COLUMN: Diet culture needs to die

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It’s resolution time (new year new us, right?) which means we’re all trying to procrastinate less, sleep more and finally show up to our morning classes on time. It’s also likely that many of us are trying to get around to exercising more and starting a new diet. While being healthier is always wonderful goal to have, dieting with the mindset to lose weight can lead to negative impacts on both our mental and physical health.

For someone wanting to improve their overall well-being, establishing a reasonable exercise routine and developing more health-conscious eating habits is a great place to start. But focusing on the new fad diet leaves us susceptible to falling into the trap of “diet culture.” Essentially, diet culture is when we place more value on our bodies being a certain size, weight or shape, rather than emphasizing the overall health of our bodies.

Put simply, a diet culture mindset is when we think being thin equals being healthy.

Yes, there are medical situations where people do need to go on a specific diet in order to improve their health, but for the sake of clarity we are going to relate diet culture to the health kick that seems to sweep the nation whenever the New Year comes around. Exercise and dieting go hand in hand with weight loss, but that focus opens up a trap door to fall into diet culture and get stuck there.

With diet culture’s obsession with being thin, it is so easy to jump from one popular diet to another, constantly trying to achieve “the perfect body” while believing the lie that your own body isn’t good enough. Each diet comes with special restrictions and a set of rules that go along the line of, “Don’t eat this! Don’t eat that! Only eat what is on this list!”

What happens if you do eat something that is not on the list of your approved diet foods? Diet culture has a way of teaching us to feel guilty for going off of the diet for a bit to enjoy food that is deemed as “bad.” When feeling guilty for eating a forbidden treat or snack, the chance of binge eating that food and abandoning the diet altogether go up. Isn’t it crazy that we allow ourselves to give food power to make us feel guilty for literally eating?

Healthy bodies come in all shapes and sizes, though. Regular exercise and relatively nutritional eating habits are important to maintaining a healthy body, and completely abandoning them is too much of an overcorrection. But you don’t have to look like the people in magazines and on social media to be healthy.

Within diet culture, people have become conditioned to feel bad after eating something that is not seen as 100% totally healthy. Have you ever heard someone say, “I’m going to be bad and get the french fries today.” Next time you hear someone utter a phrase about them being a rebel and ordering something “bad” off of the menu, please call the local authorities because we cannot have a mad man loose in our streets!

Ordering a side of fries is not going to make you automatically gain 10 pounds. Fries are amazing. Especially if you exercise and eat moderately healthy, you’re going to be just fine eating the dang fries.

If you made the resolution to improve your health this year, the key to achieving that is to get plenty of sleep, add nutritional foods into your everyday meals, and exercise a few times a week. Continue doing those steps and they will become habits that will help you reach your health-centered goals.

Do not give food and diets a moral price tag by labeling them as “good” and “bad.” Food is food.

Yes, some foods contain more nutrients than others, but at the end of the day if you are satisfied with what you ate, why should it matter if it was on the “good” list of food or the “bad” list? We as humans were not born to diet and die.

If you want to eat carrots, go for it. If you want to eat a cookie, savor it and move on with your day. Diet culture is exhausting to keep up with, with crash diets and new detox teas to try every day. You don’t need to feel guilty for eating some pizza when out with friends, or eating that pint of ice cream after a bad day. It is okay to indulge every once in a while. Find balance and what works best for you and your body, and go on to tackle whatever other goals you have set with the New Year.  

Lauren Lomeli is a sophomore pursuing a degree in communication studies. She loves learning about exercise and nutrition, but is most intrigued by nutrition because of the contradicting information between what a diet program says a person needs versus what is really needed.