Say Goodbye to Diet Culture

We’ve all heard the saying “new year, new me.” In fact, I bet most everyone reading this article has at one point in their lives sat down in December and written drastic New Year’s Resolutions that they hoped would become the blueprints of the new life they’d build. This end-of-year ritual has become a tradition for many, as if we are only granted permission to set goals and start fresh with the turn of a new year. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, our capitalist society sees this not as vulnerable people trying to better themselves, but as a convenient way to make a profit from the widespread insecurity that is catalyzed by the one and only, diet culture.

“What is diet culture?” you ask. Well, dear reader, you’ve come to the right place. Diet culture is comprised of a system of beliefs that worships thinness and equates it to being healthy, happy, and fulfilled. This is the foundation upon which our fatphobic society has been built for decades. Diet culture promotes fearing fatness by trying to erase it from the media. As a result, advertisements, television shows, movies, magazines, and even dolls all proudly display thin, airbrushed women. Ever wondered why most of the fashion industry’s billboards consist only of scantily clad, waiflike models? They are selling thinness. Did you realize that the barbie dolls that you may have played with as a child only come with one body type? Hello, diet culture. Fancy seeing you here telling young girls that they have to be thin to be worthy.

As I’ve already pointed out, diet culture is ingrained in our nation. It lives in our minds, rules our bodies, and dominates the world around us, yet many people still do not realize this. Because it is so normalized today, so many fall deep into its trap. Before they know it, their lives revolve around numbers, scales, and the lies that they are spoon fed by society while they refuse to eat anything else. Food becomes the enemy, diets become salvation, and so begins the endless quest for thinness, for worthiness. I’m going to ruin the ending of this story for you: thinness never equates to being worthy or fulfilled. In fact, the unhealthy road that is paved by diet culture only truly leads to emptiness, pain, self-hatred, and sickness.

So, why are we still vowing to alter our lifestyles to be unsustainable and dangerous when we should be educating our society on the perils of disordered eating? Because that is simply how entrenched this world is in diet culture. It has been our history, but how do we make sure that it is not our future? How do we ensure that our children grow up knowing that food should not be assigned a moral value, that our bodies are simply the vessels that allow us to physically exist, and that society’s current idea of beauty is not the rent they have to pay to live in this world?

The answer seems surprisingly simple: in order to eradicate diet culture, we must change our behavior. Instead of resolving to diet and lose weight in a desperate chase for fulfillment, try something new. Ask yourself what fulfillment would look like in your life and what core beliefs are leading you back to an unhealthy relationship with food over and over again. (Here’s a good article that explains what core beliefs are and why doing the outside work will never help as much as doing the inside work.)

Instead of reaffirming that thinness equates to happiness by making body-focused comments to others, compliment your friends by telling them how happy they seem, how much you value their place in your life, and tell that they chose a cool nail color. No food should be “off limits.” This creates a deprivation and diet-like mindset and conveys to the world that you buy into food having a moral value. If food looks good and you want to taste it but you are not necessarily hungry, you should still be able to try it anyway. But this is still all surface level. As a nation, we need to go deeper and understand the notion that thinness will bring fulfillment has been in place for so long that it is so easy to believe that lie. In order to dismantle it, we will need a large majority of people, companies, and the media to not only change their behavior, but also their mindset. This is where the work truly begins.

A good friend of mine once gave me a relevant metaphor for what diet culture does to us: imagine you are a painter. You typically make beautiful, striking art that radiates meaning and purpose, but one day, you decide to spend all of your time that you could have been painting manipulating your paint brush. You glare at it, analyze it, scrutinize it, switch it out for a smaller one, take it apart and put it back together again, but none of this helps you to paint, and it certainly does not lead to fulfillment.

So, stop manipulating your paintbrush. It is yours, it is unique, and it’s completely fine the way it is. Just start painting. There’s no reason to wait for a new year. I promise you’ll feel so much more free.