Diet culture is not a trend. It is not a passing fad. It is a wildly pervasive mindset, tied to deep-rooted social interpretations of what makes a body attractive and therefore “healthy.”
It has evolved over the years, yes and has shifted to blend stealthily into the changing standards of what is considered beautiful, but this does not reduce its potential for harm. Wrapped in the palatable packaging of “empowerment,” “hot girl summer” and “wellness,” this concept retains the same detrimental messaging of generations past, while changing one fundamental detail: that diet culture is meant to advance health through lifestyle choices, rather than the blatant adherence to beauty standards that would be found in advertisements crudely plastered across 1980s newspapers. The irony is that while the marketing has been altered, the assumption remains the same: A skinny body is a healthy one and eating more automatically translates into eating worse.
This is not to say that regulating the food you put into your body is a bad idea; frankly, monitoring your diet is one of the best things you can do for your overall health. Shifting beauty standards have even created diet culture’s antithetical sister tragedy— toxic body positivity. But the problem with diet culture emerges when the motivation behind widespread dieting conventions are based not in ideals for individual health, but in obtaining a specific body type that does not automatically correlate with fitness. Health looks different on everybody and the objectives of any fitness and wellness journey should not be to work against your specific body type, but with it.
As someone with a naturally skinny frame, being skinny has not precluded me from experiencing a slew of various health issues, some of which could, in fact, be mitigated through gaining a healthy amount of weight. I’ve been told time and time again how envious people are of my fast metabolism, of my inability to gain weight and of my resultant thinness. My friends’ remarks and praises contradicted my doctor’s repeated insistence that I gain a few pounds and had my younger self very confused.
Ultimately, the whole notion of diet culture is misguided. Don’t aim to become skinny. Aim to become strong. Aim to create a lifestyle that works for you, not one sold to you in pretty packaging by someone for whom that lifestyle may work, or by someone who is only deluding themselves that it is. Health is not determined by the number on the scale, nor the flatness of your stomach. Health is not dependent on how many meals you skip, nor on how many of your favorite treats you deny yourself. You are beautiful when you are healthy, not the other way around.
And following someone else’s path to health may not present the same way with your physique as it did with theirs. So, next time you find yourself dieting for the sake of obtaining that “perfect” body, rather than that healthy, strong, fit body—maybe even the body you currently have—remember, you are chasing an ideal that does not exist.