May 6th marks International No Diet Day, a day to celebrate and embrace body diversity, reject weight stigma, and stand up against diet culture.

Diet culture is a group of societal beliefs that overly value physical appearance, glorifying thinness or muscularity as the ideal way to look, and implying that it is a personal ‘failure’ not to achieve this. It creates a (false!) moral hierarchy of body sizes and shapes.

Everyone is exposed to diet culture – not just people with eating disorders. It is a multi-billion dollar industry designed to profit off making us feel insecure about our bodies through imposing unrealistic beauty standards and then selling “fix all cures”. These “cures” can look like fad diets, slim teas, weight loss products, ‘guilt-free’ foods or exercise programs sold through ‘before and after’ images.

Over the years, diet culture has become even sneakier.

In some ways, we’ve progressed in terms of the narrative shifting from overt diet and weight loss tips to now being more around “wellness” or a “healthy lifestyle”. However, many of these “wellness” messages are just diet culture in disguise, making it more even difficult to avoid.

While messaging has switched from weight loss dieting to “eating clean” or “lifting heavy”, the core of the idea remains that thinness and muscularity are the ideal to be achieved. The murkiness around “wellness” has also seen the rise of orthorexia, an eating disorder that presents as an obsessive desire to only eat “clean” or “healthy” foods.

Diet culture is also pervasive on social media, with trends such as “being that girl” or “what I eat in a day” videos imposing harmful ideals on an audience that is often young and more naïve.

How diet culture impacts us psychologically:

• It encourages problematic thinking patterns such as labelling foods “good or bad”, and feeling guilt or shame around our body shape or size.
• It delivers false promises of fulfilment, suggesting that achieving a certain body shape/weight will lead to happiness – when often even after achieving this, people can struggle with body dissatisfaction and other emotional issues.
• It promotes disordered eating behaviours such as frequent and/or drastic dieting. Imposing restrictions on natural hunger cues through dieting is the single biggest risk factor for an eating disorder.
• It stigmatises larger bodies and promotes an anti-fat bias. This leads to a harmful belief that fatness is a problem to be solved, resulting in unfair scrutiny and discrimination faced by people in larger bodies.

How diet culture impacts us physically:

• Diet culture can contribute to disordered eating behaviours such as binge eating, restriction or avoiding food groups, all of which are harmful and can lead to the development of a clinical eating disorder (such as anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa or binge eating disorder).
• Dieting can disconnect us from our natural hunger cues, making it harder to tell when we are hungry or full.
• Restrictive diets that ignore individual nutritional requirements can lead to nutritional deficiencies, gastrointestinal problems, a slowing of the metabolism, reduction of muscle tissue and bone density, and fatigue.

Rejecting diet culture is not an easy task, as the concepts behind it have had a pervasive presence in media and many Western cultures for a long time. However, it’s worth the hard work to unlearn the harmful messages we’ve been taught, resist the influence of diet culture from day to day and find food freedom.

Some ways to get started:

• Practise body neutrality and self-compassion
• Listen to podcasts and books that are helpful and inspiring (check out our list here!)
• Unfollow or mute social media accounts that are unhelpful
• Only take nutrition advice from a Registered Dietitian (preferably someone who practices a weight-neutral approach) who is focusing on your body’s health

Remember – it is possible to live a life free from dieting and strict food rules, just as full recovery from an eating disorder is possible for everyone.