When it comes to diet culture, everyone is a little bit caught up in it. With constant advertising everywhere promoting the image of “skinny is beautiful,” it’s difficult to not be affected by it. What’s not well understood, however, is how dangerous diet culture can be. Not only does it promote eating disorders of various types, but it can make a full recovery of these disorders nearly impossible to achieve. Here are some of the ways that diet culture affects our society, and how you can fight back against it.
Diet Culture Encourages Restriction
One of the dangers of diet culture is that it encourages restriction when it comes to eating certain foods. While it’s always a good idea to make sure you aren’t overeating, teaching people to restrict foods from their diet completely can lead to eating disorders and nutrition deficiencies. Additionally, it’s been proven that for many people, metabolism is much more complicated than just restricting calories or food groups. This can lead to feelings of unworthiness that end up having a negative psychological effect when it comes to how you view yourself.
When you see these types of claims, remind yourself our culture has many different proper uses of foods. This includes nourishment and celebration amongst many other things. Restricting yourself to the point where you risk your own mental or physical health is not an appropriate use of food.
Diet Culture Assumes Everyone’s Body Works the Same Way
Diet culture promotes the idiom that to lose or maintain weight, all you have to do is burn more calories than you consume. Our bodies are much more complex than just calories-in and calories-out. Unfortunately, food label research pushes diet culture in many ways to reinforce this incorrect assumption. While labels in the U.S. are required to list the number of calories per serving, a proposal in the U.K. would have them include the amount of exercise needed to burn off those calories.
The truth is that for many people, weight loss and gain can be personal, specific to the individual, and complicated. No one diet or system will work the same for everyone. This type of belief can lead to psychological disorders that result in over-exercise, shame, and other related eating disorders. This type of thinking is dangerous as it can cause people to think they just aren’t working “hard enough” to fit into the diet culture’s standards of beauty. When you see this line of logic, remember that your body helps you do many beautiful things, no matter what size you are. Your body is different from anyone else’s and there’s no shame to be had in the fact that it doesn’t work the same as someone else’s.
Diet Culture Promotes Exercise as a Punishment
When it comes to exercise, diet culture often promotes movement as a way to manipulate body size or reduce the risk of being fat. It promotes the stereotype that heavier people are just lazy and if they would move more, they would be an acceptable size. This is a dangerous line of thinking considering that causes many people to participate in an exercise to dangerous levels to achieve an ideal body type.
When you come across this line of thinking, remember that exercise is not some sort of indicator of how much you are worth. There seems to be a misconception that people who don’t exercise regularly are somehow less worthy than people who do. Additionally, diet culture strips the idea of exercise from anything that may make it enjoyable. There’s a lot to be said for natural movements that are enjoyable such as taking a walk at a leisurely pace.
Diet culture rears its ugly head almost everywhere we look these days. If you are aware of the dangers of diet culture, however, you stand a better chance and not having it become detrimental to your psyche.
