‘Diet Culture’ Isn’t Just About Smoothies and Food-Tracking Apps

These days, you can’t get into a conversation about nutrition and wellness without someone mentioning diet culture. It’s all over social media, in both anti-diet spaces and more general wellness ones. Celebrities are calling it out. It’s mentioned in academic research. Even the young teenagers I work with in my nutrition practice use the term. They talk about how their parents don’t keep certain foods in the house, their friend is trying to lose weight, or their coach told them to avoid sugar, “because, you know, diet culture.”

But just because a term is ubiquitous doesn’t mean that it’s universally understood. While many people think diet culture is just about, well, diets, it’s actually far more complex and far-reaching. Diet culture is an entire belief system that associates food with morality and thinness with goodness, and it’s rooted in the (very colonial) belief that every individual has full control and responsibility over their health.

What’s worse, diet culture is so ingrained, especially in Western society, that we often don’t even recognize it. That’s why SELF asked experts to address some of the most common questions and misconceptions about the term to give you a better understanding of what diet culture really means and why it’s so problematic.

What’s the definition of diet culture?

Although there’s no official definition of diet culture, Christy Harrison, MPH, RD, author of Anti-Diet, published a great one on her blog in 2018. Harrison defines diet culture as a belief system that “worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue,” promotes weight loss and maintaining a low weight as a way to elevate social status, and demonizes certain foods and eating styles while elevating others. Diet culture also “oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of ‘health,’ which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities,” Harrison writes.

We’re all surrounded—and influenced—by diet culture, all the time. “There’s this idea that diet culture only affects people who choose to diet, but that’s not true,” Sabrina Strings, PhD, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies diet culture and fatphobia, tells SELF. “Diet culture is the culture we’re all steeped in; it’s the belief that we can control our bodies based on what and how much we eat, and it places a moral judgment on food and bodies.” In other words, it makes us believe, consciously or not, that certain foods and (thin, usually white) bodies are good, while other foods and (fat, often Black or non-white) bodies are bad.

What are some of the roots of diet culture?

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, American protestants started to publicly equate deprivation with health, and health with morality. The most famous example is probably clergyman Sylvester Graham (namesake of the graham cracker, which was originally much less delicious than it is now), who promoted a bland vegetarian diet of bread, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables as a way to quell sexual urges, improve health, and ensure moral virtue.

There’s also plenty of racism and anti-Blackness baked into this colonial idea that thinness and food restriction equal goodness. In her book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Dr. Strings talks about how white colonial thought used body size as a way to argue that Black people were inferior. “During the height of slavery in the 18th century, there were prominent Europeans who believed that being thin and controlling what they ate made them morally superior,” Dr. Strings says. “And thus, African people were inherently viewed as inferior, because they tended to have larger bodies, which was equated to being lazy.”

  These deeply harmful beliefs are, of course, not true, but they’ve completely shaped the way we think about food, health, and bodies. “Doctors and scientists took this notion that thin, white bodies are superior and figured out how to back it up with science,” according to Dr. Strings. In other words, she says, many of these experts began their research with the biased assumption that fatness was always bad and unhealthy. Along with health science, this flawed assumption has also taken root in capitalism. “It’s an extremely lucrative business to tell people to lose weight and pretend to know how to do it,” Dr. Strings says. “There’s actually no way that all people who are fat can become thin, and we all know it, but it’s still a multibillion dollar industry.”

What’s the link between diet culture and anti-fatness?

“I think of diet culture as the ubiquitous environment in which food restriction is both normalized and celebrated,” fat activist Virgie Tovar, author of The Body Positive Journal and host of the Rebel Eaters Club podcast, tells SELF. This stems from anti-fatness and the fear of being or becoming fat that’s instilled in all of us, pretty much from birth. “Right now we live in a culture that measures health through weight, and automatically assigns higher-weight people a status of ill health,” Tovar says.

Basically, our society views fatness as a problem and diet culture as the solution. But the link between weight and health is incredibly complex. Being fat isn’t inherently unhealthy, just as being thin doesn’t automatically make a person healthy. And even if fatness were always linked to poor health, there’s no solid evidence that dieting leads to significant long-term weight loss or that the weight loss itself is helpful for everyone. A widely cited 2013 research review published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass looked at data from 21 existing weight loss studies that followed up with people for at least two years and found that the average amount of weight lost at follow-up was about two pounds. And a 2020 paper found that any weight people lost via popular diets was typically regained within a year.

Another fatphobic concept that’s central to diet culture is healthism, which is the belief that each person is solely responsible for their own health, Tovar says. That might make sense at first thought, but it’s not based on science, either. A report published in April 2022 by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, an advisory group for the Department of Health and Human Services, estimates that just 34% of a person’s health can be attributed to their personal health behaviors like what they choose to eat and drink, how often they exercise, and whether they smoke or use drugs. Medical care (including access to health care) accounts for 16%, while the remaining 50% is determined by factors out of a person’s control—known as the social determinants of health (SDOH), which include housing, food access, transportation, social and economic mobility, social service connections, and physical environment.

 Without access to a car or public transportation, for example, you may not be able to make it to annual checkups; if you can’t afford fitness classes and/or don’t live near a safe place to walk, it might be incredibly difficult to incorporate regular physical activity into your routine. The notion that we must all control our eating habits in order to be healthy is central to diet culture. But the evidence is clear that what we eat plays just a small role in our overall health.

How does diet culture get in the way of true “wellness”?

Though there are plenty of dietitians, doctors, and other experts telling us to avoid certain foods in the name of health, there are many others (myself included) who see this restriction as a roadblock to well-being. “The number one pattern I see in my clients is that they’ve tried all these diets and done all the things they’re ‘supposed to,’ and they’ve backfired,” Cara Harbstreet, MS, RD, a dietitian in private practice who promotes intuitive eating and the non-diet approach, tells SELF. “They don’t feel better, they haven’t lost the weight that diet culture promised they would, and this leaves them not only physically unwell, but also confused, disillusioned, and angry.”

This frustration that comes from adhering to diet culture’s rules and not seeing any of the promised results—thinness, but also the moral virtue and general sense of wellness that diet culture vaguely suggests—can often lead to a kind of neuroticism around food that undermines nutrition. “Many people aren’t eating enough calories, and they might also be avoiding very nutrient-dense food groups, like dairy and whole grains,” Harbstreet says. “So diet culture undermines both adequacy and variety, which are the two most important things for good nutrition.”

“Wellness” culture can also do some major damage here. Old-school diets that are entirely about deprivation and weight loss aren’t popular in today’s world (my teenage clients might call them cheugy). Instead, it’s all about wellness and striving to be the best, happiest, healthiest version of yourself. Harbstreet and Tovar both say, however, that “wellness” is often still about depriving yourself and being thin, it’s just not cool to say that out loud. “Wellness culture is the more privileged (and often more whitewashed) and morally correct version of diet culture because you’re elevating ‘health and wellness’ instead of weight loss and vanity,” Harbstreet says.

But, in general, wellness culture isn’t grounded in health and nutrition science, either. It’s often performative. “Many wellness influencers make their rituals and routines very aspirational, very ‘live like me, look like me, thrive like me,’” Harbstreet says. But the reality is that it’s usually largely because of these people’s life circumstances that they’re able to thrive—not because of the foods they eat, the workouts they do, or their various self-care practices. There are certainly examples of fitness and nutrition influencers offering truly helpful and inclusive wellness advice on social media, but they tend to be the folks who acknowledge their privilege and those social determinants of health I talked about earlier.

So what does a world without diet culture look like?

Our perspectives have been shaped by diet culture and we’re surrounded by it all the time, so we often don’t even realize it’s there. It’s literally our norm. This makes it really hard to imagine a world without it, or to break free from it. But it’s fair to say that without diet culture, we’d all have a much better relationship with food and our bodies.“Diet culture instills this belief that if humans don’t have ridiculous guardrails around their eating, they’ll eat everything in sight,” Tovar says. But the evidence shows that it’s actually the people who restrict who tend to binge eat, and the people who aren’t on diets don’t because food isn’t off-limits, she adds. Without diet culture, there would also be greater acceptance of all bodies, which would hopefully lead to less guilt and shame, Tovar says. As a result, people would be freer to do things that align with their own values instead of trying to live by diet culture’s rules and conform to its body ideals.

To be blunt, diet culture isn’t going anywhere. Although the anti-diet and fat-acceptance movements are growing, the belief that we’re all meant to control our food intake and strive for a certain body type is still the dominant one—and, again, it’s rooted in systemic problems that can’t be resolved without fundamental social and political changes.

However, as individuals, we can work to recognize this harmful belief system, call it out when we see it, and unlearn it as best we can so we can start living in a way that actually feels good (and stop giving our attention and money to an industry invested in us feeling bad). If you’re ready to start opting out of diet culture—or even just curious to learn more about it—these previous SELF articles are a good place to start:

• We Have to Stop Thinking of Being ‘Healthy’ as Being Morally Better
• The Relentless Reality of Anti-Fatness in Fitness
• Why Emotional Eating Is Totally Normal, According to a Dietitian
• What the Dietitians Who Invented Intuitive Eating Think About Diet Culture Today
• How to Live Your Anti-Diet Values in a Weight-Obsessed World
• What to Do If You Want to Try Intuitive Eating but You’re Worried About Gaining Weight