Why am I so vehemently against diet culture? Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, a registered dietitian nutritionist and certified intuitive eating counselor explains it eloquently.
Christy’s Food Psych Podcast has transformed my life. In 2016, Food Psych was my introduction to the Health at Every Size and Intuitive Eating approaches. In the four years since I first listened to the podcast, its multitude of guests with diverse lived experiences and academic training has been a constant reminder that I am on the right path.
Recently, Little Brown Spark published Christy Harrison’s first book, Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating. Given my infatuation with the podcast, I had extremely high expectations of the book, and it did not let me down. Harrison illustrates the historical roots of diet culture; the transformation of diets over time; the impact of dieting on our time, money, well-being, and happiness; and the benefits of life beyond diet culture (e.g., intuitive eating, health at every size, and body liberation). She elegantly describes (as her tag-line states) “why obsessing over what you eat is bad for your health.”
The Life Thief
In Part One of Christy Harrison’s book, she puts diet culture into its historical context and describes many of the ways that dieting is harmful.
There have been few historical periods in which people have portrayed fatness as threatening. During Ancient Greek and Roman times overindulging with food was considered a moral shortcoming. Later, during early modern colonialism, conquistadors idolized European foods and blamed their illnesses on native foods in the Americas. Further, they believed that the differences in diet between Europeans and people indigenous to the Americas caused their differences in physical distinctions (i.e., race). They assumed that to maintain their race, and thus to continue to enjoy the benefits of their higher status, they needed to adhere to their European diet.
These moralistic and racist ideas about food underpin modern diet culture, too, which began in the nineteenth century with the American Industrial Revolution. In the mid-1830s, Sylvester Graham preached that it was unhealthy and sinful to derive pleasure from eating. Darwin’s ideas on natural selection influenced others to believe in a human evolutionary hierarchy with thin, wealthy white men at the top and larger-bodied people of color at the bottom. The first major push for a weight loss diet was by William Banting, who did not match society’s ideal body for wealthy, white men. He promoted a low-carb diet, and he created a demand for penny scales.
Harrison continues by describing the early, evolving manifestations of modern diet culture: the Gibson Girl, Coco Chanel and flapper culture, dangerous diet pills, bathroom scales, laxatives, insurance companies’ use of Body Mass Index (BMI), the American food-reform movement during the food shortages of WWI, cigarette use and fasting, gymnasiums, calisthenics classes, bariatric surgery, weight loss groups (e.g., TOPS, Overeaters Anonymous, and Weight Watchers), and fad diets (e.g., Atkins Diet, Jenny Craig, and the South Beach Diet).
Today, diet culture, now going by health and wellness culture, uses healthism to justify its stigmatization of fat bodies. Orthorexia, the obsession with “perfect” eating, is becoming a more common manifestation of disordered eating. Diets now show up as eating foods that are so-called clean, real, whole, or pure, and even gluten-free foods; following Whole30, Paleo, or Keto eating styles; cleansing or detoxing the body; or intermittent fasting.
Harrison explains how Diet Culture (aka the Life Thief) steals our time, money, well-being, and happiness. She starts with time. She describes how we waste our time participating in official diet programs (e.g., attending WW meetings), trying on multiple outfits in the morning to find something “flattering” to wear, exercising to shrink or sculpt our bodies, researching diets, taking pseudoscientific alternative-medicine food intolerance tests, looking for anti-inflammatory food choices, and doing cleanses or detoxes. She concludes, “Unfortunately, in the effort to make our lives longer and healthier by diet culture’s standards, we lose an untold amount of life to the pursuit of health and wellness. Our efforts to extend our time on this planet end up sucking it away.” (112)
Similarly, diet culture costs us a lot of money. We waste money on formal diets and commercial weight loss programs, such as NutriSystem and WW, which have business models based on the failure rate of their programs. We waste money on diet foods, “superfoods,” meal replacements, cleanses or detoxes, and diet or clean-eating books. We lose money on shapewear and cellulite cream. We waste money on exercise videos and gym memberships. Sometimes diet culture influences our financial well-being by shaping our career choices. A significant expense related to diet culture is weight loss surgery and the cost of treating the associated medical complications. Finally, when people decide to get help healing from their body image concerns, disordered eating, and eating disorders, the price tag associated with going to an eating disorder treatment program or seeing therapists, dietitians, psychiatrists, and physicians is high. The diet industry is worth more than $72 billion, and the eating disorder treatment industry is a $3.5 billion undertaking.
Diet culture, including weight stigma, institutional fatphobia, weight cycling, disordered eating, and weight loss surgery, takes a toll on our well-being. It negatively impacts our physical, mental, and emotional health, as well as our social and spiritual lives. Diet culture isolates us, steals our identity, and prevents us from meeting our basic needs. It steals our ability to feel the joy and happiness we deserve.
Life Beyond Diet Culture
In Part Two of Anti-Diet, Harrison explains how we can live beyond diet culture now that we know what it takes from us. She also describes the benefits of doing so.
First, we can find a supportive and accessible anti-diet online community and curate our social media feeds.
We can shift our hostility from resentment toward ourselves to anger toward diet culture. We can create space to welcome self-compassion.
We can honor our hunger with an abundance of food. We can give ourselves full permission to take pleasure in food. We can expect to have cravings, and we can respond to them.
We can recognize that although foods offer different nutritional benefits, none are nutritionally or morally “better” for all people in all circumstances. We must reject the demonization of particular foods.
We can focus on social justice. Harrison explains, “Ditching the “good” and “bad” labels…is key to dismantling diet culture as a larger system. Refusing to demonize or elevate foods means letting go of the racist, colonialist mindset that holds certain foods and certain bodies as “better” than others. Ceasing to moralize about food also helps shift the focus back to the determinants of health — social inequity, poverty, chronic stress, discrimination — that matter a lot more than how much kale you eat.” (241)
We can recognize that there is no requirement for pursuing health, that health isn’t entirely in our control, and that if we want to strive for health, we can do so without trying to lose weight. The Health at Every Size approach promotes health through self-care, joyful movement, and…body compassion.
In conclusion, I highly recommend Christy Harrison’s book, Anti-Diet. You can buy the book on Amazon, and you can find Christy Harrison on Instagram or her podcast.
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