Why I Won’t Give Into Diet Culture This New Year: The harms of diet culture and fatphobia
Trigger Warning: mentions of eating disorders and self-harm, fatphobia, anti-Black racism
From a young age, we’ve been sold diets, weight loss journeys, and so-called “life-changing” transformations. We’ve been sold the image that our bodies were unworthy and undeserving of love as they are. At a young age, especially for people socialized as girls, we have been taught and trained into behaving as though our bodies are made for anything but ourselves, as though they are for another’s consumption. Our ideas of food began to be categorized into “good” and “bad”, as though food isn’t something that keeps us alive.
For many, the new year is a time to start fresh and set new goals for ourselves. However, when we’re taught that our bodies determine our value, that how our bodies look can determine how happy we are and how we’re treated in the world, we often conflate weight loss to being a necessary step in achieving success and happiness. For me, and for many other folks who have recovered or are recovering from an eating disorder, the thought of the annual spike in the advertisements of diet products and weight loss resolutions scares me. I myself remember watching body types go in and out of trend as if our bodies are something meant to be nothing more than a before or after photo.
Although the narrative about eating disorders is often whitewashed, advertised as an issue for thin white girls, toxic relationships with food are often a direct result of the processes of violent ongoing colonization and capitalist societies. Folks whose identities are constantly up for debate (this includes but is not limited to: queer and trans folks, BIPOC, people with disabilities) often have experiences of relational trauma. These are essentially chronic experiences of trauma that often happen repeatedly to the point that these harms may even feel integrated into the air around us. These relationships can be personal, such as experiences of emotional abuse, or systemic, such as chronic experiences of homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogynoir, etc. Often folks who face marginalization have significantly higher experiences of relational trauma, which results in 80% of people with an experience of trauma having experiences of disordered eating.1
Not only is the depiction of eating disorders considered exclusive to white straight cis women factually incorrect, it whitewashes the history of fatphobia as a tool to uphold anti-Black racism. Although many people may argue that fat bodies were always the opposite of the beauty standard, and that thinness is an objective measure of beauty, this argument doesn’t hold up historically.
In the past, fat bodies were viewed as the epitome of beauty, due to the conflation of fatness and wealth. The renaissance era idolized fat women, in particular, women that held more weight in their hips, butt, and stomach, all areas which were then deemed “problem areas” in the late 90s to early 2000s. So what happened during that time frame that stigmatized fatness?
In the 1900s, magazines and media warned white middle-class women that they need to eat as little as possible, to show their racial superiority.2 Although, historically, white bodies were sized similarly to Black bodies, European women wanted to create a new aspect of racial identity, including eating and body size as justification for the enslavement of Black folks.2 The racist ties to fatphobia, similarly to many practices of colonialism, weren’t a one-time event.
The use and upholding of diet culture is an act of white supremacy in that it most negatively impacts BIPOC, and is rooted in the notion of establishing a racial superiority through thinness. This is additionally seen in the shaming of BIPOC, especially for first or second-generation immigrants, for eating cultural foods outside the home. A prime example of this would be the shaming of children in grade school for the smell of their lunch. For many of us, this can create core memories of shame attached to food and our cultural identity.
Additionally, measures of health that are commonly used by doctors, schools, and fitness centers today have origins in racist colonial practices. Namely, the BMI scale wasn’t intended to operate as a tool for measurement of individual fatness, the scale presents a ratio of someone's weight to their height however does not account for bone density, muscularity, or any other influences on your weight.2 The problem with applying the BMI scale to BIPOC, specifically with Black women, is that they tend to be healthier at a heavier weight than white women.2 Black women are often told by doctors that they meet the standards for obesity, even though they may be perfectly healthy at this weight.
There is no overarching practice for which to measure an individual's health, and the prescription of one-size-fits-all nutrition advice is inherently outdated and rooted in white supremacy. Folks who are told that they’re medically obese are typically then told to go on diets. And because we’ve been blindly guided towards the false narratives that thinness will always be healthier, that thinness is equivalent to beauty, and that if our bodies don’t naturally fit into a certain mould, that our bodies are inherently wrong and unhealthy, folks go on diets to “fix” their bodies.
Doctors often overlook the fact that 95% of all people that go on diets will regain their lost weight, and often more, within 1 to 5 years.3 Additionally, Yo-Yo dieting, which is the cycle of weight loss and gain, can have negative effects, such as an increased risk of heart disease and eating disorders, long-term negative impacts on metabolism, etc.3
When considering the depiction and recommended strategies of dieting by the media (i.e. TV doctors, weight loss programs) including keto, intermittent fasting, smoothie “cleanses”, etc. it’s evident that we often conflate the term “dieting” to heavily restricting food intake as well as the types of food we may eat. Dieting then leads to our bodies going into starvation mode as our brains revert back to survival instincts. In these cases, our bodies don’t know the differences between “dieting” and famine. So, when we allow ourselves to eat again, our brains want to keep going because we’ve trained ourselves into believing we have limited access to food, when this may not actually be the case.
Even diets that are framed as “just eating healthy”, although sound like a great idea, can allow for the toxicities of diet culture that are already ingrained in us to arise in these intentional changes in eating patterns. We’re taught that there is one narrative for what “good” and “bad” foods are, seeing foods in such binaries and sorting them into these categories are: a) not scientifically sound, although foods have different levels of nutritional value, there are no right and wrong foods to eat; b) create a sense of scarcity which creates a stronger craving for foods.
Instead, we can move towards the acknowledgement that each person is different, and that individual wellbeing and health don’t always look the same. And with this acknowledgement, we can begin to eat intuitively. What forms of nourishment does our body need right now? By listening to these natural cycles we can begin to take our bodies out of starvation mode and start to heal our relationships with food.
For many folks, we often use food to cope and ground ourselves. For me personally, my harmful relationship with food was the result of a need for control, to regulate not feeling safe in our bodies, homes, society, etc. Food often becomes a tool to seek comfort, control fear or shame, punish or hurt ourselves, externalize pain, etc.
Diet culture as a whole often shames our innate responses to trauma, for example, stress eating. We treat it as a moral failing or character flaw when in reality all animals stress eat. Eating food can help us feel safe and ground ourselves, and that’s okay. This translates to a fear of weight gain during the pandemic, and diet culture tells us that this is a time to “tone up” and get fit. But during a time of heightened anxieties and fear, it’s okay to use food to ground ourselves and to help us feel a bit safer in the world again.
1 Malinauskiene, V., & Malinauskas, R. (2018). Lifetime Traumatic Experiences and Disordered Eating among University Students: The Role of Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms. BioMed research international, 2018, 9814358. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/9814358
2 "Fat Phobia And Its Racist Past And Present - NPR." Accessed December 14, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/20/893006538/fat-phobia-and-its-racist-past-and-present.
3 "kNOw Dieting: Risks and Reasons to Stop." Accessed December 15, 2020. https://uhs.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/bewell_nodieting.pdf.
Murphy, S. (Presenter). (2020, November 17). Nurturing wholeness: A trauma based approach to
disordered eating [Speech].