5 Practical Ways to Limit the Impact of Diet Culture in Your Life
No matter your background or life experiences, it can feel nearly impossible to tune out the messages of diet culture—and that’s by design. Diet culture is the result of the $1.5 trillion wellness industry, whose influence extends just about everywhere.
You’re getting diet culture messages as you scroll social media, stream your favorite shows, and even stand in line at the grocery store.
Additionally, the weight loss market size will likely exceed $405 billion by 2030, and psychologists fear this continual emphasis on diet culture will impact mental health across the globe. This isn’t just a hunch—researchers found a correlation between body capital (a societal construct in which external appearance leads to certain privileges or lack thereof) and overall body dissatisfaction.
Body dissatisfaction is more than just a fleeting thought. It can (and does) lead to eating disorders.
This sounds pretty bleak. So, what’s the solution? How do you limit those negative impacts in your own life? Let’s talk about some practical solutions for minimizing diet culture in your life.
Practical Ways to Minimize Diet Culture
You can’t stop the fast and furious forward movement of diet culture, but you can turn down the volume on its harmful, hypercritical influence. (And no, you don’t have to delete your social media apps to do it—though that wouldn’t hurt.)
Here are five actionable ways to minimize diet culture’s insidious effects on your mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
1. Curate Your Social Media Feed
Social media is one of the main tools for normalizing body comparison, reinforcing unrealistic beauty ideals, and promoting restrictive dietary habits. This recent report explains, “The widespread use of social media in teenagers and young adults could increase body dissatisfaction as well as their drive for thinness, therefore rendering them more vulnerable to eating disorders.”
If these platforms make you feel unsure about what to eat or insecure about how you look, it’s time to take charge of your feed. Unfollow any account that makes you slip into comparison, start daunting your body and self-worth, or is otherwise promoting diet culture. I’ve even stopped following some influencers who I like to follow, which sometimes is hard to do, but I can truly notice the beneficial effects of doing so.
Bonus points if you set some screen limits for yourself. The American Psychological Association found that college students who cut their social media use by 50 percent for 3–4 weeks became more accepting of their weight and appearance.
2. Push Back Against Food Myths
Diet culture reinforces many false narratives that certain foods are “impure” or “unclean,” and that you must abstain from specific ingredients to remain healthy.
Attaching a moral component to the dietary choices you make can lead to caloric restriction, extreme elimination diets, or even malnourishment. Internalizing the belief that some foods are inherently “evil” can also contribute to eating disorder behaviors, Frontiers in Nutrition reports.
It’s important to challenge prevalent food myths (you’ve heard this one: carbs are bad!) and question the sources of these claims. Instead, if you have questions about food and nutrition, consult with reliable, trusted experts who can help you debunk harmful misconceptions with concrete scientific evidence.
Luckily, there are many anti-diet and eating-disorder-informed dietitians and nutritionists now. Check out this big list from Christy Harrison of providers to connect with.
3. Do Some Reading
While social media can be a great resource for information on diet culture and debunking diet myths, there are a lot of great books that shed light on these topics too. Here are some worth checking out:
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating
Food Isn’t Medicine: Challenge Nutrib*llocks & Escape the Diet Trap
Get more recommendations in our blog post about books for eating disorder recovery.
4. Practice Self-Compassion
Diet culture supports rigid perfectionism and harsh self-criticism as a way to attain the “perfect body” or be morally better than others. If societal conditioning influences you to control or change your appearance, it can be difficult to view yourself as someone worthy of love—flaws and all.
Despite what diet culture wants you to believe, nobody is perfect. Not even those influencers you see. In fact, nearly half of influencers surveyed felt their job as an influencer impacted their mental health and 32 percent said they believed the platform had a “negative” impact on their body image.
The truth is that all bodies (including yours) are valuable. This is why self-compassion is so important in managing the harmful impact of diet culture.
Nurturing self-compassion means treating yourself with kindness and gentleness when you might automatically feel the urge to be critical. It may sound “woo-woo” but data shows that this mindset can counteract judgmental, critical narratives and increase body satisfaction, the Public Health Nutrition Journal reports.
For some ideas on how to bring more self-compassion into your life, listen to this episode of Food Psych, How to Smash Diet Culture with Self-Compassion.
5. Ask for Help
It can be so hard to ask for help, but everyone internalizes diet culture differently. Your personal experience with trauma, body image, and mental health all impact how your life is changed when you get these messages of diet culture. That’s why asking for help is so important. When working in a group of 1:1 with a professional you can better understand your own experiences, and therefore personalize your plan to minimize diet culture messages and ultimately, unlearn everything you’ve been taught by it.
Here are some places to look for someone who could help you with this:
Diet Culture Is Everywhere—But It Doesn’t Have to Run Your Life
Limiting the impact of diet culture takes self-awareness, education, resilience, and compassion. There’s pressure all around us to strive for a “perfect body” or to reflect a narrow, non-inclusive beauty ideal—but you don’t have to succumb to that influence.
Armed with these strategies, you can push back against diet culture, make empowered choices for your wellness, and embrace a more balanced, realistic outlook on body image. While the pervasive narratives of diet culture may not go away entirely, it is possible to tune them out and reclaim a body-neutral relationship with yourself.
