Diet is a Dangerous Word

Diet culture promotes toxic, unrealistic messages that lead to dissatisfaction with your body and a decrease in your overall wellbeing.

What is a Diet?

A diet can be defined as denying your body the essential, well-balanced nutrients and calories needed to fully function in order to lose weight, eat healthier, or sculpt your body.

Dieting leads to a dieting mindset, which is the internalizing of the belief that your body needs to look different. The dieting mindset leads to dissatisfaction with your body’s natural shape and/or size, resulting in efforts to try and change your appearance.

What is Diet Culture?

According to the National Eating Disorders Association and the Alliance for Eating Disorders, diet culture can be defined as a set of beliefs that value thinness, appearance, and body shape over physical health and emotional well-being. Diet culture includes any program that encourages quick, extreme weight loss that requires dangerous caloric restriction and/or cutting out of entire food groups. Diet culture also includes any program that advertises weight loss pills, detoxing teas, or appetite suppressing shakes. Diet culture promotes a belief that there are good foods and bad foods and normalizes self-deprecating talk.

Diet culture is all around us, sending people the message that their bodies should be small in order to be accepted, desired, and loved. This mindset is limiting, self-punishing, and dangerous as it leads to critical self-talk and internalized fatphobia. This mindset is full of judgment against both us and the people around us.

Diet culture fails to consider the entire person. There are more significant aspects that makeup someone’s health besides their body shape or size. A larger body doesn’t automatically mean someone is unhealthy nor does a small body automatically mean healthy. These are examples of the stereotypes and judgments associated with fatphobia. Fatphobia is reinforced by our support of diet culture’s lies, further instilling the idea that thin is more valuable than considering someone’s overall wellbeing.

What Makes Diet Culture Toxic?

All of the below statistics were obtained from the National Eating Disorders Association website and are being shared here for educational purposes.

• Americans spend over $60 billion on dieting and diet products each year (Hobbs et al., 2006).
• A content analysis of weight-loss advertising found that more than half of all advertising for weight-loss products made use of false, unsubstantiated claims (Wetheim et al., 2009).
• Of American elementary school girls who read magazines, 69% say that the pictures influence their concept of the ideal body shape. 47% say the pictures make them want to lose weight (Martin, 2010).
• Weight-based victimization among overweight youths has been linked to lower levels of physical activity, negative attitudes about sports, and lower participation in physical activity among overweight students. Among overweight and obese adults, those who experience weight-based stigmatization engage in more frequent binge eating, are at increased risk for eating disorder symptoms, and are more likely to have a diagnosis of binge eating disorder (Andreyeva et al., 2008).
• Weight stigma poses a significant threat to psychological and physical health. It has been documented as a significant risk factor for depression, low self-esteem, and body dissatisfaction (Andreyeva et al., 2008).
• Low self-esteem is a common characteristic of individuals who have eating disorders (CASA, 2003).
• Perceived weight discrimination is significantly associated with a current diagnosis of mood and anxiety disorders and mental health services use (Hatzenbuehler et al., 2009).

Risks of Toxic Diet Culture

All of the below statistics were obtained from the National Eating Disorders Association website and are being shared here for educational purposes.

• Diet culture promotes a set of beliefs that creates a sociocultural idealization of thinness. The best-known environmental contributor to the development of eating disorders is the sociocultural idealization of thinness (Culbert et al., 2015).
• By age 6, girls especially start to express concerns about their own weight or shape. 40–60% of elementary school girls (ages 6–12) are concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat. This concern endures through life.
• In a large study of 14– and 15-year-olds, dieting was the most important predictor of a developing eating disorder. Those who dieted moderately were 5x more likely to develop an eating disorder, and those who practiced extreme restriction were 18x more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who did not diet (Golden et al. 2016).
• 62.3% of teenage girls and 28.8% of teenage boys report trying to lose weight. 58.6% of girls and 28.2% of boys are actively dieting. 68.4% of girls and 51% of boys exercise with the goal of losing weight or to avoid gaining weight (CASA, 2003).
• Over one-half of teenage girls and nearly one-third of teenage boys use unhealthy weight control behaviors such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives (Neumark-Sztainer, 2005).
• 35–57% of adolescent girls engage in crash dieting, fasting, self-induced vomiting, diet pills, or laxatives. Overweight girls are more likely than normal-weight girls to engage in such extreme dieting (Boutelle et al., 2002, Nuemark-Sztainer & Hannan, 2001, & Wertheim et al., 2009).
• Even among clearly non-overweight girls, over 1/3 report dieting (Wertheim et al., 2009).

The Dangers of Dieting

• Research has begun to prove the ineffectiveness of intentional weight. 95% of all dieters regain their lost weight within 5 years (Grodstein et al. & 1996, Neumark et al., 2007).
• Yo-yo dieting — the repetitive cycles of gaining, losing, and regaining weight — has consequences on someone’s health. Yo-yo dieting increases someone’s risk of heart disease, long-lasting negative impacts on their metabolism, etc (Daee et al., 2002).
• Dieting is dangerous because it forces your body into starvation mode. Starvation modes slows down your body’s normal functioning in order to conserve energy. This means your metabolism actually slows down (Daee et al., 2002).
• Diets cause people to miss out on nutrients. Many dieters don’t get enough calcium which leads to an increased risk of osteoporosis, stress fractures, and broken bones (Daee et al., 2002).
• There are physical consequences to going on a diet. People can experience a loss of muscular strength and endurance, decreased oxygen utilization, thinning hair, loss of coordination, dehydration, electrolyte imbalances, fainting, weakness, and slowed heart rate (Daee et al., 2002).
• When you restrict your intake, you also are restricting your brainpower. Studies have shown that people on diets have slower reaction times and less ability to focus (Daee et al., 2002).
• The stress and anxiety about food and weight take up a lot of memory capacity, leading to a preoccupation with thoughts about food and body image (Daee et al., 2002).
• Studies have shown that dieting is linked to feelings of depression, low self-esteem, and increased stress (Andreyeva et al., 2008).
• Dieting can lead to an eating disorder. Many studies and many health professionals note that patients with eating disorders were dieting at the time of the development of their eating disorder. Dieting may not cause an eating disorder, but the constant concern about body weight and shape, fat grams, and calories can start a vicious cycle of body dissatisfaction and obsession that can lead all too quickly to an eating disorder (Golden et al. 2016).

Take Away

Diet culture has dangerous ripple effects that negatively people’s well-being. There is lots of research demonstrating how unsustainable and ineffective diets are as well as how damaging this mindset is to someone’s mental health. Now, it is important to begin to build awareness of the ways that diet culture is presented in the world so that we can begin to challenge the negative influence of the messages we are receiving. In my next article, I will be talking about alternatives to the dieting mindset as well as ways to begin to develop a more holistic view of health.

Sources

Andreyeva, T., Puhl, R. M. and Brownell, K. D. (2008), Changes in Perceived Weight Discrimination Among Americans, 1995–1996 Through 2004–2006. Obesity, 16: 1129–1134. doi:10.1038/oby.2008.35

Boutelle, K., Neumark-Sztainer, D.,Story, M., &Resnick, M. (2002).Weight control behaviors among obese, overweight, and nonoverweight adolescents. Journal of Pediatric Psychology,27, 531–540.

Culbert, K. M., Racine, S. E., & Klump, K. L. (2015). Research Review: What we have learned about the causes of eating disorders — a synthesis of sociocultural, psychological, and biological research. J Child Psychol Psychiatry, 56(11), 1141–1164.

Daee, A., Robinson, P., Lawson, M., Turpin, J. A., Gregory, B., & Tobias, J. D. (2002, September). Psychologic and physiologic effects of dieting in adolescents. Southern Medical Journal, 95(9).

Golden, N. H., Schneider, M., & Wood, C. (2016). Preventing Obesity and Eating Disorders in Adolescents. Pediatrics, 138(3). doi:10.1542/peds.2016–1649

Grodstein, F., Levine, R., Spencer, T., Colditz, G. A., &Stampfer, M. J. (1996). Three-year follow-up of participants in a commercial weight loss program: Can you keep it off? Archives of Internal Medicine 156(12), 1302.

Hatzenbuehler ML, Keyes KM, Hasin DS. Associations between perceived weight discrimination and the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in the general population. Obesity 2009;17(11)2033–2039

Hobbs, R., Broder, S., Pope, H., & Rowe, J. (2006). “How adolescent girls interpret weight-loss advertising.” Health Education Research, 21(5) 719–730.

Martin, J. B. (2010). The Development of Ideal Body Image Perceptions in the United States.Nutrition Today, 45(3), 98–100. Retrieved from nursingcenter.com/pdf.asp?AID=1023485

The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University. Food for Thought: Substance Abuse and Eating Disorders. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) Columbia University; New York: 2003.

Neumark-Sztainer, D. (2005). I’m, Like, SO Fat!.New York: Guilford.

Neumark-Sztainer, D., &Hannan, P. (2001). Weight-related behaviors among adolescent girls and boys: A national survey. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 154, 569–577.

Neumark-Sztainer D., Haines, J., Wall, M., & Eisenberg, M. ( 2007). Why does dieting predict weight gain in adolescents? Findings from project EAT-II: a 5-year longitudinal study. Journal of the American Dietetic Associatio, 107(3), 448–55

Wertheim, E., Paxton, S., &Blaney, S. (2009).Body image in girls.In L. Smolak & J. K. Thompson (Eds.), Body image, eating disorders, and obesity in youth: Assessment, prevention, and treatment (2nd ed.) (pp. 47–76). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

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