Diet culture has been an invasive part of our culture since the beginning of advertising in the 16th century. For as long as they have been around, advertisers, salesmen and now influencers have been pushing extreme, and in some cases, very unhealthy diets.
1940s advertisement provided by The Advertising Archives via the Library of Congress for Bile Beans
The whole problem with diet culture’s messaging is that it relies on telling the consumer that something is wrong with their body, and diets are the one thing that can fix that.
There are ads on streaming services now from companies like Him’s and Her’s where body-positive language is flipped on its head and used to promote weight loss drugs. That is one of the biggest problems I have with modern advertising—companies will try to liberalize themselves in the consumer’s eye by using and abusing positive language around issues like body image just to sell a product.
Diets create shame around eating where there should be none and create feelings of fear around eating the “wrong” types of food and gaining fat.
Choosing to eat healthier is not in any way bad and promoting healthy life choices like eating less processed foods and being more active day to day is scientifically proven to make you feel happier, and in some cases lose weight. It’s when these ideas are distorted into toxic and unhealthy diets promoted ONLY to achieve thinness, rather than a healthy lifestyle, that it becomes a problem.
As culture shifts, so do opinions on what a woman’s body should look like. As an example, in the early 2000s, the ultra-skinny “cocaine” thin was in. Then, in the later 2010s and early 2020s, the “thick” look was popularized by celebrities like Kim Kardashian and her sisters, not to mention this look was mostly achieved through extensive surgery.
Just as products change to fit the consumer, so too does the popular body type. Women’s bodies in this way are commodified and sold as an image back to women who then feel the need to diet or even undergo invasive surgeries.
With the rise of weight loss drugs like Ozempic, we’ve seen more and more celebrity reappearances where they look much thinner. The idea of thinness as being inherently more desirable and even fashionable is coming back, though I would argue this idea never really left.
Not only is diet culture rooted deeply in fatphobia, but it also has deep ties to white supremacy. In a Substack article on the topic, author Chrissy King discusses the ties that fatphobia has with white supremacy.
“The problem isn’t our bodies, the problem is the system,” King said. “The system being white supremacy and racism which demonizes folks in larger bodies.”
The ties between the two issues started a long time ago during the transatlantic slave trade. When white colonists were forcibly enslaving black people, they would label them as “gluttonous, undisciplined and hypersexual” to dehumanize them. This created a positive connotation with thinness and demonized body fat.
Unhealthy diets are promoted by advertisers and influencers alike, and both of them are just trying to further their profits. They demonize fat, promote unhealthy lifestyle choices and use imagery that shames women for eating all for the sake of THEIR bottom line.
It’s important to know the difference between an unhealthy diet and being more mindful of what you’re consuming. In the words of Jim Rohn, “Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
