Diet culture refers to beliefs, behaviors, attitudes around eating, body image, and physical activity with the goal of weight loss.
For diet culture, thinness is the goal, and all behavior will be valid with the goal of achieving it.
Some authors define it as the belief system that venerates thinness and equates health and moral virtue.
Recently, Agatha Ruiz de la Prada jokingly (or so I hope) said that it was becoming fashionable to go to dinner with friends, and that she didn't go, because she was gaining weight.
She preferred to stay at home eating natural yogurt with some sugar for dinner, or nothing at all.
If she went out to dinner, it was with gentlemen, because gentlemen drink and I suppose that with them perhaps there is the possibility of doing cardio to burn off the calories from dinner.
These statements are loaded with diet culture.
Food only matters to the extent that it makes us gain weight, it is devoid of enjoyment and we are capable of canceling plans that we want for fear of gaining weight.
She put in her mouth what many women have done or felt in order to be thin: being thin grants us the privilege of being seen, attractive, and brought us closer to that promised happiness of thinness, that is, success.
More information
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Food, in addition to nourishing us, has other functions.
As an emotional regulator, food releases neurotransmitters such as dopamine, which make us feel good when we eat it.
Diets, and diet culture, have deprived us of that luxury that is so accessible to all, and has tinged it with weakness and lack of willpower.
There are few nutritionists, communicators and other species that populate social networks, who claim that they have the holy grail so that we can stop eating emotionally.
I'm sorry to say that you're not going to like that trick to stop emotional eating, because we can only stop emotional eating if we die.
Denying the pleasure of food and that food should be tasty and gratifying is a way of continuing to divide food between those who eat well and those who eat badly, the thin and the weak, as if enjoyment of food were at odds with health.
I suppose that those who defend a diet that is not pleasurable are the same ones who have sexual relations with the sole purpose of procreating.
We are emotions and we eat with and from them too, that hunger is real, we feel it.
No matter how much that simplistic argument is repeated: “if you didn't eat an apple, it's not hunger, drink a glass of water.”
Where does it come from?
Do you have to be hungry to eat a slice of cheesecake?
Or, if you drink wine, do you do it from thirst?
Diet culture has desecrated everything related to food and health, turning it into a path to weight loss.
In fact, the term “taking care of yourself” has become a euphemism for losing weight.
Some of the characteristics of diet culture are:
The promotion of restrictive diets:
detox, the pineapple, artichoke diet and fasting.
Before and after diet models are often used, which makes it clear that one body was bad and the other good and, of course, the thinnest one is the ideal.
These before and after posts are devoid of the context of the person, who may have gone through depression, an illness, may have been in a deplorable state of mental health, but what is important is how thin they have become and the support and recognition that you will have despite everything.
Thinness despite everything;
thinness, at the cost of everything.
Stigmatization of overweight and obesity:
to the extent that you do not conform to the standard of thinness and the canons of beauty, converted into health, you will be the subject of ridicule and ridicule.
Those jokes, that extreme cruelty, are done “for your own good,” so that you react and don't give up.
The pathologizing discourse on weight loss is constructed as a means to achieve, in addition to health, self-esteem, happiness, and a higher social status (Harrison, 2019).
Saying that being thin is something you can achieve with effort and sacrifice denies body diversity and avoids the consequences on mental health, the possible development of eating disorders, the metabolic damage to your body from countless diets, frustration , body shame, the dent in self-esteem... A patient, who had gone through a pretty tough cancer, told me that she would rather go through it again than gain weight again.
To that point we are traversed by diet culture.
The fear of gaining weight is the fear of living, it is the patriarchal view of the woman's body, in which the changes of time are not admitted and in which there is only one body model, and it is young and thin.
It is also a way of always keeping ourselves at war with our body, and, therefore, submissive.
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