Once the clock strikes 12 on New Year’s Eve and the champagne flutes are cleared, there’s almost an immediate shift in mentality. After the decadence of the holidays, millions of people resolve to create better versions of themselves,As they do, there’s a multibillion-dollar wellness industry lying in wait, with a new diet or exercise plan that promises to, once and for all, help them make their bodies smaller.
In treating people with disordered eating, that’s how I became so acutely aware of the harms of diet culture. When you see them make a lot of progress in their recovery and that progress is just undone by a doctor making some comment or seeing an ad online that follows them around everywhere. It’s just a minefield out there, especially this time of year.
I don’t even like the word “wellness” anymore because it’s become synonymous with an industry and a culture that is truly predatory. It’s often the same principles, the same tenets that sort of underpin all diet culture, right? It all goes back to this idea that weight loss — or wellness — is a way of achieving a higher kind of moral status or social status.
The diet industry and the pharmaceutical industry pushed back in a big way on this idea, sort of in an effort to reclaim their power. That’s when you start to see phrases like the “obesity epidemic” surface. Before that, the focus of weight loss companies was all on aesthetics and body size. But around the mid-1990s, there was this shift in the rhetoric. The weight loss industry took on a much more serious tone, telling people that extra weight could be a real threat to your health.
Even though we know, from lots of research, that diets tend to make people weight-cycle and actually end up heavier over time, and that up to 98 percent of weight loss efforts will fail within five years, it’s still really hard to quit.It’s important that we start to shift the blame. People don’t fail at diets, diets fail.
But I think at a certain point, people go through that enough. They realize that they’re banging their head against the wall, or go through phases of losing weight and then it all comes back. Even if you’re doing everything “perfectly” according to the diet, your body will eventually protect you. Our bodies are really good at defending against famine, and when you put on weight, your body is programmed to take care of you in that way.The first step is just becoming aware.