Diets are so 1990

Hey mama, 

Summer is here! We survived homeschooling and are onto the task of camp mom.

One task I'm glad I've quit for good is shopping for diet products that are so-called "approved" on the latest plan. 

If you grew up in the 90’s you might remember the brand Snackwells,  or maybe Entemann’s fat free desserts. Back then, diet culture had us believing that everything should be fat free because fat was the devil causing our waistlines to increase and our moral values to decrease.  

Maybe your mom did Weight Watchers, the cabbage soup diet, Nutrisystem, or Jenny Craig. Maybe she even dragged you to a meeting or weekly weigh-in - in which case, it’s very likely you  developed a negative narrative around how you feel about your body.**

Fast forward to the 21st century: many women are now onto the diet industry. We know that diets only work in the short term and that there’s no diet out there that works long term.  We’re much cooler than our moms.  We’re smart women. We don’t “diet” anymore.  Instead of WW (Weight Watchers) or JennyCraig, we do “lifestyle changes”. Yeah, we’re so much cooler than our moms . . . or so we think.

What's not cool is the way the diet industry is more advanced than any shape-shifting animal. Like any successful business, the diet industry needs to stay relevant. In response to an increased cultural awareness around food and dieting they are now selling us these so-called non-diet “lifestyle changes”. But don’t be fooled, because these are still diets. They have simply changed the language to shift perceptions of these diets to being about “healthy eating”, or “eating clean”, and then call it The Wellness Diet.

The Wellness Diet promotes cleanses and detoxes and demonizes certain foods, like gluten and grains.  As Seth Rogan hilariously says in the movie, This Is The End:  “I do know what gluten is. Gluten is a vague term. It’s something that’s used to categorize things that are bad. You know, calories, that’s a gluten. Fat, that’s a gluten. Gluten means bad sh** man, and I’m not eating it.” 

Images of The Wellness Diet can be seen on every clean eating Instagram account with perfect acai bowls and kale salads. This diet promotes a perfectionist way of eating and claims that eating certain foods will help prevent disease and help you defy death. The ideology threatens, “The foods you eat better be pure or else, your morality and body size will be affected.”

Followers of The Wellness Diet often take things too far and develop something called orthorexia, a  medical condition in which “the sufferer systematically avoids specific foods in the belief that they are harmful.”

I don't want you to fall prey to diet culture's latest shape-shift. Here are the top 5 problems with The Wellness Diet: 

1.  Your body doesn’t need any extra help detoxifying or eliminating. Your kidneys and intestines and colon do a great job on their own. 
2. No food group needs to be completely avoided unless there is a medical necessity, like celiac disease (which affects less than 2% of the population).  
3. The Wellness Diet can lead to unhealthy behaviors around food, which often affects our mental health and thus our overall health. 
4. The Wellness Diet promotes the idea that our health is entirely within our control. (This one was particularly hard for me  because I naturally have the desire to want to control things, as do many people who suffer from disordered eating). There are many factors that we are not in control of that have an affect on our health. And while food does affect our energy levels and overall health to a degree, that effect is ultimately much less than we think (less than 25% of our health is affected by lifestyle factors like diet and exercise).
5. The focus of The Wellness Diet is solely on the physical aspect of health and does not take into account the emotional and behavioral side of health. Did you know that you actually absorb fewer nutrients from the food you eat if you are eating in a hurried, distracted, anxious, or isolated manner?  

It’s important to be aware of the tactics that the diet industry uses to make us believe what they are selling is not just another diet. It always is. 

This isn’t to say that striving to have a “clean” and “healthy” approach to your overall health is a bad thing. You can find ways to be “clean” and “healthy” that have nothing to do with food. A nice shower and a  good night’s sleep come to mind and sound much better for my mental health than the diet  industry’s latest game.  

xoxo,
Andrea

PS. I’d like to think I’m cooler than my mom . . . but she’s still the coolest mom I know.

PPS. **I talk more about diet history in my upcoming online course and want to remind you that racism is one of the roots of diet culture in the 19th century which is why we must continue to be both anti-diet and anti-racist.