Is Everything a Diet?

What walking pads, breast reductions, and native plants have in common — and why it makes people mad.

Today’s essay is a response to a question I’ve been asked repeatedly, and have been pondering, for awhile. It’s also, essentially, the mission statement of Burnt Toast. If this resonates with you, please consider supporting our work with a paid subscription. A heart or restack is also a huge help! Thanks so much for being here.

---

The title of this pic is “Smiling woman eating salad for breakfast.” Yes that’s a diet! (skynesher for Getty)

One thing about me: I can make anything a diet. I’m programmed to achieve and excel, to crave gold stars and high grades. For many years, especially when I was a dieter in the most traditional sense of the word, I thought this was just my personality. I’m an eldest daughter! I have a lifelong love of color-coding and closet organization! I was good at school! When my dieting (and even more, my relationship with exercise) got too intense, I initially thought the problem was that I had applied my “A student” mentality to food and movement. I spent years thinking that I could achieve permanent thinness without “taking it too far,” if only I could find some more relaxed way to eat and exercise my way into a smaller body. That, I was sure, would not be a diet.

When I wrote my first book, The Eating Instinct, I began to flip that premise. I am not just innately, randomly, an overachiever. I was socialized to be one by my family (among my parents and siblings, I have the least amount of formal education); by the white, wealthy suburb I grew up in where almost everyone goes to college; by all the expectations that school puts upon well-behaved little girls who learn to read easily; by every boy who let me do all the work on a group project; by Kristy Thomas and Stacy McGill; by Jesse Spano; by Monica Geller, by all of Reese Witherspoon’s teenage roles; by freaking Topanga from Boy Meets World. (If you’re a little younger than me, your list includes Rory Gilmore and Hermione Granger, and I’d make a case for Buffy Summers too even though her excellence was not academic per se.)

I didn’t apply my A-student mindset to dieting; the diet mindset is why I cared about being an A student in the first place. Thinness—as well as whiteness, pretty privilege, able-body privilege, and straight, cis gender privilege—has always been presented to us as an essential component of achievement. We did not grow up reading narratives of fat excellence. The kind of overachieving so many of us were trained to crave presumed bodily perfection alongside intellectual prowess and academic success. Needing to excel in school prepares girls to also need to excel at thinness, and we quickly learn that thinness, not our personal or professional success (and certainly not…our happiness) is the more important goal.

It wasn’t my idiosyncratic mistake to get hyper about food and exercise like they were my SAT scores. It was always the plan in a culture driven by capitalism and white supremacy. Beauty standards exist to uphold societal power structures. Any time a marginalized group has achieved more freedom and power, the thin ideal has become thinner, whiter, more rigid—and more expensive and labor-intensive to obtain.¹ This keeps the status quo intact.

Diet culture is a tool of capitalism and a manifestation of white supremacy. It is the primary way lots of us (especially women) interact with, and uphold those systems. Diet culture teaches us to live in permanent pursuit of thinness, yes, but also of self-improvement and optimization more broadly. Because if we keep buying into the idea that we’re never enough, we’ll keep buying.

And this is why I write so many stories, and make so many podcast episodes, asking the question: Is this a diet?

Here’s are few of the people, trends and concepts I’ve argued are, in fact, a diet:

Mel Robbins

Air fryers

Walking pads

Overeaters Anonymous

Summer reading lists

Breast reductions

Weighing your protein

(Heterosexual) marriage

Workout selfies

Home organization

Stanley cups

Not shopping, quitting Amazon, and the one day economic blackout

Screen time restrictions

Budget culture

Skincare culture

Home design culture

Native plants

People often encounter one of these pieces and have an immediate, defensive response that the way they personally weigh their protein or budget their money is absolutely, one hundred percent, not a diet, and therefore, nothing about this concept should ever be misconstrued as a diet. Sometimes that’s true; their Stanley cup is just a frigging water bottle. Sometimes that’s because I’ve named something they don’t want to look at more closely. Some folks then read two or three of these pieces, or listen to a few podcast episodes and start to get even more frustrated. “This one is a stretch,” they’ll write in a comment or a Note or on Reddit.² “Why does Virginia have to make everything diet culture?”

Some folks interpret this as a branding strategy. I’ve written two books about diet culture, I must therefore keep writing, forever, about diet culture. They assume I’m getting bored of talking about Paleo or keto (okay, that part isn't wrong) so I’m just casting around for anything else I can stick the diet label on. If Dr. Becky has been personally useful to them, or they are so glad they got their breast reduction, they are annoyed that I’d suggest that there would ever be any other experience.

Another frequent through line of negative comments is that my labeling so many things a diet is—plot twist!—its own form of diet culture. This one broke my brain for a minute, but I’m following now: When I name the diet-y aspects of something you like and find valuable, it’s easy to assume I’m saying nobody should ever exercise, or eat with an eye towards nutrition, or make any other choice about their body that is even remotely rooted in the pursuit of health or thinness. That kind of black and white approach would obviously defy the fundamental principle of body autonomy and be a way of telling you what to do with your body which—yes! That’s diet culture! Straight up!

But I’m not telling you to make different choices. I’m not telling you what to do with your body (or your money or your garden or your closet). I can’t say whether you, personally, should or should not take Ozempic, or whether you should have more or less rules around snacks. I am often asked for direct advice and I’ll own that with my women’s magazine background and overachiever personality, my work has veered into prescriptive territory in the past. But I’ve spent the past year or so actively stepping back from that.

The longer I write and think about diet culture, the more I know this: We are all just trying to survive it.

Including me. I love my air fryer. I quit Amazon in January. I keep track of the books I read and how much water I drink. I put protein powder in my smoothie every day. My two main hobbies are home design and gardening (with a lot of native plants!). I have been married. I think it is possible to do all of these things in a non-diet-culture-ish way and that I mostly do. And, I’ve spent a decade actively divesting from diet culture but when I weighed myself two weeks ago, it reactivated all my old insecurities and overachieving instincts.

So when I consider whether [insert anything] is a diet, I’m not saying it’s unequivocally bad. I’m not doing it with a hidden agenda to make you quit the thing. I’m not saying you can’t do this and be for fat liberation. And when I say something is a diet, I don’t even necessarily mean it’s promoting weight loss (though that often is a hidden or underlying goal). The “diet mindset” is about the thin ideal, but even more it’s about keeping us locked into a system that tells us that we can’t trust ourselves and we’re never good enough. By this definition, a “diet” is anyone, or anything, that:

• Tells us we’re doing it wrong.

• Makes ambitious, if not blatantly unrealistic goals of what “better” and “best” should look like.

• Lays out a list of rules or steps to follow, which sound easy at the surface but quickly become difficult to incorporate into your actual life.

• Ignores any practical context about your life that conflict with said rules or steps.

• Frames failure to achieve the goal or follow instructions as your fault, rather than a flaw of the overall project.

• Inspires feelings of guilt and inadequacy and/or the urge to find a different version of this thing that will surely work better.

Something I label a diet may not check any of these boxes for you personally, and still check a lot, if not all, of them for someone else. See: How Corinne can wear a FitBit and I should not.

I’m exploring how the rhythms and rituals of diet culture show up in so many other arenas of our lives because white supremacy and capitalism shows up in so many arenas of our lives. I’m not expecting us to individually solve those issues because these are issues that require collective action and systemic change. I’m connecting dots and naming when I see a diet mindset showing up where it doesn’t belong so that we can all decide for ourselves how, and even whether, we want to reckon with that. I’m using “diet” literally in some cases, but far more often now as synecdoche. I could label all of this as “perfectionism,” but “diet” is just more concrete and tangible. We’ve all been on one. We know what this is.

I’ll own that it can be depressing to keep beating this drum, to realize, oh hey, here’s yet another unrealistic standard, another system that isn’t built to serve us.

But there is also liberation in seeing these themes recur. It’s a reminder that it isn’t us who are repeatedly failing. We are just all casualties of the various forms and flavors of Good Girl culture, and even after we stop relentlessly pursuing thinness, that experience leaves us vulnerable to new projects and goals that are maybe not quite as unachievable but often draining in all too familiar ways. Asking “is this a diet?” sometimes leads us to a concrete “yes” or “no” answer. But more often, my answer, and yours will be murkier and more individual. And that’s okay.

1. If that was a wild sentence to read, start with Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings and The Body Is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor, then start exploring this reading list for more.

2. Don’t worry, I almost never look!