Thinking Beyond Science

By and large, Western culture is diet culture. This pervasive mindset about food and bodies hides in plain sight, masquerading as health, wellness, and fitness. It even cloaks itself as connection—like when I started bonding with people over restrictive eating habits. It’s why friends complimented my weight loss, pulling me back for more despite the harm to my well-being. Diet culture makes clients skip birthday parties fearing cake, or has parents dieting kids too young to remember those parties.

It’s consuming us. In thousands of conversations about food and body relationships, the same themes repeat: years lost to dieting and disordered eating, fortunes wasted on failed products leaving people hopeless. Health pros and magazines push weight loss, but folks end up sicker—and often heavier (weight isn’t health anyway, as we’ll explore later). They’ve missed weddings, funerals, graduations, honeymoons—life’s big moments—because food and weight obsessions hijacked their minds.

Diet culture stole their lives. It stole millions, including mine for over a decade. Post-college, my disordered eating shadowed my journalism career. At my first full-time gig editing an eco-lifestyle magazine in New York City, I couldn’t focus—my brain starved from skimpy daytime eating. I’d research restaurants, binge on “food adventures” with my boyfriend to catch up, then overexercise to “compensate” for not eating “right.”

Diet Culture’s Slippery Modern Face
Diet culture is slippery. Some claim it vanished—everyone knows diets fail, and we’re all about health now, not thinness. Ads chirp, “It’s not a diet, it’s a healthy lifestyle.” Instagram gurus proclaim, “I don’t diet, I eat real food.” But these are the same old beliefs behind Slimfast and SnackWell’s, chasing an elusive “ideal” body. To fight it, we must trace its history—its roots hold keys to breaking free.

A Historical Reversal: From Fat as Fortune to Foe
For most of human history, no one restricted food for weight loss. Survival meant getting enough to eat; plumpness signaled prosperity, famine resistance, and fertility. Thinness meant poverty, illness, death.

Early sculptures like the Venus of Hohle Fels and Venus of Willendorf celebrate big, round bodies with ample breasts and belly rolls. Ancient kings, pharaohs, gods, and goddesses flaunted fat as divine prestige. Religions warned against gluttony with fasting, but that was penance for sins—not weight control or size punishment. Early 19th-century folks even thought gluttony caused weight loss via malabsorption, after Europeans noted thinner, faster-eating Americans.

Today, away from Western ideals, fatness still shines. In Niger and Mauritania, per anthropologist Rebecca Popenoe, fat bodies symbolize ultimate beauty, prosperity, health—mothers even force-feed daughters. South American indigenous groups agree. Across history, 81% of societies favored larger women; for men, evidence points to big, muscular builds too.

Demonizing fat? That’s the anomaly, tied to rare eras like classical Greece and Rome—diet culture’s seeds. Amid prosperity, excess sparked anxiety; moderation became virtue, overeating a moral flaw. Food was fuel only, not pleasure—fatness marked corruption. The Latin obesus (root of “obesity”) meant “eaten until fat.” Yet contradictions abounded: ancients preferred “fat in moderation,” not extreme thinness. Fat often meant prosperity and fertility; thin signaled poverty, weakness.

After Rome fell, fat-as-problem slept. Fatness reverted to positive or neutral. Thinness popped up in medieval niches, but no widespread stigma hit until recently.

Food’s moral baggage peaked in antiquity too. “Diet” stems from Greek diaita, revived by Hippocrates for eating, drinking, exercise (even bathing, sex)—a “way of life,” not slim-down shorthand.

Diet culture’s history reveals its grip. Recognizing it is step one to reclaiming our lives.

Source : Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating by Christy Harrison

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45730892-anti-diet