Content warning: This blog post contains references to eating disorders and disordered eating behaviours.
Have you ever said “Well done, you look great!” to a friend who has lost weight, or joked that you’ll be “good on Monday” after getting takeaway on Friday night? Chances are, diet culture has a good hold on you. But this isn’t your fault — diet culture has been around for decades upon decades, and it manages to sneak into every nook and cranny of our lives until it’s so normalised and commonplace to be expressing (and casually celebrating) disordered eating/exercise behaviours.
As adults, there are lots of things that we’ve gone through or learned in life that we don’t want to pass onto our kids — including a negative relationship with food and/or our bodies. If you want to learn how to break free from the shackles of diet culture and model a more positive relationship with your body and food to your kids, read on.
Firstly, what is diet culture?
Many people describe diet culture as ‘the water we swim in’, meaning we’re so accustomed to it that we don’t even notice that it’s there. The roots and effects of diet culture are complex, but in a nutshell, it is a set of beliefs and practices around food and weight that promote and glorify the pursuit of thinness and a warped idea of health. It is intrinsically linked to fatphobia and perpetuates the idea that individuals must constantly strive to attain or maintain a specific weight or body type, often through restrictive dieting, excessive exercise and other harmful practices.
Why is diet culture harmful?
Diet culture is harmful because at its core, it promotes the pursuit of thinness at the expense of our physical, mental and social health. Diet culture doesn’t care if its rules have caused you to lose your period, retreat from your friendship group or develop disordered eating behaviours. All diet culture cares about is that you make your body as small as possible, while eroding our innate ability to listen to, and trust, our bodies.
This is a problem because dieting and disordered eating can very quickly turn into an eating disorder. Dieting is one of the strongest predictors for the development of an eating disorder, and restriction often leads to either more restriction or bingeing, which can trigger a vicious binge-purge cycle. More than 1 million Australians currently have an eating disorder, and this can become life threatening — more people die each year due to eating disorders than the annual national road toll.
How do I know if diet culture is affecting me and my life?
There are many ways that diet culture can show up for people. Some of the more obvious ones include calorie counting or starting new and different diets that involve restriction, doing 8 week weight loss challenges at the gym, having ‘cheat days’, comparing your body with others (that are typically in a smaller body) or avoiding eating out or eating food that others have prepared for you.
However, sometimes diet culture is so deeply embedded in our behaviours and what we think is ‘healthy’, that we don’t even notice it. Here are five lesser known ways that diet culture might be showing up in your life that you don’t even realise:
- You only see food for its calories or nutrients, rather than the joy, colour and social connections it offers in your life. You might also prefer to buy foods labelled ‘guilt free’, ‘low carb’, ‘no sugar’ or ‘high protein’ from the supermarket, under the assumption that they are ‘better for you’
- You assign labels to food, such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘healthy’, ‘unhealthy’ or ‘junk’, and by extension, you might feel shame or guilt around food or even say you’ve been ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on the foods that you’ve eaten
- You have an all or nothing view towards health. For example, you might often have the ‘diet starts on Monday’ mentality or think that moving your body isn’t ‘good enough’ unless you’re dripping in sweat or have burned a certain number of calories. This could also feel like frustration when you forget to wear your activity tracker while exercising for fear of not knowing how many calories you burned or thinking the movement ‘didn’t count’
- You exercise to ‘burn off’ or ‘earn’ food that you wouldn’t otherwise eat and you fear how certain foods might affect your weight or body shape if you don’t ‘work them off’
- You congratulate or compliment others on their weight loss and speak negatively about yourself or others who gain weight. You might also envy people who have lost weight and try to replicate their food and exercise behaviours in an effort to attain the same body shape or size as them
How to challenge and overcome diet culture
The good news is that as pervasive as diet culture may seem, you can overcome it and lessen the effects it has on your life. It may not be a quick process, and it may feel like an uphill battle at times, but it will be instrumental for not only yourself and also the next generation.
Some of the ways you can overcome diet culture include:
- Try to step away from restrictive diets (excluding those that are followed for medical reasons) and rigid rules around what, when and how much you eat. Try to listen to your internal hunger and fullness cues instead
- Try avoiding labelling food and instead call foods by their name – e.g. chips, chocolate, apples or pasta. This practice can help to make food feel more neutral and remove any moral value
- Try to find ways of moving your body that you enjoy and can comfortably sustain, and try to avoid constantly tracking your movement
- Follow people on social media that make you feel good about your body, and be unapologetic in unfollowing, blocking, deleting or muting people who make you feel otherwise
- Set boundaries around diet and body talk with family, friends and colleagues, and try redirecting these conversations to more meaningful topics
- Try to focus on all the things your body can DO for you, rather than simply how it looks. This small act of acknowledgement and gratitude can make a big difference
We provide a lot of actionable tips on how to implement these changes on our Instagram. You can also check out all of our free programs and resources for parents, educators and coaches to help young people (and the adults around them) build better body image.
If you or a young person you know are struggling with body image, don’t hesitate to seek out the support and guidance of a professional. The Butterfly Foundation National Helpline (1800 334 673) is a great place to start.
