4 Tips for Disengaging with Diet Culture

Diet culture permeates everywhere, from popular culture, every type of media and sadly to the fitness, nutrition and the health and wellness industries. Just swipe through social media or wander into a grocery check out lane and you will be bombarded with diet culture in all its shame filled language designed to make you fill bad about yourself.

This toxic culture makes it hard to love our bodies and ourselves. It influences how we speak about ourselves (and possibly others). It also makes it hard to enjoy food. Exercise is viewed as punishment you have to do based on your past food choices or the future ones.
For many, being on some form of diet for quite some time is their normal. They don’t know any other relationship with themselves, food or exercise besides in this negative light.

Diet culture leads to feelings of dislike and shame around our bodies. It can lead to a preoccupation with food and/or exercise. This preoccupation takes its toll, emotional and physically and can even lead to excessive exercising, disordered eating or an eating disorder.

Diet culture equates thinness with being healthy and fatness with being unhealthy. Health is more than just your size. Health is your mental, physical, spiritual well-being; your connection to others, your sleep and your stress maintenance.

More recent studies [1, 2, 3] have shown that when the focus of making some dietary changes and/or exercising wasn’t centered around weight loss, people’s self worth and self efficacy improved, as well as overall happiness and health physiological measures.

Often figuring out where to begin with something this big, can be overwhelming. But like most things, it starts with baby steps.

First: Awareness

The first step is to become aware of all the times in your daily life that you are bombarded with diet culture. When you see a new ad on Facebook, YouTube or even on a magazine at the store, stop and take a moment to recognize the diet culture that is being presented.

Part of this awareness would be to look at what you take in on your own with your new critical eye. Unfollow anything and anyone that continue to promote weight loss as a means to be happy and healthy or that sells exercise as a way to a better you. Any company or person that uses language that is shameful and equates fatness with morality.

Second: New Community

Then follow new people, companies and other content creators that are body positive and Health at Every Size or HAES. This will help build a community of like minded peeps in your feed, your inbox or in your local community. Check out some of these folks. @thenutritiontea, @bodyposipanda, @i_weigh, @superfithero, @thedietboycott or @sonyareneetaylor. There are so many more, but hopefully this is a nice start for you.

Third: Language Check

Next check in with the language you use, especially about yourself, but also about others. Weight shaming and shaming people, especially women (and especially Black women) is so prevalent in the culture of the US and in online spaces.

Begin to remove the language of diet culture. Stuff that moralizes food and eating: “Today’s my cheat day,”or “I ate so good today". Remove phases that make exercise about earning your food or burning off something you ate: “I worked out today, I deserve that cake”, “I gotta hit the gym I ate way too much over the weekend.”

Also watch the language you use with others. Making statements about someone’s weight: “Wow you look fabulous, did you lose weight?” or the inverse of that: "You're not looking your best, did you put on a few pounds?" As well as statements that moralize food with friends and others: “Shouldn’t you stay away from soda because it’s bad for you.” or "Did you know kale is a super? You should put it in everything if you want to lose weight."

Fourth: Intuitive Eating

Learn what it means to eat intuitively. Said simply it's about mindfully eating, but it's also more than that. Listening to your body: your hunger and fulness cues and not being so prescriptive or restrictive with your eating. Eating foods you enjoy, that align with your values or your culture.

It can be hard to fully disengage with diet culture. It's not like turning off the lights. It's a slow journey. Be kind to yourself. If you need assistance reach out to people who can help, specially folks who are aware of diet culture and don't push more of that same onto. Look for doctors, mental health providers, Registered Dietitians and nutrition coaches that understand HAES.