Diet culture’s roots run deep. Will we ever break free?

As a preteen bouncing around to friends’ houses after school, constantly ravenous for snacks, you know what’s in everyone’s fridges. (I kept one friend on speed dial purely because her kitchen was stocked with a better brand of cookie than the rest.) That’s why I remember becoming keenly aware of what margarine was. In the early ’90s, the mothers of my friends started replacing the butter in their fridges with Becel as a way to avoid saturated fat, fat having become the enemy of anyone interested in pursuing heart health — and, of course, thinness. There were grapefruit diets, Lean Cuisine frozen stir frys and so much low-fat cottage cheese. So many moms seemed to be constantly trying to lose 10 or 20 or 50 pounds. I would tag along with friends to wait for their mothers during weekly Weight Watchers meetings at suburban strip malls, as common an errand for some as going to the bank.

Yesterday, I was reminiscing about this with a friend, and she mentioned that she recently booked a beach vacation for herself, her teenage daughter and her mother, who’s in her 70s. “I told my mom, ‘We’re booked!’. The first thing out of her mouth was, ‘Yay! I better be good on Keto till then!’” She’s one of the many women, especially of this generation, for whom dieting is an ever-present part of life.

Debbie Acton remembers going on her first diet in her 20s to lose “something silly like five pounds.” She came back to dieting after having her two daughters again in her mid-40s. Now in her 60s, she’s been following the Weight Watchers program (renamed WW in 2018) for the past nine years. She recently hit her 500th day of tracking her meals without a break, something that garners rewards: tangible things like a water bottle or yoga mat, or a donation to a food bank.

Acton has lost most of the weight she wanted to, but she hasn’t reached her “goal weight”; the few who do become “lifetime members” and get to use the service for free forever, so long as they maintain it. She finds the weekly meetings “a bit of a therapy session and a little bit of a social thing.” Members do a weight check and join a workshop on food, sleep, exercise or mindset. “They’ve tried to move it more to wellness rather than being all about losing weight,” she says, “even though, to be real, that’s what people are doing it for.” She grew up with a mother who was overweight and had health problems — a stroke before she was 50, then several heart attacks. “She had a pretty unhealthy lifestyle; she was a smoker,” she says. “I didn’t want to repeat that myself.”

Acton started to think differently about dieting a few years ago after visiting an ailing relative, now aged 90, who spent the visit talking about her weight. “I thought, ‘Wow, women in their 80s are still thinking about this, that’s kind of awful. I don’t want to be doing that.’” Still, she has no plans to stop.

If Acton ever does want to, she could pick up Evelyn Tribole’s seminal anti-diet book, “Intuitive Eating,”originally published in 1995 and now in its fourth edition. It’s a guide to “making peace with food” and trusting that your body knows better than any program what it wants and needs. “It’s understandable if you have the desire to lose weight because it’s in our culture; it’s in all our institutions and systems,” says Tribole, who wrote the book with fellow registered dietitian Elyse Resch after becoming uncomfortable with dispensing standard diet advice. “Now, diet culture is more pervasive than it even was back then,” says Tribole. “What’s really sad to me is that today, the research is so much stronger showing that dieting not only does not work — it’s one of the best predictors of weight gain. It messes you up.”

One way dieting “messes you up,” Tribole says, is by normalizing disordered eating behaviour like skipping meals and taking out entire groups of food. “Then it’s easier to hide an eating disorder or not realize you have a problem until it’s really entrenched,” says Tribole. “You don’t suddenly wake up one day with an eating disorder — it’s a slow process.” Then there are the quality of life costs: the time spent on meal planning and calorie counting, the money spent on diet programs and books and products, the relationships that suffered because you were checked out at dinnertime worrying about what’s OK to eat. Tribole says when people let go of dieting, the relief is profound. “Whether you are in your 20s or your 70s, it’s a tremendous gift when you finally realize this is robbing the joy from your life.”

But it’s not easy to reject something so pervasive. In Canada, the weight loss services industry is worth an estimated $350.6 million. Revenue is predicted to grow 5.3 per cent this year, chalked up to demand from a burgeoning elderly population, quarantine weight gain and rising rates of obesity. Globally, the numbers are staggering: Weight loss products and services are expected to grow from approximately $377 billion in 2021 to $481 billion by 2026.

That healthy growth may seem surprising given the verb “diet” has become a dirty word in pockets of popular culture; it doesn’t jibe with body positivity. But weight loss has evolved, rebranding itself with the language of wellness. For many, counting points has given way to “clean eating” and cleanses, but the rules, the deeming of certain foods and behaviours as good or bad — actually toxic — are often just as restrictive. Tellingly, “Healthy Eating, Nutrition & Weight Loss” is the second largest sector of the global wellness economy, valued at $5.6 trillion as of 2020.

“That’s a really easy message to pick up on: I’m going to eat right and exercise to be well,” says Sarah Nutter, assistant professor of counselling psychology at the University of Victoria, who studies weight stigma and body image. “But we’re defining being well as being thinner, and that’s very dangerous.” She mentions the next-gen diet company Noom, founded in 2008, which uses psychology principles such as cognitive behavioural therapy to sell what is, still, a calorie restriction program.

With the advent of wearable wellness devices, we can track our food, activity and health markers at all hours of the day and night. “It’s this constant reminder,” says Catherine Sabiston, professor in Physical Activity and Mental Health at the University of Toronto. “When we talk about food tracking historically, you’re taking a piece of paper and a pen and writing down everything you eat. No one sees it other than if you’re working with a dietitian. Now, especially with exercise tracking, many people post about it on social media. Numbers are attached to it; you might be getting a score. It provides all these metrics that perpetuate negative emotions around our bodies more than ever before.”

Weight stigma consultant and educator Monica Kriete understands these negative emotions well. “Some of my earliest memories are of being told that my food and body choices were wrong,” she says. “I’m talking age 3 or 4, being told to eat the fruit before the chocolate, suck in my stomach. The first time I tried Weight Watchers was when I was 10. It was an emotional nightmare that lasted one day. We were all crying in the food court.”

Kriete went on to be “definitely pretty anorexic” as a teenager but came to a turning point when she got to college in 2008. “They had this ‘Love Your Body Day’ event, and I have a lot of reservations about that kind of messaging now, but at the time it was really transformative for me,” she says. “I had a friend at school who was fatter than me, and she had grown up with that kind of body-positive messaging from her mom. But at the event they were selling T-shirts, and they did not sell a T-shirt in her size. So it became evident to me that not every mom is telling their fat daughter to diet, but at the same time fat people are really discriminated against.” Wanting to learn more, she discovered the fat liberation movement online and came across a blog post by Kate Harding called “Don’t You Realize Fat Is Unhealthy?” that broke down major issues in diet culture and how fat people are affected by them. “All the questions that I had ever asked myself, somebody else was asking them. From there it was pretty much game on.”

This new perspective led to a difficult time between Kriete and her mother, who had grown up with weight-loss messaging from her own mother. “I think my mom saw it as a really scary rejection of the idea of health, but also as a rejection of her,” Kriete says. “And when she was trying to lose weight, I felt she was rejecting me; she was not wanting to look like me.” Ten years on, Kriete and her mom are in a much better place. “We’ve had the opportunity and privilege to work through a lot of this with therapy,” she says. “She dealt with some disordered eating and her own recovery process, and I’m in my own recovery process, and we have a lot of respect for each other’s recoveries.”

Often, dieting is something that mothers and daughters do together. “I really view dieting as a form of trauma, especially if someone was put on a diet at a young age, because they had no choice,” says Tribole. “One of the things I say to people raising families is you have the opportunity to end the legacy of diet culture at your kitchen table. In your family, you can start having these conversations, you can start to make a difference.”

But we’re not here to slam the moms. “I think so much of it is an unconscious process,” says Nutter. She helped with a 2020 study that examined how restrictive feeding practices affect children’s feelings about their bodies later in life. It found (shocker) that they grew up with internalized feelings that having a lower body weight is critical for success and self-worth. “Parents want their children to be healthy, to succeed and have everything that they dream of in life. When we live in a culture that tells us to be healthy, happy and successful is to be thin, it makes sense that that would trickle down into parenting practices.”

There it is again: the culture. So when did this way of thinking take hold? “These kinds of diets have existed since the 18th century,” says Sabrina Strings, who chronicles many of them in her highly regarded 2019 book “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.” “By the early 19th century, there was this very clear sense that if you follow this milk diet, say, that you could lose weight and have the right figure.”

The feminine body ideal has fluctuated over time, but not by much. “A study just came out that showed college-age white women are feeling a lot of pressure to be ‘slim thick,’” says Strings, referencing an esthetic embodied by Kim Kardashian. “They’re being told that it’s very important to be slender, but they’re also getting a new message that they should be shapely; not too slim.” Strings points out that in the Western world, we’ve seen mainstream esthetic ideals swing from very thin flappers of the 1930s to Marilyn Monroe voluptuousness in the 1950s, to very thin mod icons like Twiggy of the 1960s, to somewhat curvier “Amazonian” supermodels of the 1980s and so on. This could just be the latest version of a slightly modified slender ideal.

It’s no coincidence that most of those body ideals are embodied by white women. “There’s always been an association between thinness and whiteness. Clearly, white women have known for a very long time in this country that they are supposed to be slender,” says Strings, speaking about the U.S., though Canada shares many of the same cultural influences. “For a long time, the discourse about Black women was that they were simply constitutionally fat — the assumption was that they could not achieve a certain physique. It was a very clear dismissiveness of Black women.”

Of course, the idealized body differs greatly around the world. Sabiston points to research that looked at experiences of Canadian young women from immigrant families who straddle the norms of white diet culture and their home country’s culture. “They say that it’s really hard if they’re following a certain diet or regimen here in Canada and then go to their home countries for the summer, and their grandparents will be like, ‘You’re too thin, eat, eat, eat!’”

While women have been dieting for esthetic reasons in North America for almost 200 years, the idea of a “healthy weight” surfaced much more recently. In the ’80s and ’90s, a new focus on dietary fat, body size and disease emerged (hence the disappearing butter from fridges). You may remember the media-fuelled “war on obesity” that made doctors’ offices a battleground for people classified as overweight or obese.

In 2020, the Canadian clinical practice guidelines for obesity were updated and now say that doctors should focus on patients’ health outcomes rather than weight loss, and that weight bias and stigma pose a danger to health independent of a person’s weight. “There are lots of reasons why people have higher body weight and lots of people with higher body weights are perfectly healthy,” says Nutter, who sits on the Weight Bias & Stigma Committee at Obesity Canada, which co-developed these guidelines. They also now state that physicians should ask permission before discussing a patient’s weight and focus on the health goals that matter to them.

Kriete’s firsthand experience shows why this is so important. “At 75 per cent of the doctors’ appointments I have ever been to, it becomes about weight. They’ll interview me about weight loss instead of ordering an X-ray on my ankle,” she says, adding that above a certain BMI (body mass index; a ratio of height to weight that ignores body composition, genetic and environmental factors), people may be denied care, such as some surgeries. “The health care system makes fat people unhealthy by only paying attention to our weight.”

But her critique of obesity discourse goes further. “When we say ‘fat people can be healthy too,’ we’re saying, ‘OK, so now these fat people are acceptable, but all these other fat people are not,’” she says. “It’s the idea that there’s a correct way to live, and that if you live correctly, you will accrue moral and material rewards, and that if you live incorrectly you will be punished. It’s almost religious.”

So whose interests does this way of thinking serve? “The uncomfortable answer to this question is that thin people, as a class, benefit from the existence of discrimination against fat people. You get a preferential hiring and promotion experience, access to clothing; you fit in the chair, you fit in the bed,” says Kriete. “I think that there is not an appreciation of how deep anti-fatness runs. People are so overcome by their own esthetic revulsion for fat bodies. If the world did not hate fat people, diet culture would not exist.”

At least we’re talking more about what it costs us. “These conversations are happening more and more, which feels different to the environment that people grew up in just a couple of decades ago. I’m hopeful that things are changing. But maybe talk to me in 30 years!” says Nutter. “Perhaps we can change the way we think about health, appreciate our bodies for what they allow us to do every day rather than for what they look like, and celebrate beauty in all the ways that humans are in the world. How great would that be?”

Rani Sheen is executive editor of The Kit. She writes about beauty and culture. Reach her on email: [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @ranisheen