When goals to look “healthy” eventually lead to forcing yourself to throw up on the bathroom floor, you quickly learn that skinny and healthy are not the same thing. However, diet culture makes us believe the exact opposite of this. Bodies shown on the covers of magazines or pasted on the walls around the mall romanticize the “ballet body,” which triggers people to assume that their body should look like that. Diet culture is a societal belief system that prioritizes thinness and appearance over health and genuine well-being. This mindset promotes practices including calorie restriction, adherence to short-lived, yet intense, diets, and the demonization of food. These practices can completely destroy one’s relationship with food.
One of the many hurtful things diet culture teaches is that people should idolize thinness. Society treats being thin like the #1 goal, but the truth is, not everyone is meant to look the same, and skinny and healthy are not the same thing. Being thin is often seen as something to show off, be proud of, or make people jealous over. However, thinness should not play any role in one’s happiness. Instead of loving all body types, society tends to only reward skinny body types, leading people to worship a body that’s not theirs.
Due to that pressure, many people turn to restrictive eating. This can start small– skipping meals, counting calories, or cutting out certain foods. In some cases, this can be praised as healthy, but it can quickly become stressful. Instead of eating when hungry or to fuel their bodies, people start questioning every food they eat. Food stops being simple and starts feeling complicated.
In today’s society, many foods are demonized. This often coincides with labeling foods as “good” or “bad.” Labeling foods like this can easily lead to guilt or anxiety when it comes to eating, permanently hurting someone’s relationship with food. In diet culture, foods full of carbs or fats are villainized to promote weight loss. However, what people don’t realize is that the human body requires both fats and carbs because they are essential macronutrients.
With the demonization of foods comes eating disorders. Although eating disorders are not always what diet culture pushes people towards, it is commonly the case. While in some cases diets may be recommended, dieting only to lose weight can have many negative effects on both physical and mental health. Diet culture presents itself as good for someone’s health, but it often normalizes disordered eating behaviors, such as counting calories, skipping meals, and other restrictive eating processes. Apart from just promoting disordered eating behaviors, diet culture could also push someone to develop an actual eating disorder. Constantly being told that skinnier is better causes many people to fixate on body image, food, and eating, which is a major part of almost every type of eating disorder.
Ultimately, diet culture has many negative effects, teaching people that skinny and happy mean the same thing. Diet culture associates a slim body with a healthy one, in hopes of convincing people that skinny is the only way to go. While pretending to promote health, diet culture actually promotes an array of negative practices, including the worship of thinness, restrictive eating habits, the demonization of food, and eating disorders.
