Diet Culture & Food Rules
Welcome to the second pillar of my Food & Body Therapy Mini-Series. If you haven’t already, please check out my introduction and first pillar on curiosity and self-compassion.
When I’m working through my 8 week program with clients, the second thing we discuss is always diet culture and food rules. It’s quite difficult to have a conversation about intuitive eating or healing your relationship with food and your body without also talking about what’s going on in our diet obsessed culture.
From the moment we get here on planet Earth as tiny blobs of joy, our societal conditioning is beginning. This conditioning that we receive from parents, siblings, peers, media, and the greater culture around us will serve to shape our thoughts, feelings, opinions, perspectives and worldviews to such an extent, that it’s often difficult for us to know which parts of us were curated or handed to us and which parts make up our authentic self.
One of the things we’re indoctrinated with most deeply comes from what we call “diet culture.” A fancy title given to the seemingly unending messages we receive from the world around us that our physical bodies are something the world cares about deeply, so we should in turn put endless amounts of time, attention, and resources into ensuring that the one we’re living in is good enough.
Diet culture teaches us that there are ideal body types. That humans should live in ones that meet a cultural standard. And that if your body doesn’t make the cut, you should be pretty obsessed with doing everything you can to morph it into something more acceptable. In our society bodies are often made to feel like apologies. As if not having the right kind body is shameful, so it should be hidden from the world or abused until it surrenders and conforms.
Every culture has their own unique ideal body type. In the western world, the standard is often a “thin” ideal. Young adolescent females are most susceptible to diet culture messages due to the fact their brain is still developing, and they’re less able to respond to unhelpful influences with logic or rational thinking. At this young age, the more primitive parts of the brain are highly interested in basic survival, which includes a drive to be attractive and desirable to the opposite sex. If the cultural ideal for what makes us most attractive is thinness, then we become susceptible to the concept of dieting at a young age.
Unfortunately, individuals who diet are at increased risk of developing disordered eating, worsening body image challenges, and even diagnosed eating disorders. In fact, the vast majority of individuals who develop anorexia, bulimia, binge eating, and/or disordered eating or chronic dieting behaviors began dieting at a young age. Dieting or restrictive eating behaviors are the primary cause of the development of these more serious issues.
As we begin to diet, our bodies undergo drastic physical, metabolic, and hormonal changes that eventually inspire strong primal drives to eat. We can’t sustain our restrictive eating habits because our primal survival drives kick in to protect us from starvation. This is an especially powerful system when the brain and body are still developing in children and adolescents. After a first diet or period of restrictive eating behaviors, we eventually see individuals enter a period of feeling out of control around food. Behaviors like overeating, compulsive eating, and binge eating begin to develop.
Since a desire to be thinner is what inspired an individual to restrict food in the first place, losing control over food can feel deeply frightening and anxiety producing. This anxiety often leads to either the initiation of purging behaviors (throwing up food, excessive exercise, laxative use, etc), or the individual returns to another restrictive diet to regain control. However, the new diet resets the starvation response cycle and we end up seeing the manifestation of chronic dieting or disordered eating behaviors.
The more we diet, the more “rules” we start to develop about food, eating, bodies, and even what promotes health. In this section of the program, I not only review how our problems begin and then maintain themselves, but we also start to investigate the rules you’ve developed that continue to sustain your habits. What rules have you developed about food? Do you have ideas about good food and bad food? What do you believe about normal eating habits? What should eating look like for healthy humans? What do you believe about bodies and body diversity? What constitutes a normal, healthy, and beautiful body? And lastly, have your rules begun to shape what you think it means to be healthy? How do we define health?
This section begins the process of lifting the diet culture “veil” so that you can begin to see your world more clearly again. Once we re-establish what we actually know, believe and value about food, eating, and bodies we can better enter the next stages of our healing process. We now have an understanding of how our problems started, what energies have perpetuated them, and how we can begin to step out of our dysfunctional or unhelpful patterns.
In the next pillar of food and body therapy, we move on to discussing the concept of permission and allowance, the next step toward a healthy and nourishing relationship with food and eating.