Diet culture needs to die. With the internet today and the resources available at your fingertips, more and more people are discovering how horrible dieting and diet culture is and have started to pivot into body positivity and lifestyle wellness instead. In her viral Tiktok on “why diets don’t work and what to do instead”, the anti-diet Dietitian Kate Regan leads people away from strict dieting that does not work into a more wellness-based lifestyle. Posting almost daily to over 100k followers, Regan teaches how dieting does not work and how to live a healthy life instead without body image issues.
Dieting is one of the most harmful things for the human body. Food is fuel and diet culture twists it into a dangerous substance that requires strict attention to detail. You have to count every calorie, never eat any carbs, and take certain supplements in order to achieve that model body. The most ironic part of it all is that dieting doesn’t work. According to Robert H. Shmerling, MD, from Harvard Health Publishing, dieting has short term results but almost no indication long term weight-loss retention—meaning that once one loses weight they will almost always gain back what they loss and maybe more.
Restrictive diets and calorie counting cause disordered eating in the long term. While a caloric deficit can be the first step for individuals to lose weight, it is not the sustainable option. Eating calories below the rate at which one’s body burns in a day (Basal Metabolic Rate) causes nutrient deficiency, lower metabolism, fatigue, reduced fertility, and lowered immunity. The reason why one gains weight after ending a diet is due to decreased metabolism—the rate at which the body burns calories is decreased to maintain a restrictive diet—once regular eating resumes, the body gets overwhelmed thinking it is eating more food than before and rapidly puts on weight. This domino effect leads to a new restrictive diet to lose the new weight and in turn becomes a form of disordered eating.
Restrictive dieting causes muscle loss. When intensely dieting, the body can go into what is known as “starvation mode” this is when you hold onto more fat in order to keep your body functioning. Once you hit starvation mode, your body starts using muscle for fuel instead of fat which causes muscle loss, increased body fat percentage, and decreased stamina and overall strength—pretty much the exact opposite of what a diet is trying to achieve.
Most popular diets don’t even make much sense. Low-carb diets, The Keto diet, and low-fat diets are the most common diets or some form of those. All of which include restricting a certain food group in order to lose weight.
First, and most popular, is the low-carb diet. Carbohydrates are the body’s most preferred and efficient source of energy—why would we want to eat less of that? Carbohydrates come in refined and complex forms meaning that some are more efficient than others. Refined carbs go through the body much quicker and are what gets the bad rap from diet culture—it is easy to eat a lot of refined carbs because (while they may be high in calories) they get used up very quickly causing you to not get very full. Complex carbohydrates, on the other hand, give the body the fuel it needs through whole foods, and keeps you fuller for longer. Restricting carbohydrates doesn’t do much except for reduce energy levels.
The next diet that gained some traction is the Keto Diet. Originally made for epileptic children, the keto diet premise is to almost completely cut out carbs and eat incredibly high levels of fat and protein in order to get the body into a state of ketosis. Ketosis is when the body runs out of its preferred fuel (carbohydrates) and instead starts to use protein and fat as energy in the attempt to train the body to burn its stored body fat. Most of the time ketosis is harder to achieve than just not eating carbs, and this diet is only really prescribed to epileptic children to control seizures.
The last diet that most people follow when choosing to go on a diet is the low-fat diet. Fatty foods are the most calorically dense foods which is the main logic behind this dieting fad. The belief is that eating fat is going to turn into body fat, but this is just simply not true. Following a low-fat diet can actually adversely affect levels of blood lipids and raise risk for heart disease. People normally only lose weight on low-fat diets because they unintentionally cut calories by avoiding fat.
No matter what diet fad you try, it is not going to work. Each body is different and works in a unique way that a strict diet plan will not help. The only thing that a fad diet helps is to give you body issues and a bad relationship with food.
I agree with you. Dieting is not the answer to a more healthy lifestyle. I believe that as long as you eat everything in moderation, an individual will be consuming a healthy diet. It is important to get nutrients from all sorts of foods in order to fuel your body. The only difference between what people should eat is maybe the types of activities that they do. For instance, a football player might eat differently than a layperson who works a desk job solely because of the amount of food and calories it takes to fuel these different lifestyles. In summary, I agree that diets are not healthy and that people should just eat what they want to eat.
I completely agree with you! The diet culture, especially in Los Angeles, is so incredibly toxic. Not only does it make people extremely self conscious, but it heavily effects people's moods, and is overall not good for people's health. In short, I agree with you - death to diet culture!
Words cannot express how tired I am of diet culture. I think it's inextricable to how women's bodies are perceived as needing to look a certain way just for them to be respected- there are countless stories about women losing weight and discovering that people treated them nicer, or even just acknowledged their presence more often. Diet culture is seen as some sort of method to get people to see you as a human being, and it preys upon vulnerable girls and teenagers who go on to develop addictions to calorie counting and eventually even eating disorders.
This is a really informative post! I think a huge reason society has not been able to break free of diet culture's control is because it is a $70 billion industry. With the amount of funding and connections in high places this industry has, it is nearly impossible to destroy it for good. Diets like Keto and Low-carb are so focused on the exclusion of foods, but in order to properly fuel your body humans should be focusing on what nutrients and food they can add to their diet. Someone's "success" in dieting should never be measured by their body size, health should be measured by their internal wellbeing.
I think something that is also interesting to note is the more you restrict food, or certain groups of food, the more aware of what you're eating. The heightened awareness around what you're eating, coupled with the avoidance these diets assert can create an obsession. Instead of focusing on daily tasks, or fueling our bodies through the day, people are thinking of what they "can" or "cannot" eat. This obsession distracts people from doing things that actually makes them happy, and is detrimental to one's overall well being.