So, you’ve read Intuitive Eating, you’ve listened to every episode of podcasts like Maintenance Phase and Food Psych, and you’ve sworn off MyFitnessPal and low-carb diets for life. You’ve seen diet culture for what it is: A fatphobic, racist, elitist belief system that thrives off of keeping us all trapped in a cycle of body hate and disordered eating patterns. That’s awesome! Go you!
The thing is, you still live in this world, which means you’re still surrounded by the same harmful messages you’ve come to loathe. And if you’ve been working toward food and body freedom for long enough, you’ve probably realized that divesting completely of diet culture isn’t as easy as nodding along with your favorite podcasts and giving yourself permission to eat whatever you want.
As a dietitian who specializes in eating disorders, I work with a lot of folks who struggle to fully let go of restrictive food rules and the desire to control their body size. And I also see so many sneaky ways that diet culture can maintain its grip—even when a client is trying their hardest to opt out.
If you’re still having a hard time making peace with food and your body, here are some things that might be keeping you stuck, according to dietitians.
1. You follow social media accounts that trigger you, whether they’re explicitly diety or not.
“Social media can be a very sneaky way for diet culture to continue influencing your life,” Jessi Holden, a dietitian who takes a non-diet approach to food on her recipe blog The Kitchen Innovation, tells SELF. “Constant exposure to idealized body images, weight change stories, or good/bad language around food, for example, could lead to or worsen body dissatisfaction,” Holden says.
It’s not just a matter of unfollowing diet gurus and image-obsessed fitness influencers (which you probably did long ago). It’s about making sure you’re seeing a diverse range of bodies in your feed, and that the food and nutrition content creators you follow—if you choose to follow any, which you don’t have to, by the way!—aren’t making you feel like the way you eat is somehow less than. I’ve had plenty of clients who are deeply impacted by how pretty, colorful, and perfectly plated every food picture on Instagram looks, for example, even if those photos aren’t showing meals that are overtly diet-y.
The next time you open a social media app, take note of how you feel about your body before you start scrolling, then check in with yourself again afterward. If you notice that you feel worse, make it a point to unapologetically unfollow any accounts that put you in a diet-culture mindset. And while you’re at it, try diversifying your feed by following creators in bodies of all different shapes and sizes.
2. You judge a food by its packaging.
“Our food and beverage industry aligns its marketing strategy with timely fads, labeling foods and beverages as low calorie, fat-free, sugar-free, gluten-free, and more,” Amy Goldsmith, RD, the founder of Kindred Nutrition, an eating disorder and sports nutrition practice in Frederick, Maryland, tells SELF. As a result, It’s impossible to avoid these terms when you’re at the grocery store. Even if you’re not explicitly trying to eat lower-fat foods or cut back on sugar, for instance, it can be tough to shake the belief that items with less of certain nutrients (and more of others) are inherently better than their traditional counterparts.
“One way to move past this is to make a commitment to buy the original version of a product if it’s available,” Goldsmith says. For example, buy real ice cream instead of Halo Top, even if you think the latter tastes just fine. Go for regular old Wheat Thins instead of shelling out more for gluten-free crackers (unless you need to avoid gluten for medical reasons, of course). And if you love pizza, keep an old-school frozen pie on hand for nights when you don’t want to cook instead of opting for a version with a crust made of cauliflower.
Of course, it’s okay to have preferences for certain foods, and there may be some “healthified” items that you really, truly like. But try buying the OG stuff again for a couple of months and see how you feel, Goldsmith suggests—then decide which version you prefer, based on your direct experience, not because of “healthy” labels that are essentially just marketing ploys.
3. You have coaches, trainers, or gym friends who definitely don’t take an anti-diet approach.
One of the most important lessons you can learn when leaving diet culture behind is that it’s not up to you to convince others to come with you. Someone else’s body and relationship with food is their business, not yours. Still, it can be triggering when you’re surrounded by nutrition and weight talk, and it is your right to set boundaries around how someone talks about your body and eating habits. One place where this kind of talk can be especially prominent is the gym.
“Another sneaky way you can be influenced by diet culture is through messages you may get as an athlete or exerciser,” Goldsmith says. “It’s not uncommon to hear things from coaches or trainers such as ‘get to your race weight,’ or ‘tighten up your nutrition.’” Likewise, gym friends might encourage you to try carb cycling around strength training sessions or sign up for an expensive macro counting program that promises to help you “meet your body composition goals.”
It might be easy to brush off comments like this when they’re seemingly about performance and not appearance, but trying to strictly control your food intake is still a form of dieting, even if it’s under the guise of being faster or stronger. If you have friends or coaches who often talk like this—about you or about themselves or others while you’re around—Goldsmith recommends asking them to leave you out of those conversations. Let them know that you’re comfortable with (or working toward accepting) your body as it is, and say that you’d rather not talk about weight loss, macro tracking, or the latest sports nutrition trend.
4. You drastically limit your food intake ahead of a big meal or event.
When people talk about “healthy” eating, the word “balance” gets thrown around a lot. But for those of us who grew up in the era of women’s magazines printing a new diet plan every month (or for those of you younger folks who have been seeing “what I eat in a day” videos since the day you first got a smartphone), the concept of true balance might be very, very skewed.
One thing I see people do all the time—even when they’re great about eating what they love without guilt and practicing gratitude for their bodies—is eat significantly less than usual on the day of (or day before) a food-centered event and call that “balance.” This is a tricky one, because honestly, it’s okay to want to make sure you don’t show up at your favorite restaurant for dinner still full from lunch. And if you know you want to order the famous spaghetti carbonara with a side of garlic bread, intentionally including vegetables in lunch might be a great idea.
The trick here is to stop thinking about balance from a place of restriction (as in, What foods can I cut out in order to keep my food intake in check today?). Instead, try to approach your meal choices from a place of abundance: What foods can I add today in the name of variety, without making myself feel too full?
5. You’re cutting out foods in the name of “gut health,” “hormone balance,” or another vague wellness goal.
Because straight-up dieting is raising a lot of eyebrows these days (rightfully so), plenty of folks in the health and wellness space have started linking food restrictions to other supposed (often vague) benefits, like “gut health” or “hormone balance.” But really, these types of food rules are about weight loss most of the time, Kristin Grimes, RDN, a dietitian and nutrition communications consultant based in Denver, Colorado, tells SELF.
Grimes gives the example of gut health influencers urging followers to cut out a long list of foods to eliminate bloating or digestive discomfort or self-proclaimed “hormone experts” (who aren’t endocrinologists, the only true hormone experts out there, for the record) telling you to only eat certain foods at various times in your menstrual cycle. These recommendations are often tempting because they make huge promises, like never feeling bloated again or avoiding all uncomfortable period symptoms forever and ever. But there’s rarely much high-quality evidence behind this advice, which is why you don’t often hear such sweeping claims from doctors or other credentialed health professionals.
“When you see someone recommending restricting your eating in any way—amount, time of day, types of foods—that should raise a red flag,” Grimes says. Instead of blindly following food rules you saw on TikTok, check in with your primary care provider about any unusual symptoms you’re having and ask if they have any evidence-based recommendations for how to manage them. (And yes, plenty of doctors also give out cookie-cutter diet advice that can feel triggering. Here’s more information on how to find a weight-neutral doctor.)
It’s okay if diet culture creeps back in sometimes—as long as you see it for what it is.
Frankly, the end goal here isn’t to block diet culture out of your life completely. That’s simply not realistic—again, toxic messages about food and bodies are everywhere. Instead, it’s about noticing when you have diety thoughts or bad body image moments and reflecting on what prompted them. That way, you continue to gain a better understanding of how these triggers impact you and what you can do to protect yourself against them—whether that’s changing who you follow on social media, bowing out of conversations about food restriction and weight loss, or thinking about nutrition from a place of abundance instead of restriction.
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