THE TOXICITY OF DIET CULTURE

TW: This article includes disordered eating and diet culture

What Is Diet Culture?

Diet culture is the belief of prioritising your looks and figure over your general well-being. It glorifies the idea of being “skinny”, having a good appearance and having a good figure. Diet culture can include obsessing over your calorie intake, labelling food as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, excessively exercising to burn off calories and trying to suppress your appetite by drinking liquids (e.g. caffeine, water), the list is endless. Diet culture can be found almost everywhere: on social media, grocery stores, in the workplace etc. It can cause eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and restrictive food intake disorder.

When Did Diet Culture Start?

Diet culture has essentially always been around. However, the idea of having an ‘ideal body type’ started in the middle of the 19th Century. Clothing became very fitted for men and women so you could see their body shape. Women wore tight corsets to make their waist appear smaller. Men would wear breaches to show the shape of their legs. Breaches were short, tight pants that were worn just below the knee. ‘Fad diets’ in the 20th century included the cigarette diet. This was when cigarettes were promoted for weight loss as nicotine suppressed appetite. Another example is the cabbage soup diet. This was believed to cause weight loss as cabbage has a low energy density and if you didn’t like the taste of cabbage then you would lose weight by not eating it.

Diet Culture In The Early 2000’s

Diet culture in the early 2000’s was extremely toxic. In May 2021, Lucy Huber tweeted “If any Gen Z are wondering why every Millennial woman has an eating disorder it could be because in the 2000s a normal thing to say to a teenage girl was “when you think you feel hungry, you’re actually thirsty so just drink water and you’ll be fine.” This received 7,455 retweets and 76.4k likes. This shows just how many people related to this. Celebrities, such as Camilla Mendes, have opened up about the toxicity of diet culture. In 2018, Mendes announced she was done with dieting because of how much it damages your physical and mental health, solely to fit into society’s standards. Some other examples of things said to people in the 2000’s was ‘skip dinner, wake up thinner’ and ‘are you really hungry or are you just bored’.

During the early 2000’s magazines would constantly be tracking celebrities’ weights, such as Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. They would even go as far as following them to restaurants to find out how many calories they had eaten. Magazines would never show someone not considered ‘skinny’ unless it was a before and after transformation. There was always a big emphasis on which celebrity had lost weight, and which celebrity gained weight. Objectifying bodies was considered the norm in the early 2000’s. This made it really hard for anyone to love their body. Tabloids played a big part in the toxic diet culture of the 2000’s. They would include celebrities’ food diaries, make presumptions over their weight and add heavily edited images of their body and face.

Who Is Affected Most By Diet Culture?

Diet culture can affect anyone; however, studies have shown it mainly affects teenage girls. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) shows approximately 700,000 people in the UK have an eating disorder. Approximately 90% of this population are women.

Diet culture has always played a big part in society and affected people in many different ways. Social media and society itself create an unrealistic standard of how someone should look. If they don’t fit into the standard it can make them feel unworthy and not good enough. However, modern society has now started to challenge these ideas and focus more on body positivity. Body positivity boosts people’s selfesteem and allows people to be more accepting of their body. Some habits to help resist diet culture is exercising as a way of making you feel good, rather than to lose a certain weight. Language also plays a big role in diet culture. Don’t label food as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or use food as a reward (e.g. ‘I earned that slice of pizza’ or ‘I deserve that chocolate bar for walking 5km’.) Many people have felt so much happier after ‘ditching the diet’ and stopped caring about what society thinks.