5 Diet Culture Rules To Break
Carbs after dark, drinking your calories, and other myths.
Disclaimer: You’re reading this column because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.
Q: In Anne Helen Petersen's newsletter piece, The Millennial Vernacular of Fatphobia. She quoted a tweet that was definitely something I've heard before: “When you think you feel hungry, you're actually thirsty—so just drink water and you'll be fine." In the same vein, I've often heard that it takes 20 minutes for your body to “know” you're full, so people advise eating slowly or waiting to get seconds.
What of this is diet culture BS and what is intuitive eating and/or factoids I can learn from to make the most of an all-you-can-eat situation?
First of all, slow clap for strategizing how to use a rule like “it takes 20 minutes to know you’re full” to your advantage at an all-you-can-eat buffet. I’m trying to decide if that means you have to eat very very quickly to get to everything before this alleged fullness kicks in? Or do you plan to stay for several hours, so you can wait out those fullness windows? Either way, wear stretchy pants and live your best life.
More to the point: I love this question. There are so many of these rules burrowed into various dark corners of our brains. And divesting from diet culture does mean examining these little pieces of “wisdom” that we’ve taken as fact and deciding which ones are useful and which ones cause harm. Some rules fall very clearly into the “causes harm” bucket. See cutesy terrible mantras like “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” (actually, I promise, brownies taste SO MUCH BETTER) and “it’s always good to feel a little hungry” (JUST WHY).
There are also rules that have changed, evolved and contradicted themselves so much over the last few decades that I hope we can go ahead and throw them out just because it’s so clear that there is no consensus around them. When I polled Instagram followers for their most annoying diet rule, equal numbers of people responded with “breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” and with “never eat breakfast, it just jumpstarts hunger!” As one follower put it: “I still don’t know if breakfast is the most important meal or if you must skip it to lose weight.”
The main reason we can throw out the vast majority of diet culture rules is that last part: These are strategies for dieting that we learned for the express purpose of losing weight. But study after study has shown that dieting does not result in long-lasting or sustainable weight loss. Dieting also increases your risk for a disordered relationship with food and your body, and chronic dieting (otherwise known as “weight cycling”) is associated with all of the same health issues we normally attribute to being fat. In other words, dieting doesn’t work and even if it did work, it doesn’t improve your health. And dieting reinforces anti-fat bias as a cultural norm, which causes clear and measurable harm in a whole variety of ways to pretty much all of us, but especially fat folks.
The clearest way to decide if a bit of diet culture wisdom is useful to you is to ask: Am I attaching a weight loss goal to this eating strategy? And be honest. Sometimes we think we don’t care about weight loss anymore—like not officially— but we’re still eating according to a diet culture rule because maybe we don’t mind it all that much, and hey if it happened to result in some weight loss and make us effortlessly thin well would that be so bad. And that’s a slippery slope back into full-blown dieting.
But it’s also true that some of these “rules” could be rooted in a little bit of truth for you. Not because they’ll result in weight loss, and not because they are universally true for everybody but because maybe you do feel better and more functional if you eat breakfast most mornings. “It can be really hard to reconcile that there’s any truth to these when you’re rejecting diet culture,” says Diana K. Rice, RD. “But it’s ultimately important in understanding how to take good care of ourselves.” And to be clear, that’s taking care of yourself in the sense of enjoying food, feeling nourished by it but not obsessed with it and having energy to get through your day—not “taking care of yourself” as code for getting thin. “What’s actually BS is that diet culture co-opted what we know about human anatomy,” says Diana. “It has us all following black-and-white rules instead of gently using this information to support our own bodies.”
So another good test of any food rule would be: Are you allowed to break it? “What I’m hearing at the heart of most of this ‘advice’ is ‘Don’t listen to your body, listen to me, the expert,’” says dietitian Anjali Prasertong, MPH, RDN. “That sentiment absolutely has roots in racism, misogyny, cissexism, fatphobia, and other systems of oppression which have a long history in the medical field.” But that premise is so baked into all of our brains that I think sometimes we need to hear from folks in that “expert” position in order to give ourselves permission to think differently. So for this month’s Ask Virginia, I decided to ask Diana, Anjali and a few other favorite anti-diet, fat positive dietitians to help us sort through what you told me were the five most common diet culture rules. Here’s our Dream Team:
Anjali Prasertong, MPH, RDN, author of the newsletter, Antiracist Dietitian
Samina Qureshi, RD, of Wholesome Start
Diana K. Rice, RD, of Tiny Seed Family Nutrition and @anti.diet.kids
Laura Thomas, PhD, RNutr, author of the newsletter Can I Have Another Snack?
Whitney Trotter, RDN/LDN, RN, of Bluff City Health
And here’s our mission: To figure out when some of those kernels of maybe-useful information pop up in a diet culture rule —and when it is, in fact, total bullshit. Spoiler: It’s most of it.