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Diet Culture has Messed Us Up
What is Diet Culture?
Diet culture is hard to explain because the concept is complicated. The simplest definition of diet culture is a set of made-up rules surrounding health and beauty like the misconception that skinny individuals only eat salads. It is a way of thinking that promotes thinness and weight loss. Diet culture pushes overnight solutions to lifelong problems.
Diet culture says there is a particular way of eating that will make you skinny. This philosophy is legalistic, in that it requires strict adherence to laws. Laws that aren’t necessarily true. It teaches that eating certain foods and doing certain activities are harmful. For example, carrots are good, but carrots with ranch are bad. Or you have to stop eating at seven o’clock to lose weight.
A staple of diet culture is fad diets or what I like to call overnight eating disorders. Fad diets are typically extreme eating styles and/or workout plans that aren’t sustainable, but enable significant weight loss. A good example is a juice cleanse. There is no scientific evidence that cleanses benefit your body in any way as soon as the diet is over, the individual gains all the weight back.
Diet culture says it’s easy to succeed on these fad diets; that everyone is effortlessly losing weight. They had ample willpower to achieve their goals…
