How to Spot Diet Culture When Preventing or Managing Blood Sugar
Why it is hard to spot diet culture, especially if you were recently told your blood glucose was elevated.
Spotting Diet Culture
Diet culture is a way to describe the endless chatter about weight and health. It can focus on fears about our kids: “What if they gain too much weight?” and reinforce the belief that “Weight loss will help me be healthier," “Sugar is bad for me," or “Being fit is really healthy.”
In this No Weight Loss Required issue, I have compiled several resources to help you unpack how diet and wellness culture appear in the media, at medical appointments, in school, and in sports.
This is a list of resources from fat and straight-sized, white and BIPOC, queer, and heterosexual individuals and professionals.
Weight Inclusion Glorifies “Obesity”
Glorifying Obesity is something that I have been accused of when I talk about offering a weight-inclusive approach to preventing and treating diabetes. This accusation takes time to unpack because it starts with the false belief that people don’t come in various sizes and shapes. Reaching back to my college days and my first lecture on statistics, I am reminded of the Bell Curve, which shows that everything has a spectrum, with the most significant number in the middle between two extremes. Weight is on a spectrum, and a wide range of healthy weights exist. The second false belief is that acceptance is somehow the same as glorifying. Acceptance is a complex emotion, meaning there are many parts to acceptance - including but not limited to feeling grumpy, guilt, grief, glee - a weight lifted, and gratitude. Acceptance is part of mental health and an essential part of healing.
A great place to start understanding diet culture is from a fat person. This is why I am suggesting the Maintenance Phase podcast. It debunks the junk science behind health fads, wellness scams, and nonsensical nutrition advice. It provides information and research to counter common beliefs about weight, health, and weight bias. It is an excellent way to start to unpack diet culture.
Here are three episodes that discuss the three common questions I am asked.
Stop Objecting to Objective Information
Listening to and hearing about someone’s lived experience may not feel important because it appears to lack the ‘scientific’ evidence many professionals tout. However, your decisions aren’t only made up of quantitive information. Experience, views, values, and “gut” feelings provide essential information. When your experience doesn’t align with “The facts,” your brain experiences cognitive dissonance. It is having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially regarding behavioral decisions and attitude change. I think cognitive dissonance is a good description of diet culture.
Let’s face it—the change process isn’t as simple as you might have been led to believe. There are many parts to change, and discovering and exploring diet culture is essential to untangling and healing from weight stigma. Listening, reading, and accessing social media from lived experiences surrounding diet culture, weight stigma, and self-compassion is essential.
"You Just Need to Lose Weight" And 19 Other Myths About Fat People By Aubrey Gordon
Discover the facts and figures to reframe myths about fatness in order to dismantle the anti-fat bias ingrained in how we think about and treat fat people. As conversations about fat acceptance and fat justice continue to grow,
What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat By Aubrey Gordon
Anti-fatness is everywhere, including in our cultural and social systems. Diet culture is the water we are all swimming in, and as a result, it has been normalized for fat people to be denied basic needs because they are fat. Getting curious about authentic fat activism is, and how ending legal weight discrimination, giving equal access to health care for large people, increasing access to public spaces, and ending anti-fat violence could change your life.
The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength.
Virginia Sole-Smith is the author of Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture.
The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image, and Guilt in America. Virginia Sole-Smith also offers the Podcast Burnt Toast
Chapter 1: FAT TALK: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture
Weight-Inclusive Nutrition Professionals
Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat with Diabetes: A Mindful Eating Program for Thriving with Prediabetes or Diabetes by Michelle May, M.D. and Megrette Fletcher, MEd, RD, CDCES is a Mindful Eating Program for Thriving with Prediabetes or Diabetes builds on the Mindful Eating Cycle and other principles to help readers with prediabetes or diabetes reduce their anxiety about diabetes self-management. Even people with diabetes can eat what they love, using awareness and intention to guide them.
Nutrition Unmeasured Podcast By Gina Forster, MS, RD. Body Image is part of diet culture. How To Handle Body Discomfort and Distress, with Body Image Educator Brianna Campos, is for everyone who has looked in the mirror and hated the reflection—feeling like screaming after trying on clothes. This episode helps you get curious about these feelings, what they mean, and how to handle them in the moment, which can help you on your journey of body acceptance.
The Joyful Nourishment Podcast Linn is a nutritionist, Nutrition Therapist, Body Image Coach. In this episode, Linn explores What is Diet Culture? “Diet culture refers to a rigid set of expectations about valuing thinness and attractiveness over physical health and emotional well-being. Diet culture often emphasizes “good” versus “bad” foods, focuses on calorie restriction, and normalizes self-deprecating talk. Diet culture is toxic, and it can be a risk factor for body dysmorphia, disordered eating, and other mental health issues. (From Shelby Gordon’s presentation on Weight Stigma in Health Care June 2023 for TCME)”
Diet Culture has roots in racism, colonialism and eugenics. Body hierarchies are imbedded in our cultural fabric and it is everywhere.
Linn also provides a great article, “Why do I have to stop dieting?”
Sweet Bodies: Practical Body Image Tools for People with Diabetes is a five-part program for paid subscribers of No Weight Loss Required. This unique program, which is specific for people with prediabetes and diabetes, consists of a video and a 28-page ebook.
The Air We Breathe Podcast by Heather Sayers Lehman, MS, is a health coach and behavior change expert. In this episode, Deconstructing the Deception of Diet Culture with Dietitian Rachael Hartley. In this episode, learn how to spot and navigate diet culture, especially on social media, and reduce the content you consume. Identify things you could do if you were comfortable in your body today.
Almost Sated by Kristi Koeter, she is a recovered chronic dieter who writes about diet culture. In this article, Kristi explains, “One of the toughest parts of rejecting diet culture is challenging the widespread belief that being fat means being unhealthy. This idea has been reinforced by clever marketing from the medical and pharmaceutical industries. It's no longer just about appearance; now, we're encouraged to diet for health rather than vanity.”
Kate Manne, author of the book, Unshrinking, writes about diet culture for Substack.
Rethinking Wellness Podcast offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being. We explore the science (or lack thereof) behind popular wellness diets, the role of influencers and social-media algorithms in spreading wellness misinformation, problematic practices in the alternative- and integrative-medicine space, how wellness culture often drives disordered eating, the truth about trending topics like gut health, how to avoid getting taken advantage of when you’re desperate for help and healing, and how to care for yourself in a deeply flawed healthcare system without falling into wellness traps.
Rethinking Wellness - The Harms of Social Media is a podcast by author Christy Harrison MS, RDN, CEDRD Who has written Anti-Diet and The Wellness Trap
Christy Harrison’s book Anti-diet helps you understand what the term diet culture means and how this system of beliefs that equates thinness to health and moral virtue promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status and demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others. Diet culture fuels sexist, racist, and classist beliefs that are embedded in the fabric of our society, making it hard to recognize.
The Wellness Trap delves into the persistent, systemic problems with that industry, offering insight into its troubling pattern of cultural appropriation and its destructive views on mental health, and shedding light on how a growing distrust of conventional medicine has led ordinary people to turn their backs on science.
Live Nourished, Make Peace with Food, Banish Body Shame, and Reclaim Joy by Shana Minei Spence helps you reject diet culture, achieve a healthy relationship with food, and nourish your body and soul. This book is from a registered dietitian, nutritionist, and creator of the Instagram @TheNutritionTea,
Decolonizing Wellness: A QTBIPOC-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation, by registered dietitian and nutritionist Dalia Kinsey, will help readers to improve their health without restriction, eliminate stress around food and eating, and turn food into a source of pleasure instead of shame. A road map to body acceptance and self-care for queer people of color, Decolonizing Wellness is filled with practical eating practices, journal prompts, affirmations, and mindfulness tools. Ultimately, decolonizing nutrition is essential not only to our personal well-being but to our community’s well-being and to the possibility of greater social transformation.
The Body Liberation Project: How Understanding Racism and Diet Culture Helps Cultivate Joy and Build Collective Freedom is about finding actual freedom in our bodies by discovering strength and aspects of fitness, movement, and eating that work for YOU. It’s about realizing that the goal is not to look at our bodies and love everything we see; it’s to understand that at our essence, we are so much more than our bodies. Recognizing that none of us are free until all of us are, Chrissy King shares the wisdom, the tools, and the inspiration to motivate readers to find body liberation and, even more importantly, to pass it on.