The Dangerous Narrative of Diet Culture
In a world that claims to be body positive, why are we obsessed with diet culture?
Everything seems to revolve around weight and body image. Social media, advertisements, news, TV shows, and nearly every form of mainstream media now has a leg in on promoting diet culture. This has been so engrained into our everyday media consumption that we can easily overlook things and not see them as promoting this problematic mindset. Gym programs and meal plans that promise 6-week results, such as Arbonne and SlimFast, are often not considered part of diet culture, but are in fact the very foundation of it.
Last year, Instagram restricted posts that promoted toxic diet culture and plastic surgery, according to the Daily Dot. Like many other celebrities, Kim Kardashian received backlash in 2018 for endorsing appetite suppressants and unhealthy supplements. Juice cleanses, appetite suppressants, and detox teas are the do-re-mi of diet culture and are still constantly filling our feeds on a daily basis. It’s nearly impossible to escape it.
Quarantine fueled diet culture to an extreme level. With extra time on hand, everyone was worried about gaining the dreaded “COVID 15,” which suggests people would put on 15-20 pounds during the stay-at-home orders. This weight gain is easily compared to the “Freshman 15”, where college students are said to gain about 15 pounds during their first year at school. Both of these narratives are harmful, and many young women take it to heart and worry about fluctuating weight during these stressful and transitional times.
On nearly every social media platform, “COVID 15” was being discussed and influencers were posting about ways to combat it only a few weeks into quarantine. They recommended new diets and at-home workout routines. While it’s a great idea to stay active and adopt a workout regimen to stay healthy, this narrative was pushed to extremes. Now that stay-at-home orders have been lifted, influencers are talking about the results of the “COVID 15” and how they are working overtime to lose the weight.
Personally, diet culture has always been a part of my life. I’ve never felt comfortable in my own skin and have considered every diet under the sun. I’ve tried it all: keto, drinking apple cider vinegar, the cabbage soup diet, Weight Watchers, Whole30, The South Beach Diet, intermittent fasting and everything in between.
Quarantine caused me to hyper-fixate on all of the diet trends and at-home workouts. I fell into poor eating habits and worried about gaining that “COVID 15” during quarantine, as did many others, and I quickly hopped on all of the diet and weight loss trends. The Chloe Ting YouTube workouts and two-week shred rapidly became part of my daily routine, as did drinking water loaded with lemon and apple cider vinegar morning and night to boost my metabolism.
While I did see the results I wanted, I quickly got obsessed. I cut back on meals and refused to eat in the morning until I had consumed my apple cider vinegar concoction. This ultimately resulted in an ulcer from drinking so much vinegar on an empty stomach for nearly a month.
It was something that couldn’t continue. While I still wasn’t where I wanted to be in terms of my body, I know that there are healthier ways to accomplish it rather than pushing myself to extremes. The beauty standards on social media are not realistic and that’s a hard pill to swallow.
Diet culture promotes a harmful narrative that can lead to disordered eating and ostracizes the issue at hand. This narrative only got more intense during quarantine and led people to a place of despair with gyms closed and comfort food nearby. Taking national panic and a pandemic to further the motives of diet culture is disgusting. This obsession with dieting and weight loss is suffocating. Every day, young women focus on how to lose weight and figure out how to fit into the cookie cutter mold of beauty standards. There’s more to life than paying bills and losing weight, even if Instagram doesn’t agree.
As stay-at-home orders have been lifted, posts have surfaced about how to lose the COVID 15 and how people are upset with the weight they’ve gained during the quarantine. Our bodies were under immense stress from March to July, and gaining weight is normal. There is no need to pay hundreds on a juice cleanse or skip breakfast to compensate for that.
There are plenty of ways to promote a healthy lifestyle without skipping meals or going on detoxes like diet culture suggests. Instead, you can meal prep and have healthy home-cooked meals. I personally worked on making a healthy breakfast of eggs or avocado toast every morning to start my day; I would cap my days with a walk around my neighborhood during sunset. To be healthy, you don’t have to go to extremes. It’s all about moderation and doing things to make your body feel good.
By Emma Bittner
Rom-Com fanatic and coffee connoisseur with a little bit of "I wanna save the world" in me.