The Dangers of Diet Culture

Trigger Warning: Discusses eating disorders and body-shaming comments

I was around six years old, underweight and confused, and I’m standing crying my eyes out on the landing because I couldn’t find my suitcase in the spare room. 

My mother had threatened me with hospitalisation if I didn’t start eating, and in a moment of despair and utter desperation, told me to go pack my bag.

As a little girl, I grew up feeling paralysed with fear around food and refused to eat at all in front of other people (I’ll explain why in a moment). When I first started school at the age of 4, I cried my eyes out at lunchtime and refused to eat. My parents were called and the teacher advised them to let me eat lunch at home and come back for the afternoon, just to make sure I ate something during the school day.

As I got older and stayed at school for lunchtimes, I sat in fear of the dinner ladies coming around to the tables to police what we ate. I was always being corrected on the order in which I ate my food.

When I went to friend’s birthday parties, the parents were just the same, hovering around the table, prompting on how much to eat, what to eat, what to not eat too much off, what to eat much more of, and what order to eat it in. Being watched was the quickest way for me to lose my appetite - it felt too much like being at home.

Doctors put my food avoidance down to “normal picky eating”, “just a phase she’ll grow out of” and reassured my mum that “she’ll eat when she gets hungry”.

In many ways, the doctors were not wrong (I did eat, when hungry, and when in private), and I’m glad they were discouraging my mum from becoming even more hyper-focused on my diet, but they were missing a crucial part of the picture.

Fear of food is a learned behaviour. 

Fear of food and anxiety around eating in general, are not normal behaviours (although Diet Culture trains us to accept feeling this way). It goes against biology to fight against human instinct, and our body’s primary goal is to encourage us to engage in behaviours necessary for survival. It does this through internal cues such as hunger, thirst, tiredness, needing to pee etc.

Therefore these fears and anxieties are learned. We are taught to ignore our own cues for hunger, fullness and satisfaction through external food policing and arbitrary food rules, i.e. diet plans.

Where do we learn food fear?

My mother, for as long as I can remember, severely restricted and controlled her own diet. She has long since been diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, and at one point was engaging with out-patient treatment for it. Sometimes, she recognises herself in her diagnosis, but at other times, she views her habits as “very dedicated dieting”. 

My mum’s obsession with weight, diet and exercise was readily praised at the school gates, by my friend’s parents who said they “envied her figure” and “wished they had that level of self-discipline around food” and “motivation to exercise for hours a day”. Not one of them made the connection between my mum’s excessive “dieting” and over-exercising and my “picky eating” and frighteningly low BMI.

Therein lies the fundamental problem I have with diet culture; its strict rules, need for unrelenting self-control, self-punishment, and lifestyle-limiting habits are not all that distinctive from clinically recognised eating disorders. To the extent that even people who have been diagnosed with eating disorders, can view themselves as dieters and often go unnoticed or even praised by close friends, family and medical professionals for many years.

Diet culture is life-threatening, toxic and damaging to both our physical and mental health. It can also spread like wildfire through the family tree. Many of the women on my courses have spoken of their friends, mothers, sisters and aunts dieting. If you struggle with disordered eating now, I can pretty much guarantee that someone in your circle has experimented with diets, body-shamed you or body shamed themselves in front of you.

There is no doubt in my mind that my eating problems started right from a very young age, where I observed my mum anxiously eating food and labelling items ‘good for you’ (shorthand for “won’t cause weight gain”) or ‘junk’ (shorthand for, “this food will make you fat, and being fat is very bad").

Restriction leads to binge-eating

When I became old enough to buy food myself, I took to buying lots of food to eat secretly in my room away from the critical gaze of others. I would eat huge amounts to make up for going hungry all day at school, and eat rapidly to avoid getting caught.

This lead to binge eating disorder and by my late teens, weight gain, which was, of course, met by further criticism and body shaming.

One vivid memory I have was walking up the stairs in my PJs and overhearing my father tell my mother that I had “big fat white thighs”. At the time, I pretended it didn’t bother me, but it had made me feel deeply ashamed, self-conscious and crushed my self-esteem. I avoided shorts, skirts and dresses for years after that, even in the summer months.

Body-shaming compounds disordered eating

In my early twenties, while at university, I downloaded a popular calorie counting app and slipped quickly into an obsession with weighing myself, weighing out my food portions and exercising in order to ‘earn’ my food.

I told myself it was a ‘lifestyle’ because technically, no food was off-limits to me, it wasn’t anything like the sort of diet plan like I was used to seeing in the 90s, like the Weetabix diet I remember the school mums going on for two weeks before complaining of stomach ache and constipation. But the truth is, it was a diet, it was food restriction, food anxiety, over-exercising, and weight obsession. The very definition of a diet and disordered eating.

Diet-culture makes it harder to diagnose eating disorders

I was praised for weight loss because I had started using the app when I was in the ‘obese’ category of BMI. Had I carried on much further past the ‘normal’ range, people would have suddenly labelled the exact same behaviours as an eating disorder. The only difference, being my weight. But these behaviours were still unravelling my life and mental health, independent of what my current weight was (fortunately I stumbled into the Intuitive Eating and Body Positivity community before it went any further).

Diet culture has us thinking that eating disorders only affect middle-class, white, able-bodied, emaciated women, but eating disorders can and do affect anyone of any weight, size, gender and ethnicity.

If you feel anxious around food and struggle with disordered eating, please know that you do not have to ‘look’ sick in order to be worthy of help.