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Diet culture can be exhausting even when you recognize its harmful messages.

Living according to your own values can be a meaningful form of resistance.

Understanding why people cling to diet culture can make room for compassion.

As a psychotherapist who specializes in eating disorders and body image concerns, I spend a lot of time talking with people about diet culture and the ways it shapes how we think about food, weight, health, and bodies. Diet culture treats thinness and weight loss as universal goals, links body size with health or personal worth, and reinforces the idea that some bodies are more acceptable than others. I am exposed to those same messages, and I have felt their pressure too.

Knowing how diet culture operates does not make me immune to it. Sometimes, that understanding only heightens my awareness of how persistent and insidious it really is. There is an energy drain in constantly questioning these messages, or even in simply trying to maintain an intrapsychic boundary against cultural noise that others seem to accept without hesitation.

Diet culture is not hard to find. Weight loss is advertised as an improvement, smaller bodies are praised, and conversations about food often come with rules about what should or should not be eaten. Someone may lose weight because of illness, depression, food insecurity, or an eating disorder and still be congratulated for it. Restriction can be mistaken for discipline. Compulsive exercise can be admired as dedication. Everyday comments that have become part of our cultural lexicon, such as needing to “work off” food or being “good” for skipping dessert, reinforce these ideas.

Diet culture is also embedded into our medical settings. Weight may become the explanation for a symptom before a thorough assessment has even taken place. Thinness is often still interpreted as proof that someone is healthy or caring for themselves, even though body weight does not measure overall health and someone may be undernourished in order to achieve what is assumed to be a healthy weight.

Of course, diet culture........

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