Running Away from Diet Culture

Diet culture is nothing new. I was born the same year as Kate Moss, and spent my formative years idolizing waifs and trying every diet. I have a vivid memory of tagging along with my mother to a calorie counters’ meeting, where the women weighed in, then sat in a circle on folding chairs and “passed the piggy.” If you had gained weight since the last meeting, you had to deposit a toll in the neon pink piggy bank.

Over the years, I’ve avoided fat, then shifted to fear sugar, bread and carbs in general. I started running in my 30s – ostensibly to improve my mental health, but it was secretly driven by the goal of losing weight. I now shudder to think how many times I ran under-fuelled.

U.S. anti-diet and intuitive eating author and dietitian Christy Harrison describes diet culture as “a system of belief that equates thinness to health and moral virtue, promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status and demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others.” But while the explosion of social media has created even more platforms for diet-culture messaging, it also offers the unique opportunity to curate the content we consume.