Why Is Diet Culture Bad?
In today’s society, many people only know how to eat if they are following a diet or meal plan. With so much misinformation and cherry-picked evidence, many companies have been able to profit off the average American’s little education on nutrition by selling diet books, pills, shakes, and meal plans. All of these without any professional unbiased review. Over the years, the diet culture and weight loss services have built up an empire industry of $2.6 billion in market size. One would hope that such a large industry would be in business to benefit the population. Unfortunately, this is not the case with diet culture because in reality, it causes you to have a worse relationship with food, your body, and your health. Diet culture is bad and it can and will take over one’s sense of self and their own health.
Source: IBIS
What is Diet Culture?
In simple terms, diet culture is a way of living where society makes you believe that large bodies and all foods ‘associated’ with them ie refined cereal, ice cream, bacon, cookies, chips, french fries, and cakes are bad. Due to the modern beauty standard, dieting pills, supplements, and meal plans are advertised as a quick fix to prevent obesity. Unfortunately, this mindset of the ‘quick fix’ is extremely harmful, so here are 4 negative outcomes that prove why diet culture is bad.
Effects of Diet Culture
1. EATING DISORDERS
Eating disorders or disordered eating habits are one of the main reasons why diet culture is bad. These disordered habits and symptoms can even last years after quitting the diet lifestyle. There are 3 main eating disorders that can arise from excessive disordered eating behaviors. They are called anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder. Specifically, anorexia nervosa is the deadliest mental illness, and it is reported every 52 minutes someone loses their life from complications of an eating disorder. Eating disorders can have a variety of origins, but they all can stem from a seemingly innocent diet that turns into an entire lifestyle of food rules and disordered eating habits. All 3 of the eating disorders have a component of physical or mental restriction of food which can lead to either excessive eating episodes in bulimia and binge eating disorder or they can lead to excessive starvation as in the case of anorexia. Food and your weight should not take up your entire mental headspace.
2. WEIGHT CYCLING
As dieting becomes more severe in one’s daily life, weight cycling can become a large concern. Weight cycling is when you go through periods of high weight followed by periods of having a low weight and vice versa and you constantly oscillate between the two. Approximately 20-50% of women in the nation struggle with weight cycling, so it is important to know the implications and causes of it. The reason that weight cycling occurs as a result of diet culture is that the more restrictive you are, the more your body wants to fight against it. High restriction can lead to a lower weight, but the sustainability of that low weight may become close to impossible to maintain, so your body will send you continuous signals to eat, and over time you can’t resist them anymore resulting in weight gain. Researchers have found that weight cycling can actually be worse than sustaining a higher weight in terms of health risks such as high insulin levels, blood pressure, cardiac output, cortisol sensitivity, and blood glucose levels which will be touched in the following sections.
Source: 24183140, 2718940, 25614199, 32099104
3. POOR BODY IMAGE
Poor body image is another negative effect of diet culture. Since the goal is to lose weight, this leaves dieters put all of their thoughts and motives throughout the day towards their body and what they are eating. Diet culture is weight-focused and this causes people to only see themselves as their weight and that’s it. People who start dieting are already vulnerable because they want to positively change themselves, but they fall down the wrong path of diet culture and start to become more and more self-conscious. A big problem with many diet companies is that they show testimonials and transformation photos (which are usually fake) of people who succeeded on the diet plan, and when real people fail they feel even more shameful because they see other people have succeeded. This can lead people to feel defeated and not good enough. Being overly fixated on your body is harmful because it lowers your self-worth down to just an outward appearance.
4. HYPERINSULINEMIA
Hyperinsulinemia is another effect of diet culture. Insulin is an anabolic hormone released from our pancreas when we eat food. It helps us to put glucose into our cells for energy or into our fat cells for storage. The problem with hyperinsulinemia is that too much insulin in the bloodstream can signal the ovaries to produce more testosterone which is not good for hormone balance. Additionally, hyperinsulinemia can lead to insulin resistance and prediabetes. This condition occurs due to continuous weight cycling and is statistically more common in people within the normal BMI ranges because of the overshoot theory. This theory indicates that the people in the normal BMI range who undergo weight cycling will end up overshooting metabolic and cardiovascular health markers when they gain the weight back. Basically, after periods of weight cycling due to disordered eating and excessive dieting they found that serum insulin levels were very elevated to abnormal levels.
FREE HAPPY HORMONE GUIDE:
Breaking Free from Diet Culture
1. INTUITIVE EATING
Intuitive eating is a style of eating that became popularized by two dietitians Elyse Resch and Evelyn Tribole, who wrote the book called Intuitive Eating. In the book, they created 10 major principles which are to be followed in order. They are listed as:
Reject Diet Mentality
Honor Your Hunger
Make Peace with Food
Challenge the Food Police
Feel Your Fullness
Discover the Satisfaction Factor
Cope with Your Emotions
Respect Your Body
Exercise-Feel the difference
Honor Your Health with Gentle Nutrition
This eating style in short is: eat based on listening to your internal body signals. Now, this is a lot more complex than what it seems like because learning to listen to your body can be a pretty hard skill to pick up on especially if you are coming from diet culture where you are told to not listen to how you feel. Intuitive eating is not mindless eating, and it is not a diet. There is no restriction in intuitive eating. This eating pattern is created to be utilized every day over a life span.
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2. BETTER RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD
One benefit to breaking free from diet culture is that you will have more enjoyment with eating and will have a better relationship with food. We need to acknowledge that food is a constant part of our survival but also is part of our enjoyment during social settings or holidays, therefore we do have a relationship with it. Having a positive and healthy relationship with food is important for our general happiness and stress levels. Breaking free from diet culture and adopting intuitive eating provides that no foods are off-limits or restricted. This allows people to not feel guilty or stressed when they encounter a plate of ‘fear foods’ or less healthy food items. Allowing permission to eat any food will not put certain foods on a pedestal and therefore you will feel the freedom to enjoy everything you eat. Intuitive eaters eat in a way centered around preference and choice, not based on food rules or restrictions. No food is good or bad, so intuitive eaters feel satisfied during mealtime.
Source: NIH
3. WEIGHT STABILITY
Another one of the benefits of breaking free from diet culture is weight stabilization. Luckily, intuitive eating has been shown to increase weight stability regardless of BMI. This is because our bodies have many innate signals that show us how hungry or full we are. If accepted and listened to, these signals will tell us how much to eat based on a healthy weight range our body is happy at, also called our set point. Weight stabilization is all about finding your personal happy weight range whether it is considered a high or low BMI doesn’t matter.
Source: 24183140, 2718940, 30821648
4. BODY APPRECIATION
Another one of the benefits of breaking free from diet culture is having better body appreciation. There is a large emphasis on the female body appearance in diet culture which results in the praise of thin bodies and the demonization of larger bodies. Fortunately, as people break free from this, they can better appreciate their bodies for their function instead of their appearance. A systematic review has found that intuitive eating can increase body appreciation when implemented. Intuitive eating focuses on your body’s ability to function properly when you eat food. It is not a diet so intuitive eating has no weight or BMI goal set in place, the goal is simply to appreciate your body for being able to tell you what it needs and what it can do.
Source: 26474781
5. BETTER GLYCEMIC CONTROL
Better glycemic control is another one of the benefits of breaking free from diet culture. Glycemic control refers to the blood glucose levels in the vessels. Optimally, blood glucose levels should remain steady throughout the day with a slight increase after meals a slight decrease between meals. Unfortunately, those with type 2 diabetes have insulin resistance, our storage hormone of glucose, so they have issues with glycemic control. A study on type 2 diabetes patients found that intuitive eating was associated with a decreased chance of inadequate glycemic control by 89% regardless of BMI.
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