing to Vanderbilt this spring was lose weight and get ‘toned’ so other girls would like me. Quarantine was the first time I realized how severe my fatphobia still is. But the worst part is, even in recovery I can’t picture banishing diet culture’s presence in my life. I submit to my destructive inner narratives and let them trickle into my spoken word, taking a position where I inadvertently participate in the oppression and marginalization of bodies that don’t fit an inflexible ideal.
In a half-hearted effort to counter my inner resistance, I’ve started following Health at Every Size (HAES) influencers on Instagram. In case you haven't heard of the movement before, here’s a brief overview: rather than using weight as a primary indicator of health and well-being, HAES practitioners take a more holistic approach that acknowledges that healthy eating yields healthy outcomes, independent of weight and weight loss. And in addition to body positivity, it preaches body neutrality, which celebrates what your body can do—its state of being rather than its appearance. My social media feeds are typically composed of sports, memes, and models. Now, it also makes space for HAES dietitians and womxn acknowledging that they are more than a number on the scale. And contrary to what I previously thought, adding such diversity has truly made the prospect of seeing myself as more than just my physique feel more feasible.
It would be naive to think that simply following HAES advocates on Instagram will eradicate fatphobia’s presence in my everyday life. But this addition creates a more stark contrast between the anti-diet ideals I hope to one day live by and the dispiriting diet culture dogma that still makes its way onto my TikTok ‘For You Page.’ Self-love and body neutrality inevitably require hard and deliberate work to dismantle, especially after growing up in a social environment that upholds the racist, classist, and ableist standards of diet culture.
The 66 billion dollar valuation of the U.S. weight loss market paints a grim picture of what the future of diet culture holds, and to believe that HAES ideals will usurp diet culture as primary governing principles of health sounds excessively optimistic. The weight loss industry we have in place right now would not survive a societal transition to body neutrality, and with capitalism in the way...can we ever really escape? I don’t think so, so I want to close with an important reminder: your worth is not defined by your body, and health is so much more than the number you see on the scale. Health is listening to what your body needs, and finding both physical and mental balance that works for you.
By Anita Mukherjee
Indie rock enthusiast and home chef who will always make time to watch a stand-up special.