Without access to a car or public transportation, for example, you may not be able to make it to annual checkups; if you can’t afford fitness classes and/or don’t live near a safe place to walk, it might be incredibly difficult to incorporate regular physical activity into your routine. The notion that we must all control our eating habits in order to be healthy is central to diet culture. But the evidence is clear that what we eat plays just a small role in our overall health.
How does diet culture get in the way of true “wellness”?
Though there are plenty of dietitians, doctors, and other experts telling us to avoid certain foods in the name of health, there are many others (myself included) who see this restriction as a roadblock to well-being. “The number one pattern I see in my clients is that they’ve tried all these diets and done all the things they’re ‘supposed to,’ and they’ve backfired,” Cara Harbstreet, MS, RD, a dietitian in private practice who promotes intuitive eating and the non-diet approach, tells SELF. “They don’t feel better, they haven’t lost the weight that diet culture promised they would, and this leaves them not only physically unwell, but also confused, disillusioned, and angry.”
This frustration that comes from adhering to diet culture’s rules and not seeing any of the promised results—thinness, but also the moral virtue and general sense of wellness that diet culture vaguely suggests—can often lead to a kind of neuroticism around food that undermines nutrition. “Many people aren’t eating enough calories, and they might also be avoiding very nutrient-dense food groups, like dairy and whole grains,” Harbstreet says. “So diet culture undermines both adequacy and variety, which are the two most important things for good nutrition.”
“Wellness” culture can also do some major damage here. Old-school diets that are entirely about deprivation and weight loss aren’t popular in today’s world (my teenage clients might call them cheugy). Instead, it’s all about wellness and striving to be the best, happiest, healthiest version of yourself. Harbstreet and Tovar both say, however, that “wellness” is often still about depriving yourself and being thin, it’s just not cool to say that out loud. “Wellness culture is the more privileged (and often more whitewashed) and morally correct version of diet culture because you’re elevating ‘health and wellness’ instead of weight loss and vanity,” Harbstreet says.
But, in general, wellness culture isn’t grounded in health and nutrition science, either. It’s often performative. “Many wellness influencers make their rituals and routines very aspirational, very ‘live like me, look like me, thrive like me,’” Harbstreet says. But the reality is that it’s usually largely because of these people’s life circ*mstances that they’re able to thrive—not because of the foods they eat, the workouts they do, or their various self-care practices. There are certainly examples of fitness and nutrition influencers offering truly helpful and inclusive wellness advice on social media, but they tend to be the folks who acknowledge their privilege and those social determinants of health I talked about earlier.
So what does a world without diet culture look like?
Our perspectives have been shaped by diet culture and we’re surrounded by it all the time, so we often don’t even realize it’s there. It’s literally our norm. This makes it really hard to imagine a world without it, or to break free from it. But it’s fair to say that without diet culture, we’d all have a much better relationship with food and our bodies.
