Dear Diet Culture Letter: How Diet Culture Promotes Unrealistic Beauty Standards
DEAR DIET CULTURE,
It’s me, Sunday.
I want to start off this week by letting you know this: you continue to cause a tremendous amount of unnecessary pain and suffering in this world while you sit there on your high horse and pretend like you aren’t a wolf in a sheep’s clothing. Actually, maybe a more apropos descriptor is while you pretend to you “aren’t a diet dressed in lifestyle and wellness clothing.”
Recently, I have been thinking about the ways that you overtly and covertly enact unrealistic, oppressive beauty standards toward women and femmes. It’s exhausting, confusing and leaves most people feeling like your beliefs are their beliefs, but I guess that’s the name of the game when it comes to getting people to internalize your beliefs, right?
And because I am sure you are saying, “But, what unrealistic beauty standards do I perpetuate?”, I wanted to be sure to list them out for you so that it’s nice and clear.
First up: Thin bodies
This is one of the more obvious beauty standards that you perpetuate, Diet Culture. The “standard” of beauty being only found in thin bodies that you create shows up in the Media: who’s bodies are shown and who’s are not. Culture: who gets hired to be in positions that influence and create our culture in art, media, design, and much more. Social media: violent words spewed at fat people doing the same thing as thin people (mostly just existing and living life, btw), what bodies get paid to be “influencers”, who the algorithm favors, etc. Clothing stores/brands: not making inclusive size options and stopping sizes at 12-14 in the US. And, creating harmful shows like the biggest loser and revenge body, to name a few.
Second up: Perfect, glowing skin
I’ve stopped counting the amount of times that I have seen advertisements for diets or “lifestyle changes” talk about how it will “transform your skin” or some other nonsense that is unsupported by research. You also don’t take into account how risky and harmful it is to put someone on a diet even IF it did temporarily clear up skin issues. You tell people that the only way they can achieve beauty is through clear skin, and that it’s people’s obligation to achieve this, all the while offering all of your disordered eating (aka diets) along the way to “clear up skin.”
Third up: Youth
You uphold youth as the standard of beauty, and you are hyper-obsessed with the preservation of youth. This is so pervasive that most people are shocked when they see a single advertisement with an older person that isn’t health-related or medication-related. I cannot remember the last time I saw a person aging in the media. Anywhere. This is ABSURD. And this does a few things: makes people think that no one ages, allows you to sell your dumb diets and protocols to “look younger”, and makes it easier for people to discriminate against older folks (this is called ageism). Turns out you can’t reverse aging through food despite all your sneaky attempts.
Fourth up: Beautiful hair
Another insidious way you show up is in the promise of shiny, thick hair (and almost always only on white women), which is ironic. It’s ironic because when bodies are undernourished, you start to see signs of degradation in its attempt to keep its most vital organs going, and one of the first things to go is often hair luster and thickness. It’s SO common to lose hair when a person is not eating enough, in particular protein and fat, regardless of body size. So, you offer “solutions” to a problem that for the most part you are causing. I see your tactic here.
Overall, your beauty standards are unrealistic, ageist, disordered and boring. You prioritize white, thin, youthful, able bodies as the “epitome of beauty”, while leaving out the entirety of the rest of the world and all the diversity that human bodies hold.
Beauty is in diversity of skin and bodies; beauty is in ageing; beauty is in less able bodies; beauty is in changing bodies,growing bellies, and fat; beauty is in scars and acne; and beauty is in wrinkles.
Diet culture, your definition and representation of beauty is limiting and oppressive and I (really I mean we as the collective) are on to you.
Sincerely,
Sunday, aka your most friendly non-diet Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that you were not brought into this world to be beautiful and that Diet Culture’s standards of beauty seek to make you chase something that doesn’t exist while profiting off of your insecurity.