Diet Culture

By Rawya El Gammal

As a sports therapist, personal trainer among other things, have always been against diet culture. If you asked me to eat by a clock or cut out foods I loved, that became my day’s focus and that’s not healthy. In over three decades, I have refused to market nor work with quick fixes. My role was to meet people where they were, not ‘fix’ them. There’s already too much noise from gyms, wellness influencers, diet fads, and doctors.

The more I worked with dieting clients, the clearer it became: stress causes weight gain, starvation causes injury as well as mood disorders and obsessing over scales misses the point. The body retains water and builds muscle which make them heavier on the scales or tighter in clothes, yet, people want fast results and not sustainable change.

The U.S. diet industry makes over 30 billion dollars a year, yet studies show most of them are ineffective. The damage? A society obsessed with thinness, riddled with shame, disordered eating, food obsession, and nutrient deficiencies.

Diet culture doesn’t just target women. Men are pressured to bulk up, sometimes turning to steroids or obsessive workouts and often teen boys avoid beaches for fear of body shaming. Girls shame each other and women greet each other with, “You’ve gained weight,” as if that’s a measure of worth. It’s all become very toxic.

Meanwhile, kids are forced to eat salads for dinner, going to bed hungry and struggling to sleep because their blood sugar is too low. We’ve lost sight of what matters: nourishment, not deprivation.

People skip doctor visits out of fear. They dread airplane seats. They feel judged for eating in public. Many starve themselves, self-harm, and suffer in silence. And we haven’t even scratched the surface of workplace or school bullying.

In the 1830s, Sylvester Graham and Michael Pollar introduced the early diet culture. In 1863, William Banting popularized low-carb diets; people then following his diet were ‘Banting’.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, grape, grapefruit, and cabbage diets gained traction. In 1963, Weight Watchers was launched. From the 1970s to the 2000’s came Atkins, raw food, paleo, keto… and the list goes on.

Magazines in the 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s before the takeover of social media defined what was ‘hot’ or ‘not’, ignoring the fact that bodies change, especially women’s due to hormones, life stages, and, well, being human. The result? An unwell society.

Fitness professionals often enter this field to help people, but many become complicit in overvaluing appearance. Marketing and gym cultures push the false idea that body size equals health. Fat bodies are shamed and labeled unhealthy, and individual behaviors are unfairly blamed.

The global fitness industry is worth over $109 billion dollars. That’s without even counting sports, gear, or the endless stream of questionable products. And yet, most of what’s sold is shame, not health.

Trainers working with bodies daily and are on the front lines who know their clients’ stressors, pain can do more.  They can go beyond protocols, skip measurements, help people tune into what they feel, what they love, what hurts and what heals. People asked to flex their biceps can be asked to flex their inner awareness as well.

We must dismantle the toxic standards in fitness certifications, gym marketing, health magazines, blogs, social media and internet searches as well as psychotherapy.

We need to stop idolizing weight loss and muscle mass, marketing ‘bikini bodies’ and selling yoga through skimpy outfits and false promises.

Professionals need to ask better questions. Psychotherapists should ask what they’ve eaten that day as a hungry person can be misdiagnosed. Diet culture tells people that being thin equals worth. It body shames for profit, controls how we think, feel, eat, and behave, disconnecting us from our own bodies.

Can we push back?

It’s time to reclaim your body, tune into your real needs, defy the noise, trust yourself and learn to rebuild your relationship with food.

We don’t need another diet, we need to revolutionize our standards.

Let’s shift the focus from fixing bodies to valuing them. Let’s lead from compassion and not control and above all, let’s stop selling shame and start cultivating true health.