“You look great, did you lose weight?” How often do we hear this comment? In modern society health and wellness is equated with thinness and weight loss, so even healthy people believe that their bodies should be smaller. Diet culture encourage people, specially women, to center their lives around a thin physical appearance and perpetuates a society where women often hate their bodies. Promoting an unachievable physical appearance but keeping individuals busy thinking that they can achieve it with a vast array of diet and cosmetic products, surgeries, etc. what also keep them spending. It is said that an obsessed population is a docile one and that’s why diet culture is linked with capitalism and patriarchy.
A cultured centered on female thinness is not obsessed about female beauty but about female obedience and, in this way, dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history that encompasses rules, restrictions and regimens where the body is seen as a hackatable object. Diet culture is a system of beliefs that prizes smallness and restriction to achieve the idealised body thin and young.
Research studies show that by age 6 girls begin to express concerns about their shape or weight and that up to 60% of girls from 6 to 12 years old and more that 80% of young women are worried about becoming too fat. It is well demonstrated that diets put teenagers at risk of an eating disorder, encouraging low self-esteem and potential consecuences such as depression, anxiety, drug abuse, self-harm, etc.
To overcome diet cuture and develop a healthy positive body image it is recommended to practice self-care, learn to accept one’s body, focus on nourishing the body, find like-minded connections, seek out positive, empowering messages and and resist diet culture in everyday life.
Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), director of the Laboratory of Antibiotics and Molecular Bacteriology.