I talk a lot about the harmful effects of dieting (of which you can read here). Diet culture is rife in our society and always will be: but how has it ebbed and changed over the years? This article takes a look at some examples of the diet culture which have hit us over the last 20 years. Read on to see what resonates with you – I bet some of it does!
Diet Culture: What is it?
Diet culture is a system of beliefs which values appearance and the pursuit of ‘thinness’ above health and wellbeing. It is well rooted within our society, where the public is constantly bombarded with the message that they should be striving to fit into a certain ‘ideal’ body type. Although a large percentage of diet culture is aimed at women and weight loss, men are also affected and made to feel that they should be striving towards a muscular body type.
How is diet culture pushed on us?
It’s common that people tend to beat themselves up for ‘falling for’ diet culture when recovering from the effects of chronic dieting. However, it’s really not their fault if they got caught up in the world of diet culture, because it’s everywhere. Certain types of diet culture such as billboard or television adverts specifically about weight loss can be easy to recognise. However, there are also many subtle forms of diet culture which are much harder to spot, which will be subconsciously feeding the message to our brain that we must strive for weight loss. Do any of the following examples resonate with you?
Movies
Have you ever watched back movies which you used to love and picked up on subtle fat shaming or storylines that you hadn’t noticed before? For example, ‘the girl had a makeover and got with the boy and they all lived happily ever after?’ Or movies where the entire cast fits an unrealistic beauty standard (such as every single male having a six pack)? There are movies which I used to absolutely love as a teenager, but now find really painful to watch back because all the messaging screams that worth is based on appearance (just not true). We pick up on these messages unconsciously, which feed into our beliefs that we should look a certain way. Now into the third decade of 2000, things are starting to improve: there is more diversity in movies and a wider representation of different body types – but there’s still a long way to go.
TV Shows
Do you remember any of these really popular TV shows from the 00’s?
- You Are What You Eat
- How To Look 10 Years Younger
- Super Fat Vs Super Skinny
…plus many more but these are the ones at the forefront of my mind…
All of these shows had a subtle theme: you are not ok as you are, you must change yourself to fit into society. I remember enjoying these programmes when I was younger, and it was normal that people in larger bodies were portrayed as having done something wrong and we all celebrated when they changed and lost weight (which now makes me feel sick).
Magazines
Before the rise of social media, came the (trashy) magazines. You know which ones I mean – the ones which felt the need to comment on the bodyweight of celebrities as though it was a fun activity to fat shame them. They also worked the other way round – by celebrating so-and-so’s amazing weight loss transformation…I don’t know which is worse! Imagine how damaging this messaging was (and still is) to the celebrities in question reading it, as well as to the rest of us who are made to feel that our bodies are not good enough.
Advertising
Nowadays, it’s much more widely acknowledged that there needs to be wider representation in the general media, in all aspects such as body size, race, gender, cultures etc. Companies are now much more likely to get called out for horrific messaging: shout out to Protein World for their amazingly horrendous ad in 2015: ‘Are you beach body ready?’1 which sparked off a campaign calling for it to be banned.
However, 20 years ago, most adverts which you will have seen in the media would have contained models of a certain body type. I have to point out that I have nothing against a modelling industry which is inclusive and transparent about beauty, however back then it wasn’t commonly spoken about how all of the pictures of these women were not real. They were all photoshopped and/or ‘touched up.’ For a ‘normal’ woman looking through these magazines, it’s hard not to compare and wonder why you don’t look like that. It’s because it’s not real, but we weren’t told that at the time.
Household brands riding on the wave of diet culture to sell their products
Example A: The Special K Diet
Anybody can say the words ‘Special K’ to me, and up comes the image of the woman in a red swimsuit, smiling as she holds her bowl of Special K. This diet was launched in 2004 and involved eating a bowl of Special K twice a day (alongside one normal meal). I didn’t ever try this diet at the time, but I did consider it. Looking back now I can see how ridiculous this sounds. From a nutritional perspective, it’s really not that healthy as there’s much less room for variety in the diet. Two bowls of cereal is also unlikely to have enough energy to fuel your day compared to standard meals. I love having a bowl of cereal now and again, but I’ll eat it because I fancy it in that moment, not for weight loss purposes.
Social Media
As if there wasn’t already enough out there to have us throwing ourselves at the nearest diet company’s offering – along came the rise of social media and the newest type of celebrity: the influencer. The very nature of how social media works lends itself to the rapid spread of diet culture. Anybody can post anything without valid qualifications on a subject. Typically, in the beginning, influencers which fit into society’s body ideal became hugely popular, leading to them being able to make money off selling diet products to people who strived to look like them. It was a time when ‘skinny teas’ and ‘what I eat in a day videos’ were trending. Don’t even get me started on weight loss transformation posts! Don’t get me wrong these things are still around now, but there’s also a growing awareness of how fake the social media world can be.
I could go on and on…
There are so many more examples, but there’s only so much I can mention in one article! I didn’t even get around to the influence and ‘normality’ of actual diet companies in our lives, such as Weight Watchers! This is a handful of the things which particularly stood out to me over the last two decades. It made me feel quite sad how much has been thrown our way, which can make us feel like we should change who we are. Did any of them resonate with you? Let me know in the comments below if you can remember any diet culture I haven’t mentioned!
If you’re still struggling to let go of diet culture, why not get in touch with Hattie to book your free 20-minute discovery call now!
References
- BBC Website (2015). ‘Beach body ready’ advert not offensive, rules watchdog. Available from: ‘Beach body ready’ advert not offensive, rules watchdog – BBC News (Accessed 1st December 2021)
