How to Avoid Plugging Back into the Diet Culture this January

Here we go again! It’s that time of year when “being merry” fades into another tiresome weight loss resolution. The diet industry once more pushes the promise of losing weight and keeping it off. If you are healthy and are planning to go on another diet to shrink your body, here are some reasons you might want to reconsider.

The diet industry is a big part of the diet culture. It uses generalized assumptions to motivate us to criticize ourselves, or perhaps instill a negative body image that wasn’t there in the first place. Internalizing standards of thinness while wasting precious time achieving it can produce dire psychological consequences. Dieting is a risk factor for developing a serious eating disorder.

January is a prime time to lure folks back into unrealistic resolutions under the guise of health. People want to get healthy by reducing their food intake, which is short-lived as they slide back into old eating habits within a few weeks. The all-too-obvious clue is that weight loss programs aren’t sustainable. But what is sustainable? The availability of another recycled weight loss program that makes the same empty promises year after year. The emphasis is on changing behavior while focusing less on other factors that cause weight gain or the mental health consequences of chronic dieting.

How can you stop the tidal wave from dragging you back in? Start by deconstructing the ads you see. Look for baseless generalizations. Question the easy solutions to difficult problems. Here are four concepts to awaken your skepticism.

Body acceptance isn’t profitable, but failure is.

The body transformation industry needs a conduit to low self-esteem, or it won’t survive. It’ll lie by withholding the truth about how our bodies grow, develop, and mature. By tapping into the desire for self-improvement, it wants you to believe that every extra pound, wrinkle, and gray hair that deviates from the ideal standard is your fault. They sell hope while they coach you into a better life. They don’t want you to accept what you’re born with and will always convince you to keep paying despite the evidence that what they’re selling isn’t working.

Body acceptance means, in part, accepting, respecting, and caring for your body even though you don’t like certain aspects. Acceptance of yourself reduces the power of ideal standards and the desire to subscribe to them. Failure has no meaning in this perspective.

If you’re new to body acceptance here are three ways to begin moving toward it:

1. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. This includes comparing your body size to the images of the before and after photos in weight loss ads. Instead, focus on how far you’ve come. Whether you survived or achieved it’s your story.
2. Whenever a bad thought about your body surfaces, say (out loud) something nice about yourself. Choose words you can believe in.
3. Acknowledge your worth and value in the body you are in right now.

Sure, it’s easier said than done, but how is not accepting yourself working so far?

Diet culture encourages you to demean yourself.

I’m too fat. I need to stop eating so much sugar. I’m getting old. How many times have phrases like these entered your mind? The diet industry is notorious for promoting ways to compare yourself to others. These generalizations can apply to almost anyone:

• “Just eat the food and lose the weight!”
• “Our program is clinically proven to help you lose weight.”
• “Join millions of others who lost weight and kept it off.”
• “I feel like my youth came back, it’s amazing!”
• “Losing weight gave me the energy and the confidence I need!”

One popular diet company encourages food logging. Food records don’t work for everyone and recording every bite of food is unnatural. Obsessing over calories and portion sizes encourages unrealistic expectations and unhealthy categorization of certain foods. The potential danger of keeping a food diary is that it can worsen the symptoms of an eating disorder.

Separate yourself from the gimmick of weight loss.

Any company selling a product or service, whether it involves losing weight (or not), works toward a bottom line. The small ones want to earn profits, and the larger ones owe their shareholders. At what point are they focusing on their customer’s best interests?

People don’t start out believing they need to lose weight. At some point, we all develop beliefs based on the culture that surrounds us. We are taught that fat is bad. In developed countries and on the internet limiting exposure to thousands of weight loss ads is impossible. The diet industry seeks out the vulnerable and coerces them into the fantasy of weight loss for a better life. Their message tells them what nature gave them, isn’t good enough. Every ad has its niche, but all accomplish the same thing, to make viewers fear fat.

You are good enough now not in some future utopia.

There’s no guidebook to life. So don’t leave your life in the hands of conglomerates peddling unrealistic standards that convince you into useless misery. Protect yourself by knowing that most ideals about body size aren’t your own, they are learned. How you internalize them will affect how you treat yourself, and not in a positive way. When it comes down to it, you get to decide what comes into your life and what does not.

All of us are caught in a tug-of-war between the food industry selling convenience food and the diet industry telling us we’re fat. The fault is always placed entirely on consumers while they harp on self-control. Most of us are forced to work long hours to pay for the rising cost of food with less time to figure out how to feed ourselves.

As this post was written, the diet industry is scrambling to stay competitive in response to the heightened demand for GLP-1 injections. The price for weight loss skyrocketed. Even with insurance, patients on Wegovy can expect to pay $650 monthly for 28 doses, about $7800 a year. Not to mention the inconvenience of the weekly injections while placing sharps in an FDA-approved container and legally disposing of them. As with all medicines, there are risks, and once they are discontinued the weight returns.

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