My goal is to lose weight, especially with the holiday coming. I work out 4 days a week, I eat salads and cut carbs, but why can’t I lose weight?

Diet culture can be harmful and put you at risk for developing an eating disorder or form disordered eating habits. Diet culture is a pervasive belief that appearance and body shape are more important than physical, psychological, and general well-being. It is more of an idea that if you can control your body, and more importantly your diet, this is normal. Diet’s emphasize limiting what and how much you eat, it can lead you to count calories or choose low fat and low carb options. You can develop more attention towards weighing yourself frequently and if you don’t reach your weight loss goals or gain weight, this can negatively impact your mood and motivation. Diet culture normalizes labeling food as good or bad and thinking it is more of a  transaction. This means, you either earn it or don’t deserve it depending on how much you have exercised or how you have eaten that day or week so far. Beyond this, it can extend to labeling yourself as good or bad for eating some of these foods.

Diets have conditioned people to think this is normal and can develop poor self-image and self-esteem. You can engage in negative self-talk and firmly believe that being thin makes you a better person than someone who is not. This can lead to an all-or-nothing mindset and worsen over time the longer you engage in dieting or continue to label foods. Diet culture can evolve into disordered eating and as an approach that has a lack of focus on nutrition while prioritizing low-calories foods. This can extend to your views on exercise and activity to work off “bad foods” in order to earn food.

Food is much more than fuel to the body and the mindset that food is only fuel and must be earned produces an unhealthy mindset that can create disordered eating or eating disorders. Social and cultural aspects can influence these views and also reinforce them, but isolating food in this way prevents you from enjoying and embracing food as a deeper part of your life. The stigma and culture is encouraged around holiday’s when ads, articles, and videos pop up about detox diets, weight loss after the holiday weight gain, and new year’s resolutions coupled with gym memberships. These practices are potentially dangerous and remove the enjoyment of food and focus on the consequences. These practices are unscientific. Learning more about what parts of food fuel you can be helpful, but restricting nutrient dense food for low-calorie options, or restricting your intake generally speaking does not help you optimally function and often miss valuable nutrients that all varieties of food have to offer. This can be detrimental to your health.

When diet culture becomes an unhealthy obsession, it can translate into Orthorexia, which is considered an extreme form of cleaning eating, obsessive into what is “correct” healthy diet and negatively impact daily life, social life, and emotional health. This can include a restrictive diet, rituals around eating, and avoidance of foods that are not “good” or “healthy. This can look like avoiding gluten when you do not have an intolerance or allergy, extreme forms of veganism, extreme low-fat or low-carb diets, detoxes, cleanses etc. This can lead to anorexia nervosa, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and/or body-dysmorphic disorder.

Since diet culture glorifies being thin, diet culture can negatively impact your body image. Diet culture perpetuates being healthy as being thin and anything outside of that narrow range is considered anything but. Weight loss can be healthy at times but the methods to do so may not always be healthy. Celebrities and influences may glamorize diet culture or promote weight loss tools but this practice endorses being thin as the path towards acceptance, happiness, and health. Appearance does not provide a comprehensive picture of someone’s health and bodies that fall outside of this narrow range can live happy, fulfilling, and healthy lives. Regardless of body size, a poor diet and lack of exercise can lead to increased health risks.

Since diet culture is so pervasive, it can be helpful to reduce its reach. If you want to combat the influence of diet culture in your life, try to reduce or avoid certain influences, pages, or celebrities that may endorse diet culture or an unhealthy fitness lifestyle. Follow different pages or people that promote intuitive eating, positive body image, body positivity, and/or body neutrality. Practicing body neutrality can help you appreciate and love your body for what it can do for you right now, rather than its appearance. It can help reduce you trying to control or manipulate what you look like and shifts you towards ambivalence about your appearance and respecting what you can do realistically now. These steps can help you move away from diet culture, food labeling, and instead honoring your body as it is right now.

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