The Invisible Hands of Diet Culture
Do any of these sound familiar: You look in the mirror and immediately notice each of your body’s “flaws” or areas you aren’t happy with. Or while eating you start telling yourself “I shouldn’t be having this. It’s so unhealthy”. Or when you think about engaging in exercise or movement, is it quickly followed by thoughts of how “lazy” or “unproductive” you’ve been up until this point? If these sound familiar it is likely diet culture that is to thank for these ideas.
Diet culture is everywhere - it’s in our advertising, at our medical offices, in our clothing, in our grocery stores, and over time with repeated exposure, in ourselves. But what is diet culture? The Butterfly Foundation, an Australian organization that helps provide support and charity work to individuals and families impacted by eating disorders, defines diet culture as a “set of ever-changing myths about food and bodies, promoting the idea that one’s body weight automatically equals health and that foods can be simplistically categorized as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It also comprises a moral hierarchy of bodies that preferences the thin-ideal while masking a “fear of fat”. Talk about a lot to unpack. Diet culture not only shames how our bodies might naturally or biologically appear and be, but it’s also a constant moving target with new rules or commands on what you should or should not be doing regarding your health, movement, and eating habits. It can feel so overwhelming and impossible to keep up with and the secret is, diet culture wants us to feel that way.
In my therapeutic work with individuals who are struggling with their relationships with food and body, a common theme that emerges is that they feel and believe that they have failed in some way. Whether that’s believing you’ve failed because yet again another diet didn’t work for you, or because you didn’t go to the gym every day like you hoped, it still routinely leads to feelings of failing and then to feelings of guilt or shame. This cycle traps people in diet culture over and over again. If we feel we have failed then there is also an unspoken message stating that we just didn’t try hard enough. And also that if we do it again the outcome will be different this time.
Because of this, my goal in my work is to begin helping individuals unlearn what diet culture has led them to believe about their and other’s health and bodies. Myths such as being in a larger body instantly makes someone unhealthy or that by cutting out carbs or sugar that you’ll not only feel “lighter” but that you may also drop a few pounds. Recognizing these as untrue beliefs is imperative in beginning to protect ourselves against feelings of failing. Because the truth is you have not failed, but instead diet culture has failed all of us.
More from Amanda
Self Space therapist Amanda Kieser shares her brief thoughts on why you might keep eating even when you’re not hungry. (If you prefer to read a transcript instead, scroll below the video.)
Transcript
Hi, my name is Amanda and I'm a therapist here at Self Space and I'm answering some questions that clients ask me as they start the work. One question that comes up frequently is, why do I keep eating even if I'm not hungry? I have worked a lot with folks with disordered eating or eating disorders or just our relationship with food in general, and there's lots of reasons why that may be complicated. We may be trying to get some comfort, we may feel like we're trying to reach for some control or some sense of autonomy, but our relationship with food is complicated by a lot of different factors and interacts with a lot of various things, our bodies, our culture, our own self-esteem. So we may be eating as a way to try to cope with something bigger that maybe we don't have a good sense of yet.
Amanda Kieser is a Self Space Eastside therapist. She helps her clients better understand their own feelings, thoughts, and symptoms and has experience treating people coping with depression, anxiety, trauma, disordered eating or eating disorders, and body image concerns. She also loves helping clients with identity work including sexuality, gender, and culture.