“It is No Measure of Health to Be Well Adjusted to a Profoundly Sick Society.”
The quote above is from an Indian philosopher, Jiddue Krishnamurti, and while I don’t think he was referring to diet culture when he said this it still applies.
What do I mean when I say diet culture? It’s a system of beliefs that celebrates thinness as the ideal, promotes losing weight to become a better you, encourages you to work out extra hard to burn off those calories, and promises that your life will be so much better if you just loose those couple extra pounds.
The bad news- it’s everywhere. It’s your friend saying, ‘you look great, have you lost weight?’. It’s the new fad diet or celebrity picture on the cover of a magazine saying they lost the weight by doing a sugar detox. It’s that thought that says, ‘I ate good during the week so this weekend I can have some chocolate cake at my son’s birthday party.’
The good news- you can choose to reject it. Just because it is the social norm to diet to attain the ‘perfect’ body, doesn’t mean you have to do it.
This does not mean that those that do have to follow a certain diet for medical reasons are entangled in diet culture, but they can be. A diet that is followed for a medical reason, like a gluten free diet for someone with Celiac Disease, is a diet that’s goal is to improve the health of the person following it- not to lose weight.
So, you might be thinking, ‘but aren’t overweight people unhealthy?’
That’s what diet culture gets wrong about health; being thin does not equate health.
Promoting diet and weight loss to achieve health has been shown to be detrimental because often it only produces short term effects and moves people further away from being able to listen to what their bodies are telling them they need nutritionally.
Moreover, the assumption that adiposity increases mortality risk is incorrect. In fact, most epidemiological studies find that people who are overweight or moderately obese live at least as long as normal weight people. When it comes to chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease obesity may be associated with their occurrence but the causation of these diseases and being overweight is less well established. What epidemiological studies fail to really acknowledge is factors like fitness, activity, nutrient intake, weight cycling, and socioeconomic status.
For example, there is increasing evidence that type 2 diabetes is more strongly associated with poverty and marginalization than conventionally accepted risk factors such as weight.
What is needed is a shift in the paradigm. The focus needs to move from weight loss to weight neutral outcomes that don’t erode self-esteem and body image. Just because society is telling you that being thin is better and you will be healthier doesn’t make it true. Don’t refuse to listen to the hunger cues that your body is telling you because Oprah said don’t eat after 7 pm to lose weight or feel like you have to join the gym this new year because everyone is jumping on the ‘new year, new you’ bandwagon.
Eat when you are hungry. Eat foods that are going to fuel your body. Move because it makes you feel good. Refuse to listen to messages that promote thinness as the ideal.
