Today we live in a society where diet culture is the “new normal.” Following a diet is something that has become so common that if you don’t follow a diet and go to the gym constantly, you’re farmed as “unhealthy.”
Christy Harrison, author of “Anti-Diet–Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating” defines diet culture in several ways. Harrison says it promotes being thin, losing weight and body reshaping for a means of attaining a high status, and demonizing foods or food groups that you may love. Because of this, it has caused people to fall into a trap of diet culture, which is ultimately harmful.
To begin, diet culture can cause severe mental health issues, especially in young adults. The constant pressure of meeting unrealistic beauty standards can ultimately lead to low self-esteem. We live in a culture that if you aren’t skinny, or muscular, or a low clothing size, then you don’t meet the beauty standards that everyone wants you to meet. Along with this, diet culture can lead to body dysmorphia, causing an unrealistic perception of your own body.
Mentally, diet culture can cause extreme anxiety and depression. This is because following a strict diet can lead to unrealistic goals of what you need to accomplish. By not meeting these goals, it can induce stress and contribute to the anxious feeling of not completing your diet’s standards.
Diet culture can also generate an unhealthy relationship with food. This causes some people to believe that foods are “good” or “bad.” Diet culture essentially seems to demonize certain foods; you begin to see that having a sugary treat after eating healthy all day can ruin your progress. This can lead to disordered eating, which with the use of social media and influencers has become idolized.
People on the internet post what they eat in the day and it gives the viewer a false perception of what they should be eating in a day, even if it is not sufficient enough for their body type. Conditions like bulimia, anorexia, and binge eating can stem off of the pressures of having to follow a strict diet and follow diet culture. Overall, this all can lead to the lack of essential nutrients that our bodies need to survive. Because of this, following a diet and following it in an unhealthy way can lead to fatigue, a slowed metabolism, and a weakened immune system.
Another harmful effect of improperly following a diet is issues with hunger cues. When we are hungry, our bodies give us cues to alert the brain that we need nutrients. When consumed by diet culture, someone may inadvertently train themselves to ignore these cues. This causes us to not truly follow what our body needs, which disrupts humans’ natural eating patterns.
Diet culture cultivates an obsession over food. The counting of calories, and macros, micros, and sugar intake can lead to this obsession of constantly keeping track of everything we consume. While it is important to fuel our bodies with good, healthy food, obsessively examining every calorie we intake can have adverse effects. Our bodies need fuel, and diet culture causes us to not fuel our bodies the way we truly need.
Finally, diet culture just promotes a false perception of how people are supposed to look. This can cause a lot of insecurity for many, especially young girls, boys and young adults. It can cause us to look at someone differently just because of what they eat when it could be different from what we eat in a day.
The truth is, we shouldn’t idolize this idea of diet culture. Yes, it is good to care about your health and take care of your body, but it is not important to not idolize it in an unhealthy way. Instead of promoting diet culture, we should promote body positivity, letting everyone know that it’s okay to eat what we want when we want to. You can still take care of yourself by eating healthy, but you also can treat yourself to “unhealthy” snacks, and listen to your body when it is hungry.