You think that you’re no longer dieting? Well… you might still be following the rules dictated by diet culture without even realising it.

Do you ever feel guilty for eating a “bad” food or try to “make up” for a meal out? That’s diet culture talking!

Let me show you the subtle ways that diet culture still shows up in your life - and how it impacts it - so you can break free from it for good.

What is diet culture?

Let’s start with a quick explanation of what diet culture is. Diet culture is all the beliefs that have been ingrained into us by diets, the main ones being:

• thinness equals health

• thinness equals worthiness

• there are bad food for you (burgers/chocolate/cakes, etc...)

• eating “healthy” means that you’re being good

• eating fat foods or junk food means that you’re being bad...

...as if what you’re eating is any indication of if you’re a good person or not. All those beliefs have been inked into your brains by all messaging from social media, fitness gurus, and even our parents!

Those messages being everywhere, of course we internalise them - losing weight will change your life, solve all your issues, and make you a better person. Right?! (If you’re here, I hope you know that the answer is no!).

Sneaky ways diet culture still controls you

1. Labelling foods as either “good” or “bad"

Let me start by saying that food doesn’t have moral value: no food is inherently bad or good. Chocolate in itself isn’t bad, and eating it doesn’t make you a bad person either.

However, this vision of food can create guilt & obsession. If you strictly restrict the foods that you consider bad, you might start to feel obsessed and constantly crave it. It also creates a strange and quite unhealthy system where you feel proud after eating a salad, but you feel guilty or ashamed after eating cake. In both cases you just ate food, though? Eating cake doesn’t make you a bad person, and eating a salad doesn’t make you a good person.

2. Exercising to burn off or make up for the food you’ve eaten

Another way that diet culture might still be ruling your life in a sneaky way is in your relationship with exercise. Most diets teach you that exercising, in addition to restricting what you eat, is essential - and exercise IS important, don't get me wrong. However, diets tend to present it as a way for you to burn off food, to burn off calories, so you could potentially eat more and have more “treats”. But movement can bring you so much more: strength, fitness (in terms of feeling fit while climbing up stairs, not it terms of looking thin!), and has wonderful impacts on your mental health.

The consequences of that might be that you start skipping meals because you haven’t worked out that day. Because you haven’t burned off enough calories. Because you want to burn off that meal you had at the restaurant with your friends. Because you want to burn off the cake you had for dessert.

Moving your body becomes something that you have to do to earn the right to eat or something that you feel guilty if you don’t do enough of, instead of being something you enjoy.

3. Feeling like you have to earn or deserve food

Just like with exercising, diet culture and its messaging can lead you to feel like you need to earn your food: by working out, by being “good", by restricting what you eat for a while, and allowing yourself one “cheat meal”.

If you’ve had a good day of eating, you can then allow yourself to use up your leftover calories (or points or syns or whatever is being counted in the diet you’ve been doing) to have extra snacks, or “treats” that you wouldn’t allow yourself to have otherwise.

4. Tracking, Counting, or Measuring Everything & fear of letting go of control

Tracking can become restrictive, and it can be a difficult habit to shake off even after you’ve finished a diet. I can’t tell you how long it took me to forget the number of syns in my food after a year of doing Slimming World… And for the longest time, every time I was eating something, my brain would flash the number of syns I was eating.

(Right when I’m seating down to write this blog post, I’m watching a Youtube video and there’s an ad for weight loss provider in the UK… I swear, it’s everywhere!).

When you’ve spent months or years tracking and counting everything you eat, following somebody else’s rules, letting go of that control can be scary. What if I give up on counting my calories and end up losing all control and can’t stop eating? That’s a valid fear, but that’s only a concern because you don’t trust yourself any longer - you’ve relied so much on the rules dictated to you by somebody else that you don’t trust your own body and your own judgement.

How to start breaking free

Breaking free from diet culture is the very first step all my clients go through when we work together. So, if you were my client, what would we do?

We'd challenge the food rules that you have internalised: we'd learn that no foods are “bad” or off-limits, that restricting yourself isn’t the key to a healthy relationship with food (shocker, right?).

We'd look at where diet culture shows up, still, in your life: we'd look at your thoughts, your actions and in your daily habits.

And then we'd look at the concept of food freedom and how to get you there.

I have a simple exercise for you to start your journey of breaking free from diet culture today: go through the list of people you follow on social media, and ask yourself if the content they share make you feel good, or if they trigger you to want to lose weight or to start new diets.

Here’s a gentle reminder that an account that triggers you or make you feel bad about yourself or your body does not belong in your feed! Curate your social media feed with accounts that make you feel good, that show you different types of body.

You don’t have to be officially on a diet to still be trapped in diet culture. But the good news is, you can break free!

If you’re ready to take that first step, I’d love to invite you to book your complimentary consult today 💚