We tend to think of diet culture as a modern obsession — a product of Instagram aesthetics and wellness influencers. But the roots of our fraught relationship with food run far deeper, stretching back centuries, shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and an ever-shifting set of moral judgments about what and how much people should eat.
When Food Became Fear: The Colonial Origins of Moralizing About Diet
Long before calorie counting and meal plans, the idea that eating the “wrong” food could harm you was already taking hold in Western thought. When Christopher Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Americas, they brought with them not only weapons and disease, but a deep anxiety about food.
The colonizers feared that living in unfamiliar lands among unfamiliar people would make them sick. To protect themselves, they believed they needed to eat specifically European food. The logic, rooted in the “four humors” theory of medicine that was still dominant at the time, held that climate altered the body’s humoral balance — and that the supposedly damp conditions of the Americas required the familiar foods of home as a kind of corrective.
And so, Spanish settlers declared that indigenous foods made them ill. Never mind that they ate these same foods at nearly every meal without incident. Whenever illness struck, the food took the blame. It was one of the earliest examples of a pattern we would see repeated for centuries: using food as a scapegoat, a moral and medical stand-in for anxieties that ran far deeper.
The 1920s and ’30s: When Dieting Went Mainstream
Diet culture took hold with striking force in the American mainstream during the 1920s and 1930s, cutting across racial and socioeconomic lines. What unified these early diets was a single, powerful concept: willpower.
The term had entered the American lexicon in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1920s it had become central to the way society understood body size. Fatness was now considered a failure of will — a moral shortcoming, not a medical or biological reality. Blatantly bigoted anti-fat sentiment became commonplace in diet books, popular culture, and the medical community alike.
The methods people used to lose weight during this era were, by any reasonable standard, alarming. In the 1920s, people took up smoking cigarettes and deliberate fasting to shed weight — sometimes on the explicit advice of doctors. By the 1930s, physicians were recommending diets that had patients subsisting on little more than fruit and milk. Gyms began offering those peculiar vibrating belts that were supposed to “loosen” fat so it could melt away. They did not work.
Strikingly, even the Great Depression did not dampen the appetite for dieting. People remained fixated on thinness, simply pursuing it on a tighter budget.
Pills, Speed, and the Booming Business of Weight Loss
The 1930s also saw the rise of diet pills, beginning with Benzedrine. By the 1940s, amphetamines — commonly known as speed — had become the drug of choice. These were given freely to World War II soldiers to keep them alert in combat, and in the years that followed, they became widely popular as weight-loss aids.
The medical establishment’s relationship with these drugs was contradictory, to say the least. The American Medical Association issued a public warning against using amphetamines for dieting as early as 1943. And yet by 1970, eight percent of all prescriptions written in the United States were for amphetamines — and at least a fifth of those were explicitly for weight loss.
Meanwhile, gyms and fitness culture grew steadily through the postwar decades. The 1950s brought televised calisthenics classes designed to help people “shrink” their bodies. The market for slimness was expanding rapidly, and the industries built around it had no intention of slowing down.
Group Dieting and the Emotional Eating Narrative
By the late 1940s, a new approach had entered the picture: group dieting. Take Off Pounds Sensibly was founded in 1948. Overeaters Anonymous followed in 1960. And in 1961, a housewife named Jean Nidetch began hosting informal dieting meetings with friends in her living room — an endeavor that would eventually become Weight Watchers.
Nidetch’s years of yo-yo dieting had led her to believe she couldn’t stick to any diet because of “emotional overeating.” Her solution was also emotional: support groups, motivational speeches, and eventually weight-loss camps. The idea that people failed at diets because of their feelings — rather than because the diets themselves were flawed — was very much a product of its moment.
The concept of emotional overeating had been introduced by psychiatrist Hilde Bruch, who studied larger-bodied children and argued that childhood obesity was caused by mothers who overfed their children as a substitute for genuine affection. Her claims were later debunked. But at the time, they became part of the popular consciousness, disseminated widely by researchers, the media, and — crucially — the diet and food industries.
Those industries had an obvious stake in framing diet failure as an emotional problem rather than a defect in the diets themselves. If the problem was always the person, the product could never be to blame.
Food as Politics: The Counter-Cultural Movements of the ’60s and ’70s
The 1960s and 1970s brought something genuinely new to the conversation about food. As civil rights, gay liberation, feminism, environmentalism, and antiwar protests reshaped American culture, people began to see food as a site of political action. The idea that “the personal is political” extended naturally to what people chose to eat — a way of taking a stand against big business, capitalism, white supremacy, and the patriarchy.
These countercultural ideas about food were, at their core, oriented toward justice. They were meant to push back against the very oppressive forces that created impossible standards for how bodies should look.
But diet culture, as it would continue to demonstrate, was remarkably adaptable. It eventually absorbed and redirected these ideals, bending the language of health and consciousness toward its own commercial and moral purposes.
The Fat Liberation Movement and the Fight Back
Born in the same era, the fat liberation movement offered a direct challenge to the assumptions underlying diet culture. Just as other social movements of the time advocated for the rights of marginalized groups, fat liberation activists fought for the dignity and rights of people whom society labeled “overweight” or “obese.” They worked to reclaim the word fat itself from a culture determined to use it as a diagnosis.
Organizations like the Fat Underground worked to bring scientific scrutiny to the evidence for and against dieting and intentional weight loss, work that eventually gained the attention of some mainstream health professionals and academics.
Yet despite this pushback, mainstream diet culture from the 1970s through the 1990s intensified rather than retreated. Wildly contradictory nutritional claims contributed to an increasingly chaotic national relationship with food. The market for dieting grew rapidly — not because diets were working, but because more people from more diverse backgrounds, including men, people of color, and the elderly, had come to believe that their bodies were problems requiring solutions.
What This History Tells Us
The story of diet culture is not primarily a story about health. It is a story about power — about who gets to define the “right” way to eat, whose bodies are deemed acceptable, and who profits from the anxiety created when those standards cannot be met.
From colonial-era food anxieties to twentieth-century amphetamines, from emotionally-framed diet failures to industries that thrived on both, the infrastructure of diet culture was built deliberately and expanded relentlessly. Understanding that history is the first step toward questioning the assumptions it left behind.
Source : Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being, and Happiness Through Intuitive Eating by Christy Harrison
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