What is Diet Culture?
In today’s society, many people only know how to eat when they are following a diet or meal plan. With so much misinformation and cherry-picked sources, companies have been able to profit off the average American’s little education on nutrition by selling diet pills and meal plans. Over the years this diet culture and weight loss services have built up an empire industry of $2.6 billion in market size. One would hope such a large industry would benefit the population. Unfortunately, this is not the case with diet culture because it actually causes you to have a worse relationship with food, your body, and your health.
Source: IBIS
What is Diet Culture?
1. Weight Focused
Diet culture’s main aim was to sell the appeal of having a thin body in our fat-phobic society. The media continuously perpetuates the idea that fat is bad and thin is good. The product of this belief is dieting and selling the standard that eating less food will make you thin and accepted. Under the guise of health, many diets, especially in the present, will sell themselves as not a diet but as ‘wellness eating’ or ‘clean eating’. Both of these gimmicks still fall under diet culture because they defend the fact the certain foods should never be eaten so that you can slim down. Diet culture tries to convince the consumer that losing weight will increase one’s health, but this simply not always the case as many overweight and obese individuals are healthy just as many normal-weight individuals are unhealthy. A weight-focused approach to lifestyle is only going to lead you down a path of diet culture.
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2. Endless cycle
Diet culture profits off of its short-term outcomes. Many people can do a diet for a few weeks to a month and drop a few pounds and feel satisfied, but they also become exhausted from following such a rigid meal plan. The result of this is excessive binge eating and breaking the diet. The dieter can only diet for so long before a cheat meal turns into a cheat day and a cheat week. All the weight they had lost has now been regained and maybe even more. This defeat leaves the dieter feeling worthless because diet culture tells them that the plan is foolproof, everyone benefits, and if you don’t, then it is your fault. A moment of motivation arises and the dieter returns to the diet to try again and the cycle repeats over and over. Diet, weight loss, refeed, weight gain, repeat.
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3. Social withdrawal
Social withdrawal is another part of diet culture. What the diet companies fail to tell you is that food is a part of celebration and socializing. They tell you that the diet plan can never be broken and that fun and tasty foods at parties and restaurants are bad. This leads many dieters to distance themselves from social events where food is involved in fear that if they attend, they will break the diet and binge. This social avoidance can lead to a bad relationship with food because it teaches you only extremes and middle ground. The truth is that diet culture doesn’t want you to know that going to that social gathering with cake, pizza, chips, cookies, and wings is not going to destroy your health or weight.
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4. Last supper mentality
The last supper mentality is another part of diet culture. Since the rules of many diets are ‘don’t eat this and that, only eat at this time or only eat this food with this food’ it makes people form an all or nothing mentality. You either are on the diet or you are not and there’s no room for forgiveness. In this sense, say the dieter decides to go to that birthday party or social event and they want to eat some cake. If they eat a slice they might realize they broke the diet and that they might as well eat as much as they can right now because they already cheated and can start over tomorrow. This mindset is extremely common in dieters, but it will lead them down a painful path of binge eating.
Source: NIH
FREE HAPPY HORMONE GUIDE:
Breaking Free from Diet Culture
1. Intuitive eating
Intuitive eating is a style of eating that became popularized by two dietitians Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole, who wrote the book called Intuitive Eating. In the book, they created 10 major principles which are to be followed in order. They are listed as:
Reject Diet Mentality
Honor Your Hunger
Make Peace with Food
Challenge the Food Police
Feel Your Fullness
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Cope with Your Emotions
Respect Your Body
Exercise-Feel the difference
Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
This eating style in short is: eat based on listening to your internal body signals. Now, this is a lot more complex than what it seems like because learning to listen to your body can be a pretty hard skill to pick up on especially if you are coming from diet culture where you are told to not listen to how you feel. Intuitive eating is not mindless eating, and it is not a diet. There is no restriction in intuitive eating. This eating pattern is created to be utilized every day over a life span.
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2. Better relationship with food
One benefit to breaking free from diet culture is that you will have more enjoyment with eating and will have a better relationship with food. We need to acknowledge that food is a constant part of our survival but also is part of our enjoyment during social settings or holidays, therefore we do have a relationship with it. Having a positive and healthy relationship with food is important for our general happiness and stress levels. Breaking free from diet culture and adopting intuitive eating provides that no foods are off-limits or restricted. This allows people to not feel guilty or stressed when they encounter a plate of ‘fear foods’ or less healthy food items. Allowing permission to eat any food will not put certain foods on a pedestal and therefore you will feel the freedom to enjoy everything you eat. Intuitive eaters eat in a way centered around preference and choice, not based on food rules or restrictions. No food is good or bad, so intuitive eaters feel satisfied during mealtime.
Source: NIH
3. Weight stability
Another one of the benefits of breaking free from diet culture is weight stabilization. Luckily, intuitive eating has been shown to increase weight stability regardless of BMI. This is because our bodies have many innate signals that show us how hungry or full we are. If accepted and listened to, these signals will tell us how much to eat based on a healthy weight range our body is happy at, also called our set point. Weight stabilization is all about finding your personal happy weight range whether it is considered a high or low BMI doesn’t matter.
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4. Body Appreciation
Another one of the benefits of breaking free from diet culture is having better body appreciation. There is a large emphasis on the female body appearance in diet culture which results in the praise of thin bodies and the demonization of larger bodies. Fortunately, as people break free from this, they can better appreciate their bodies for their function instead of their appearance. A systematic review has found that intuitive eating can increase body appreciation when implemented. Intuitive eating focuses on your body’s ability to function properly when you eat food. It is not a diet so intuitive eating has no weight or BMI goal set in place, the goal is simply to appreciate your body for being able to tell you what it needs and what it can do.
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5. BETTER GLYCEMIC CONTROL
Better glycemic control is another one of the benefits of breaking free from diet culture. Glycemic control refers to the blood glucose levels in the vessels. Optimally, blood glucose levels should remain steady throughout the day with a slight increase after meals a slight decrease between meals. Unfortunately, those with type 2 diabetes have insulin resistance, our storage hormone of glucose, so they have issues with glycemic control. A study on type 2 diabetes patients found that intuitive eating was associated with a decreased chance of inadequate glycemic control by 89% regardless of BMI.
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