What is Toxic Diet Culture (plus real-world examples)
What if I told you that you don’t have to be a dieter to be heavily and negatively impacted by toxic diet culture? Would you be surprised?
If so, you're not alone. People hear the term “diet culture” and assume that it’s about dieting. And yes, of course it is. But the truth is, diet culture is so very much bigger, more pervasive, and frankly more toxic, than any single diet, detox, or clean eating program you can think of.
To protect yourself and your loved ones from its harmful impact, you need to fully understand what it is.
So, I’m pulling back the curtain on harmful diet culture to show you what it is, where it shows up in your day-to-day life, why it’s so harmful (including for children), and what life could look like when you learn how to unsubscribe from this destructive paradigm!
The simplest way to understand toxic diet culture, aka “Big Bikini”
The most straightforward way to think about diet culture is that it’s an eyepopping $133 BILLION industry that profits off of seeding, and then exploiting, body- and weight-based insecurities.
In their awesome book, Burnout, Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski refer to diet culture as The Bikini Industrial Complex or “Big Bikini.” I love this description because it conjures up images of Big Pharma or Big Tobacco, perfectly illustrating the size, scale, and power of this massive industry.
In reality, diet culture is so much more than the excessively lucrative weight-based industry. It’s the lens through which we view food, exercise, health, and having a body in our society—and, if you ask me, it’s synonymous with pressure:
Pressure to eat a certain way
Pressure to exercise a certain way
Pressure for our bodies to look a certain way
Pressure to try to “control” the number on the scale
Diet culture equates thinness with health and promotes an incredibly narrow “thin ideal” that’s impossible for most people to attain or maintain. It vilifies certain foods and ways of eating while assigning virtue and personal superiority to others. Think about the smugness with which certain celebrity influencers regale us with their glorified “what I eat in a day” routines, as an example. Or consider how many times you’ve heard someone say something along the lines of “I was so bad today; I ate pizza or cake.”
Diet culture even devalues certain forms of exercise, making us think that only certain types of movement “count.” Basically, Big Bikini keeps far too many people stuck, hyper-monitoring or obsessing about their food choices, calories, weight, or their bodies themselves.
Diet culture shows up in our healthcare system too
If all that weren’t bad enough, diet culture and the resulting weight-based stigma and shaming that it breeds are woven into the very fabric of our medical system too. This anti-fat bias in our culture at large and in healthcare, specifically, causes undue physical and emotional stress that detracts from the overall health and wellbeing of larger bodied people. It may also cause them to delay or avoid seeking out medical care, and has been shown to impact the quality of care that fat people receive.
All of which are confounding variables that get overlooked or are largely unaccounted for in the widely reported research that shows a correlation between weight and health outcomes. In truth, correlation cannot prove that being at a higher weight causes poor health outcomes. These and other key factors that get left out of much of the research could account for some of the health differences we see between higher and lower weight individuals.
I could point to bunches of other meaningful data and examples, but I’ll save that for a separate article. For now, suffice it to say that healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes—as do unhealthy ones. You cannot tell a person’s health by looking at them.
Diet culture is so super sneaky
Another thing that most people don’t understand about diet culture is that it’s constantly shape-shifting.
Most people have correctly figured out at this point that dieting doesn’t work—in fact, some research puts the long-term failure rate of diets as high as 95%! (Side note: this is just one of the many reasons why I’m so passionate about helping people learn to break up with dieting and diet culture and eat intuitively.)
And yet, as people have figured out the hard truth about diets, the industry has responded in kind, creatively marketing their weight loss regimens. So now, instead of diets, we’re often sold “lifestyle changes,” “clean eating programs,” “wellness routines” and other programs that are really just diets in disguise.
A great example of this is Weight Watchers rebranding to WW or Noom marketing itself as a psychology-based eating program, both effectively twisting themselves in knots to avoid calling their programs a diet. And yet, at their core, they and many other programs, are calorically restricted ways of eating that are meant to induce weight loss—in other words, diets!
Side note: don’t even get me started on the fact that now WW is jumping into the Ozempic and weight loss drug arena—in effect, seeming to admit that its lifestyle program is ineffective at producing long-term weight loss.
The bottom line is that we consumers need to be super savvy to understand and root out diet culture in all its many forms.
You run smack into diet culture in all these places—and more
I mentioned at the outset that diet culture is so much bigger than Noom, Keto, Atkins, or any other specific diet you can think of. Most people are surprised to discover where and how often they encounter diet culture in their daily life.
So, let’s look at some concrete examples. Diet culture shows up every time you:
hear a group of people lamenting their weight, body shape, or size (in effect, perpetuating the idea that a smaller body is better
hear or talk about being “good” for eating certain foods or “cheating” for choosing others (moralizing how we eat)
feel guilty for eating particular foods (again, food has no moral value)
hear people talk about being on a diet or adopting a “lifestyle change” or “wellness plan” that’s really just another plan targeting weight loss
are encouraged to earn or burn your calories through exercise (in truth, bodies need food every single day, we don’t need to earn it)
are told that being a certain weight is the key to health
see certain body shapes, sizes, and types promoted as the “ideal” to strive for
encounter before and after weight loss images
hear “jokes” about people’s body shape or size
see food portrayed in black-and-white terms, like healthy or unhealthy, clean or junk, or good or bad
Honestly, the examples are endless.
The many ways diet culture harms us all
Now that you have a clear picture of what diet culture is and where it shows up, you may be wondering, ok but what’s the harm, really? To which I say, how much time do you have?!
Diet culture is loud and toxic; it’s a belief system that runs incredibly deep with long historical ties.
Of course, diet culture has a disproportionate negative impact on people in larger bodies who experience the harmful effects of weight stigma and anti-fat bias day in and day out. But people in smaller bodies feel the effects of all this pressure too, as they may fear gaining weight or feel tremendous strain to stay thin or to eat or exercise according to diet culture’s rigid ideals.
Diet culture makes it nearly impossible for anyone in our culture to feel confident and peaceful in their body.
Worldwide, a staggering 45% of people say they’re trying to lose weight with dieting, even though the research is tremendously clear as to how ineffective diets are at producing long-term, sustainable weight loss.
Between 2000 and 2018, the incidence of eating disorders more than doubled, with a whopping 1 in 10 people expected to experience an eating disorder at some point in their lives.
When diet culture leads to disordered eating…
Disordered eating (which describes a range of irregular eating behaviors that may not meet the diagnostic criteria for an eating disorder but still have potential negative health implications) has become so common that it’s essentially normalized and often even praised in our culture.
Many common dieting behaviors may in fact be forms of disordered eating, including:
Avoiding or fearing certain food groups, such as carbs
Feeling guilty for eating or not eating certain foods
Having rigid eating or exercise routines that interfere with social activities or personal relationships
All-or-nothing behaviors with food and exercise
Binge eating
Skipping meals
Misusing supplements, and many others
Even kids feel the harmful impact of diet culture
Importantly, adults aren’t the only ones to feel the tremendous pressure and harms of diet culture. Kids feel it too.
Even kids as young as 3 and 4 years old have been found to feel body dissatisfaction. Other research has shown that nearly half of 9-11 year-olds have tried or frequently diet or that 81% of 10-year-olds are afraid to be fat.
Make no mistake, diet culture impacts all of us. In essence, it keeps far too many of us stuck hyper-monitoring our food choices, feeling stressed out, anxious, or guilty about what or how we eat, or constantly thinking about our bodies and how they look—instead of living life to the fullest within our bodies.
Here’s how you can protect yourself from toxic diet culture
The analogy I like to give for diet culture is that it’s like a large and severe storm. While we cannot change the weather, we can make sure that we have the right gear to survive the storm.
Fortunately, there are lots of steps you can take to opt out of and protect yourself from toxic diet culture. I’ve outlined a few of them for you here—and of course, I teach you how to break up with diet culture and eat intuitively in my private and group coaching programs.
I’d also strongly encourage you to check out and embrace a weight-neutral approach to health. Remind yourself again and again that weight and health are not the same thing. That you are so much more than just a body or a number on the scale.
Instead of focusing on weight or weight loss, practice shifting your focus to sustainable and enjoyable health-promoting behaviors, body trust, and a pleasurable way of eating that includes all foods, without guilt. Embrace Intuitive Eating and your body itself.
If you’d like help breaking up with dieting and diet culture and reimagining your relationship with food, movement, and your body, reach out and sign up for a free Whole Health Strategy chat with me here. I’d love to help you!