If you work in the fitness industry or promote any form of healthy lifestyle as part of your job role, its more than likely that you will have come across the term ‘diet culture’. Broadly speaking, the term ‘diet culture’ is a set of values, beliefs and societal values that relate to food, exercise and body ideals, placing ‘thinness’ as the ultimate goal of health, no matter the cost to your overall health. Diet culture promotes restrictive calorie counting, pits food groups against each other (‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods), and normalises negative self-talk often referred to as “fat talk”. Examples of such include “I look fat in this”, “I need to exercise after eating that cake” (Daryanani, 2021). Diet culture and negative self-talk have become so normalised in the ‘diet world’ it is hard to come by services which do not promote a stereotypical, aesthetically pleasing body shape as the ultimate goal.
Examples of diet culture (Arzt, 2021):
· Foods labelled as good or bad
· Negative self-talk, fat shaming, or ‘fat talk’
· Feeling guilty for eating certain foods
· Exercising to ‘earn’ food or punishment for eating
· Avoiding meals out because you can’t control calories
· Limiting entire food groups (for example fat or carbs)
· Idolising thinness and weight loss
Although the aforementioned descriptions appear more online (grey literature), it has not been until recently that academic studies have tried to holistically define what ‘diet culture’ actually means. Jovanovski & Jaeger (2022) conducted a survey of health professionals and anti-diet activists in an attempt to demystify the term ‘diet culture’ and describe that “diet culture is characterised by a conflation of weight and health including myths about food and eating, and a moral hierarchy of bodies derived from patriarchal, racist, and capitalist forms of domination’’ (p.9).
So, now that you have a bit of a background as to what ‘diet culture’ means I’m going to explain why I feel I fit into the middle ground. I do not agree that the ultimate goal is thinness, neither do I think you should be speaking to yourself unkindly, but where do we draw the line for example if a client approaches us with wanting to lose weight because they are miserable in the body that they are living in? Do we dismiss their concerns? Do we sell them the dream they want to hear, set unrealistic goals and expectations? Or do we berate and lecture, telling them that they need to be anti-diet culture and that they shouldn’t want to lose weight? Because quite honestly, none of these options are helpful.
I come from a background where ‘diet culture’ was not a term I had ever heard of before, however upon reflection of the last two decades I have certainly come across hundreds of people, men and women alike who all shared similar characteristics, they were all chasing ‘the ultimate goal of thinness’. More often than not, if you type in the hashtag ‘dietculture’ or ‘ditchdietculture’ for example, many accounts, mostly female led, will pop up. I found this interesting, because most of what we see today in mainstream media is that diet culture affects women, however in my experience I would definitely state that men also suffer similar societal pressures when it comes to health and fitness. Phrases like ‘lose the dad bod’ are used in many marketing strategies, thousands of pictures of ‘shredded abs’ appear when you look up ‘fitness motivation’… so my question is, where are all the men advocating against the toxic world of fitness that they find themselves immersed in too? I believe that men face their own stigma and discrimination when it comes to fitness, similar to the mental health conversation, for example many men are taught from a young age to ‘toughen up’, or ‘boys don’t cry’. We need to be supporting people equally because I can guarantee that everyone at some point in their lives, male or female, will have compared their body to a model in a magazine or someone on social media, we need to be paving a way for men to talk about their body image concerns too.
So how do we find a middle ground?
First and foremost, as a coach I will firmly state that I do not agree with-diet culture, but I am not anti-diet. If you explore deep enough across social media you will come across two main themes, you will either find people advocating against diet culture and the harm it causes both physically and mentally or you will have fitness influencers promoting their latest six-week transformation programme that promises to solve all your problems. In all honesty, social media can become quite a toxic place to be.
It is not inherently ’bad’ to want to lose weight or change your physical appearance, but as a coach I want to find out more about the reasons behind why you want to do so in the first place. I firmly believe that we should not be deterring people away from wanting to change their lifestyle, what we should be doing as coaches is supporting people as individuals. Every single person you will meet as either a coach or a personal trainer (PT) will be coming to you with a background of completely different social and cultural beliefs, the last thing we need to be doing is then enforcing a rigid set of health and fitness targets which often use stigmatising language around eating habits and dieting. Although I firmly believe in the anti-diet culture message, when people embark on a lifestyle change it is more than likely that this will involve some dietary changes. To reinforce my point further the word ‘diet’ literally means the food and drink we consume, I believe the word ‘diet’ does not need to become this demonised word. My point is simple, not all diets are inherently bad and not all diets are going to ruin your relationship with food.
So how can we help as Coaches and PTs?
My approach when it comes to navigating diet culture and supporting my clients is to really dig deep behind the weight loss reasons that my clients are coming to me with. I believe that knowledge is power, and it is a two-way street. As coaches, we need to be taking the time to understand both the mental health and physical needs of our clients. And for our clients, empowering them to learn about nutrition, how to fuel their bodies and how to fully understand their own minds, will support them in becoming the best versions of themselves. More often than not, the real reasons behind someone’s weight loss goals in my experience, has more to do with how they feel on the inside and who they are comparing themselves to on social media than their appearance in the first place. At the end of the day, we could make our jobs really easy by spoon-feeding strict planned diets in order to achieve their ultimate thin weight loss goal, or we could take the more difficult route and support the mental health needs of our clients. At the end of the day, we can support our clients to achieve their aesthetic goals, but if they haven’t worked on their own personal and mental development, are they really going to be happy in their new ‘thin’ body? For a while maybe…but in the long term, probably not.
References
Arzt, N. (2021). Diet culture: definition, examples and impacts. Choosing Therapy. https://www.choosingtherapy.com/diet-culture/
Daryanani, A. (2021) What is diet culture? UC San Diego Recreation. https://recreation.ucsd.edu/2021/01/diet-culture-social-media/
Jovanovski, N., & Jaeger, T. (2022). Demystifying ‘diet culture’: exploring the meaning of diet culture in online ‘anti-diet’ feminist, fat activist, and health professional communities. Women’s Studies International Forum, 90, 1-10.
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