What Is Diet Culture—and How to Finally Break Free from It
Diet culture is everywhere—this is how you stop falling for it
You might’ve clicked on this blog because something in your relationship with food—or your body—just doesn’t feel right. Maybe you’re tired of the constant pressure to eat "clean," to shrink yourself, to do better, be better, control more. Maybe you’ve started wondering where that pressure even comes from—and whether it’s actually helping you.
This post is for you if you’ve ever:
Felt guilty for eating something “bad”
Wondered if your hunger is wrong
Questioned why your self-worth seems tied to your jeans size
Or looked around and thought, “Is this just how being a woman is supposed to feel?”
Here’s the thing: it’s not. But you’re not imagining it either. We’re swimming in it. Diet culture is everywhere—from social media to doctor's offices, fashion week to the freezer aisle, Netflix to your friend’s detox post. It’s subtle, it’s loud, and it’s designed to make you think the problem is you. This blog is here to help you name it. Because when you can name it, you can spot it. And when you can spot it, you can stop falling for it. Let’s get into it.
Diet culture is a toxic system of beliefs that equates thinness with health, morality, and worthiness. It tells you that controlling your body is a virtue—and that weight loss is always a worthy goal. But here’s the truth: diet culture is sneaky, pervasive, and deeply harmful. And it’s not just about food. It’s about power, control, shame, and systems that profit from your insecurity.
So… What Is Diet Culture, Really?
Diet culture is an overarching belief system that glorifies thinness, equates body size with health and morality, and promotes control over food and appearance as a marker of success. It’s not just a trend—it’s a deeply embedded social script shaped by capitalist profit, patriarchal values, and the legacy of racism and colonialism.
This system thrives on insecurity. It sells the idea that your body is a problem to be fixed, then offers you endless products and programs to fix it. And because it’s everywhere—from wellness influencers to medical advice to family dinner conversations—it often feels invisible, even normal. But naming it is the first step to dismantling its hold. Let’s break it down further.
Diet culture is a collective set of values that prioritizes:
Thinness as the ultimate ideal (and a sign of discipline, attractiveness, and health)
Weight loss as inherently good and weight gain as bad
Restriction and control as signs of willpower
Food as "good" or "bad"
Exercise as punishment for eating
It shows up in your doctor’s office, in wellness podcasts, in Instagram reels, in your aunt’s casual comment about carbs. It’s the culture that makes it feel normal to hate your body and spend your whole life trying to shrink it.
And it's not just an aesthetic problem. It's a public health problem. A mental health problem. A justice problem.
The Insidious Origins of Diet Culture
To understand diet culture, we have to zoom out. This isn’t just about food trends or Instagram influencers. Diet culture has deep, insidious roots in racism, colonialism, and systems of oppression that have shaped the way we view bodies—especially women’s bodies—for centuries.
Where It Began
In her powerful book Fearing the Black Body, sociologist Sabrina Strings traces the origins of fatphobia back to the 18th century. In colonial America and Europe, fatness began to be framed not as a health issue, but as a sign of immorality, laziness, and racial inferiority. These associations were intentionally crafted to differentiate white, wealthy, upper-class women from Black women and others who were deemed “less civilized” by colonial powers.
Thinness, then, became a symbol of racial, moral, and social superiority—an image tied to whiteness, Protestant self-denial, and class privilege. This wasn’t about science. It was about power and control.
Colonial Control & Bodily Discipline
As colonialism spread, so did these ideals. Colonizers imposed standards of bodily control and “refinement” as part of their so-called civilizing missions. The message was clear: if you could discipline your appetite and control your body, you were superior. This logic was used to justify racism, slavery, and violence.
This legacy continues today. The dominant body ideal—thin, white, able-bodied, cisgender, youthful—is still presented as the “healthiest” or most desirable. Meanwhile, bodies that fall outside this mold (especially Black, fat, disabled, or gender-diverse bodies) are pathologized, stigmatized, or outright erased.
Still Embedded in Modern Wellness Culture
Modern diet and wellness culture may sound softer—“clean eating,” “biohacking,” “toning,” “lifestyle changes”—but these trends often echo the same oppressive beliefs. Cultural foods from non-Western traditions are still demonized. Bodies are still policed. And access to “wellness” remains tied to class, whiteness, and thinness.
Diet culture isn’t just personal—it’s political. And if it feels hard to opt out, that’s because it was designed to be hard. It was designed to keep you striving for an ideal that was never yours to begin with.
Diet Culture Is a System, Not Just a Behavior
It’s easy to think of diet culture as just a series of personal choices—what someone eats, whether they’re counting calories, or if they follow a certain fitness trend. But to understand the true impact of diet culture, we have to recognize it as a systemic force, not just a collection of behaviors.
Diet culture operates as a social system of control, shaping how we value bodies, who gets medical care without bias, who is seen as “disciplined” or “lazy,” and who feels safe or unsafe in their body. It’s not only in magazines or on TikTok—it’s woven into the policies, practices, and norms of our schools, workplaces, doctor’s offices, media, families, and even our intimate relationships.
It influences how doctors diagnose and treat patients (often dismissing real symptoms in fat bodies), how clothing brands design and limit sizes, how jobs and promotions are offered (hello, size discrimination), and how “healthy” food is marketed—often inaccessible to lower-income communities while demonizing cultural foods.
Diet culture teaches us from a young age that bodies are problems to be solved. That thinness equals virtue. That fatness is failure. These ideas are so normalized that we rarely stop to question them—and that’s how systems maintain power: through invisibility and repetition.
When we name diet culture as a system, we can start to see that it’s not about individual failure or willpower. It’s about how society has structured body hierarchy, moralized eating, and built profit models off shame and control.
Until we see diet culture as a system, we’ll keep trying to fix ourselves instead of interrogating the beliefs that told us we were broken to begin with.
Who Benefits From Diet Culture?
Short answer? Not you. Diet culture is a multi-billion dollar industry that survives—and thrives—on your self-doubt. It profits every time you second-guess your reflection, skip a meal, or spend your paycheck on something promising a “better” body.
This system doesn’t care about your wellbeing. It cares about your buy-in.
The beauty industry, fitness world, pharmaceutical companies, diet apps, supplement brands, detox tea influencers, plastic surgeons—they all depend on one thing: that you keep believing your body is a problem. The longer you stay in the loop of fixing, shrinking, and striving, the longer the cash keeps flowing.
And because the ideals of thinness, youth, whiteness, and productivity are baked into our cultural definitions of success, diet culture also benefits anyone in power who wants to maintain the status quo. It distracts, divides, and disempowers.
When you're at war with your body, you're less likely to question the systems profiting off your pain.
Why Diet Culture Feels So Personal (Even Though It’s Not)
Diet culture is sneaky because it makes systemic messaging feel like your own voice. You don’t just hear “your body is wrong.” You start to believe “I am wrong.” And that’s how it gets you. Especially if you’re smart, sensitive, successful, and used to striving. You think controlling your food and body will make you finally feel okay. In control. Worthy. Safe. But that’s the trap. Diet culture promises safety and delivers obsession.
Diets don’t work. Anyone who has ever tried one knows this, except they typically go on to blame themselves! The diet industry never holds itself accountable so its all of us who feel like a personal failure for not living up to these ridiculously harmful and problematic standards. And the diet industry never sleeps. You never really stop feeling the societal pressure to be “higher up” on the hierarchy of who is more valuable and worthy of love. So you take the bait and try another diet, directly advertised to you. Skinnytok is now a trending section of TikTok where tips and tricks to lose weight are shared like life-changing advice. Before that there was Tumblr’s dark ED side with “Mia” and “Ana,” secret code names for bulimia and anorexia so users could post and share “tips” without content getting flagged. It’s the same culture flowing through different platforms, but never really changing.
The Thin Fantasy Diet Culture Sells to You
The core message of diet culture is this: you are not good enough. But it doesn’t stop there—it wants you to believe you’re just one diet away from finally being enough. I call this the “thin fantasy.”
The thin fantasy promises that once you’re thin, you’ll finally have it all: love, attention, desirability, power, freedom, ease. You’ll be adored, pursued, cool, confident, and effortlessly happy. It tells you that every painful memory—being bullied in school, teased by other girls, criticized by your mother, shamed by your grandmother, rejected in dating—will be erased once your body fits the ideal.
Diet culture preys on your trauma, your shame, your wounds. It weaponizes them against you to sell a fantasy—a fairytale ending it cannot deliver. Because here’s the truth: you can be thin and still feel not good enough. Many of the women I work with have lived in thinner bodies. They still felt unworthy, unseen, and insecure—because the wound wasn’t the weight. It was the belief that worth had to be earned through control.
The thin fantasy is just that—a fantasy. It’s not a real place anyone ever arrives. Thinness does not guarantee love, joy, confidence, or immunity from rejection. But diet culture needs you to believe that it does—because that belief keeps you spending, striving, and suffering.
Reflection
Take a moment and reflect on your own thin fantasy. What have you believed thinness would give you? Write it down—no wrong answers, just stream-of-consciousness truth. Then ask yourself: if you’ve ever been thinner, did those things actually come true? If you know someone in a thinner body, do they have everything you imagined for yourself?
This is how you start waking up from the fantasy—and walking toward freedom.
When Thinness Does Get You Something (But at What Cost?)
There’s an intricate complexity to all of this though. Let’s be honest: society does reward thinness. This isn’t all in your head. It’s real. Thinner bodies are more likely to be praised, included, validated, desired, hired, even believed in medical settings. So when you think, “Maybe life really would be easier if I were thin,”—you’re not wrong to notice that.
Some of the items on your thin fantasy list? They might’ve happened. You may have gotten more compliments. More attention. Maybe you were pursued more, or had an easier time shopping for clothes. That part is real. But the fantasy as a whole is a weapon used against you to get you to remain obsessed with making yourself smaller. If you’ve ever come close to achieving your body goal ask yourself: what was the cost?
Did that attention come at the price of starving yourself? Of obsessively tracking everything you ate? Of missing out on joy, spontaneity, or connection? Did you still feel empty, anxious, or like it was never enough?
Diet culture rewards you for betraying yourself—and then tells you it’s empowerment. Let me be crystal clear: you are not to blame for any of this. You didn’t create the rules. You’ve simply been surviving within them. But I want you to pause and reflect on something bigger: What is your peace worth? What would it mean to stop striving and start softening? What if your path to self-love doesn’t look like control—but looks like compassion?
You cannot hate yourself into love.
You cannot diet your way to freedom.
But you can begin to wake up—and choose something more true.
Diet Culture and Disordered Eating
Reality Check: diet culture doesn’t just influence disordered eating—it creates it. It’s the soil most eating disorders grow from.
According to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), 35% of “normal dieters” progress to pathological dieting, and up to 25% of those develop full-blown eating disorders. The American Academy of Pediatrics has even warned against dieting in adolescents, linking it to an increased risk of eating disorders and body dissatisfaction later in life.
And yet—we live in a world that praises the very behaviors that often signal disordered eating: skipping meals, “being good” by avoiding carbs, obsessing over portion sizes, counting every step. These aren’t random habits. They’re symptoms of a culture that taught us to fear food and worship control.
Many of my clients come to therapy saying, “I don’t think I have an eating disorder… but I can’t stop thinking about food.” Or, “I’m constantly swinging between restriction and bingeing.” Or, “I’m exhausted by how much of my life revolves around what I ate and what I weigh.”
You don’t have to be underweight or diagnosed to be suffering. You don’t have to be visibly unwell for your relationship with food to be painful. If your eating feels stressful, obsessive, guilt-ridden, or all-consuming—you deserve support.
As a therapist specializing in eating disorders, I work with high-achieving women and neurodivergent folks who are ready to untangle the roots of their struggles—not just slap on surface-level strategies. Together, we can explore what food has come to mean in your life, and build a new relationship to nourishment, embodiment, and self-trust. You are not broken. You are responding exactly as a person would in a culture designed to make you feel at war with your body.
Curious if you might have an eating disorder?
Take my eating disorder quiz to find out
You don’t have to have a full-blown eating disorder to be harmed by diet culture. The constant food noise and mental math—how many calories, how many steps, how much you weigh—can erode your sense of peace and connection with your body. If this is you, it’s not your fault. You’ve been swimming in these waters your whole life.
How to Start Opting Out of Diet Culture
Stepping out of diet culture can feel damn near impossible given it’s ubiquitous presence in our lives. You don’t have to change everything overnight. But you can begin by:
Challenging food rules you didn’t consent to
Unfollowing people and accounts on social media who perpetuate diet culture
Eating enough. Full stop.
Noticing how your body feels instead of how it looks
Practicing body love rituals in situations that typically stir up diet culture rhetoric and urges such as fitting rooms, upcoming trips, reunions, or weddings.
Finding a therapist who doesn’t uphold diet culture (hi, I’m here)
Diet culture thrives on your silence. Opting out is radical—and it’s not just about your body. It’s about your life and the lives of so many others who are apart of marginalized groups. To dismantle your own internalized diet culture is to be a political activist for what is humane and what is right.
A Better Framework: Health at Every Size (HAES®)
If you’ve been living in diet culture for most of your life, it can be hard to imagine another way. Letting go of the pursuit of weight loss might feel scary, even reckless. You may wonder, “If I’m not trying to shrink my body… then what am I working toward?”
That’s where the Health at Every Size® (HAES®) framework comes in.
Developed by researchers and clinicians, HAES is a weight-inclusive, evidence-based approach to health that prioritizes respectful care, body diversity, and sustainable behaviors—not weight loss as a goal. It shifts the focus from controlling the number on the scale to nurturing health through supportive habits, stress reduction, joyful movement, and a healed relationship with food.
The core principles of HAES include:
Weight inclusivity: accepting and respecting the diversity of body shapes and sizes
Health enhancement: supporting health policies that improve access to care for all bodies
Respectful care: acknowledging systemic biases and offering compassionate, person-centered treatment
Eating for well-being: using intuitive eating to honor hunger, satiety, and pleasure
Life-enhancing movement: encouraging enjoyable physical activity, not punishment or weight-centric exercise
Studies have shown that HAES-based interventions result in improved blood pressure, cholesterol, eating behaviors, and psychological well-being, all without promoting weight loss or body shame. It’s a framework rooted in science and humanity—and a powerful antidote to the toxic messages of diet culture.
Learn more about HAES and the research behind it at:
HAES isn’t about giving up on health—it’s about redefining it in a way that’s liberating, not punishing. It’s a call to honor your body’s wisdom, your lived experience, and your right to exist fully and unapologetically—right now, not 20 pounds from now.
If you’re ready to replace shame with science, and punishment with possibility, HAES offers a place to begin.
Ready to Heal Your Relationship With Food and Your Body?
You weren’t born hating your body. You were taught to.
Diet culture made sure of that.
But healing is possible. You can unlearn the shame, untangle the rules, and return to the wisdom of your own body. You can stop living in a constant loop of guilt, restriction, and striving—and start building a relationship with food, movement, and self-worth that’s rooted in freedom, not fear.
I work with high-achieving, sensitive, emotionally intelligent women who are ready to go deeper—beyond surface-level strategies, into the real work of reclaiming their bodies and their peace.
This is therapy for the part of you that’s exhausted, but still hoping. The part that knows there has to be more than this. — If you're ready to step out of the shame spiral and into something truer, I’m here to walk that path with you.