Diet culture demands that you prioritize overcoming societal
weight stigma by adhering to extreme dietary advice. Michael Pollan, a
well-known food journalist, believes that you should avoid diet talk and
instead take a more moderate and intuitive approach to your overall health and
wellness. Continue reading to find out what he has to say about combating diet
culture.
What Is Diet Culture?
Diet culture is a set of societal beliefs and behaviors that
emphasize the importance of maintaining calorie deficits, eliminating food
groups, and participating in detoxes and cleanses. It places a high value on
weight loss.
Advertisements, influencers, certain health professionals,
and other public figures and sources disseminate information about fad diets.
Diet culture, rather than encouraging a moderate approach to healthy eating,
promotes a narrow view of what people should eat and how they should look. As a
result, it can have a significant negative impact on people's physical and
mental health.
Why Is Diet Culture Harmful?
Diet culture persuades people that they must pursue a
specific body type at all costs, even if it is harmful to their physical and
mental health. The diet industry frequently demonizes gaining weight,
regardless of the circumstances, and promotes disordered eating behavior. It
elevates weight loss and thinness as moral virtues, highlighting the negative
health effects of obesity while refusing to acknowledge how crash dieting can
harm a person's wellness.
Harmful Effects of Diet Culture
Diet culture has had a negative impact on people of all
sizes and shapes. Here are some of its negative consequences:
Body image problems: People with larger body types may
develop negative self-images as a result of diet culture. In fact, diet culture
defines almost all of a given population as having an abnormally large body
shape in the first place. Many health care workers now advocate for a
"health at every size" approach, hoping to reduce people's body
insecurities while also encouraging them to adopt healthy habits.
Risk of developing an eating disorder: When diet culture
makes people believe they have an abnormal or incorrect body size, it can lead
to the development of disordered eating behaviors. Some people obsessively
track their calorie intake in dieting or food restriction apps, while others
develop more severe eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia.
Malnutrition: Some diets encourage followers to eliminate
entire food groups. A diet, for example, may recommend drastically reducing or
eliminating carbohydrates. While it is possible to consume an excessive amount
of carbohydrates, they are still required for your body to function properly.
Misleading diet advice like this leads to people ignoring other aspects of
their health in order to avoid weight gain.
Weight cycling: Rapidly changing eating habits and choices
can result in a rapidly changing weight. Over time, this type of weight cycling
can be detrimental to your physical health and wellness. Even in the short
term, it can cause significant increases in insomnia and anxiety.
4 Tips on How to Combat Diet Culture From Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan, a food journalist, has spent years
researching the relationship between what people eat and how it affects their
health. Consider these suggestions for combating diet culture:
1. Do not diet. Michael is generally anti-diet and believes
that eating a diverse range of foods from various food groups is preferable.
"You know, we've been through so many fad diets, and they all fail,"
he says. "They are ineffective. And they're simply not the way to approach
eating because the changes you make are not long-term." Instead of looking
for ways to cut hundreds of calories or avoid entire food groups, approach food
with balance in mind.
2. Be prepared for changes in nutrition advice. New diets
become popular as new and sometimes contradictory information about the human
body becomes available. "Nutrition advice changes all the time,"
Michael says. "In many ways, the human body, like the natural world, is a
wilderness, and human nutrition and metabolism are still very poorly
understood." You're also better off consulting a reputable and registered
dietitian or nutritionist rather than basing your food choices on social media
fads or best-selling diet books.
3. Exercise restraint. If you want to lose weight,
understand that clean eating will give you a better chance than crash dieting.
"If you eat well," Michael says, "if you eat from a healthy food
chain, from healthy soils, and you don't eat ultra-processed food, you will
lose weight as a byproduct." Practice intuitive eating habits and pay
equal attention to your mental and physical health.
4. Be skeptical of what you hear. If you hear about a new
diet on a podcast or from a friend, it doesn't necessarily imply that there is
a lot of hard science to back it up. "What is the data based on when you
read about some new study showing that, you know, low fat helps, or
Mediterranean helps, or whatever it is?" Michael asks. How did that
conclusion come to be? "How do you research what people eat?"
Approach nutritional advice with skepticism and common sense.
