Why diet is more than culture or nutrition. health and wellness

Diet culture refers to beliefs, behaviors, attitudes toward eating, body image, and physical activity with the goal of weight loss. For diet culture, thinness is the goal, and all behavior will be validated with the goal of achieving it. Some authors define it as the belief system that respects leanness and equates it with health and moral virtue.

Recently, Agatha Ruiz de la Prada jokingly (or I hope so) said that it was becoming fashionable to go out to dinner with friends, and she didn’t go because she was gaining weight. He preferred to stay at home and eat natural yogurt with a little sugar for dinner, or eat nothing at all. If I went out to dinner, it was with gentlemen, because gentlemen drink wine and I think with them there’s probably an opportunity to do cardio to burn calories before dinner.

These statements are filled with diet culture. Food matters only to the extent that it increases our weight, it is devoid of pleasure and we are able to cancel our intended plans for fear of gaining weight. She put into her mouth what many women have done or felt about being thin: being thin gives us the privilege of being visible, attractive, and brings us closer to that promised happiness of thinness, that is, success. .

Food, apart from nourishing us, also performs other functions. As an emotional regulator, food releases neurotransmitters like dopamine, which makes us feel good when we eat it. Diet and diet culture have deprived us of the luxury that is accessible to all, and filled it with weakness and lack of willpower. There are some nutritionists, communicators and other species that exist on social networks who claim that they have the holy grail so that we can stop eating emotionally. I’m sorry to say that you won’t like that trick to stop emotional eating, because we can stop emotional eating only if we die.

Denying the pleasure of food and that food should be tasty and filling is a way of continuing to divide food between good eaters and bad eaters, the skinny and the weak, as if enjoying food is counterproductive to health. yes. I believe that the people who defend a diet that is not pleasurable are the same people who have sex for the sole purpose of reproduction.

We are emotions and we feed on them and also from them, that hunger is real, we feel it. No matter how much that simple logic is repeated: “If you haven’t eaten an apple, it’s not hunger, drink a glass of water.” Where does it come from? Do you have to be hungry to eat a piece of cheesecake? Or if you drink wine, do you drink it out of thirst?

Diet culture has corrupted everything related to food and health, making it the path to weight loss. In fact, the term “take care of yourself” has become a euphemism for weight loss.

Some characteristics of diet culture are:

• Promotion of restrictive diets: Detox, pineapple, artichoke diet and fasting. Usually models before and after diets are used, making it clear that one body was bad and the other good and, of course, the thinnest body is ideal. These before and after posts are devoid of the context of the person who may have gone through depression, an illness, been in a poor state of mental health, but the important thing is how thin they have become and the support and validation that all comes with it. No matter what happens, you will have it. thinness despite everything; Thinness, at the cost of everything else.
• Stigma of overweight and obesity: To the extent that you do not conform to the standards of thinness and principles of beauty, transformed into health, you will be the object of ridicule and ridicule. Those jokes, that extreme cruelty, are done “for your own good”, so that you will react and not give up. Pathological discourse on weight loss has been constructed as a means to achieve health, self-esteem, happiness, and in addition higher social status (Harrison, 2019).

Saying that being thin is something you can achieve with effort and sacrifice ignores body diversity and ignores the consequences it can have on mental health, the potential development of eating disorders, the metabolic damage to your body from countless diets, Prevents disappointment, physical shame, self-harm. -Respect… A patient, who had gone through a very difficult cancer, told me that she would rather go through it again than gain weight again. Up to that point we go through diet culture.

The fear of gaining weight is the fear of living, it is a patriarchal view of the woman’s body, in which changes with time are not accepted and in which there is only one body model, and that is young and thin. It is a way of keeping yourself always at war with your body and therefore staying humble.

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