Episode #1: What is Diet Culture?
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You are listening to wait a minute with Beth and Jessica, Episode 1.
Hey, I'm Beth and I'm so excited to be bringing this podcast out to you and to the world. So Jessica and I have been having fabulous conversations for the past nine years about food and health and weight and all of the wild spectrums and viewpoints we see here and experience with our clients on a daily basis.
We used to joke on our walks that we should record our conversations because they're just so great and we always wished we could share with everyone so now here we are sharing all of our conversations with you.
Welcome to our first podcast episode. It's so real. We're doing it!But before we get started Beth, why don't you share a little bit about yourself real quick?
Okay, I am a little bit multi-faceted because I will never stop learning but primarily I am an integrative dietician, meaning that I kind of mix my traditional dietetics training and knowledge with functional medicine. And then I have started to include internal family systems therapy, which is a non-pathologizing healing modality. I'm also currently training in Cranial Sacral therapy so that way I can do a full mind-body approach.
That is one of the things I love so much about you is that you are always learning and I think our clients really appreciate that. And I know all your friends appreciate it. So yeah Beth is always learning and I've been just so lucky to know you and work with you for this long.
At some point, I probably should stop to just allow a lot of things to really sink in and also to help my bank account for a minute.
It is inspiring. I think I've accumulated more knowledge just by being near you.
I actually don't know what I would do if I wasn't learning something actually. Jessica tell us about you.
I am a certified life and health coach and I actually started in cooking. I was a chef and that's where you and I met in culinary school and over the years in our practice, I learned that making valuable change was really less and less about the food and more about how we think about the food and how we think about ourselves and value our minds and our bodies that makes the biggest impact. So life coaching has just helped me personally a ton and I have grown to love coaching others and that's really where my focus is now is the coaching piece.
Yes, which is how we actually started working together right? I had gone on my own for a little bit and I was like Jessica I need your help. So, just you know, making the nuts and bolts of some things I was doing with clients and then ultimately that was what you where was the coach part of our practice.
Yeah but originally it was to grow and it was so food-focused I remember I was making meal plans telling people here's what you're eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner because everybody told us that they needed and wanted but as I was creating these plans and putting so much effort and energy into them I also noticed that nobody was doing them. It wasn't their fault right? I think that was so eye-opening. I realized it's not about the food it's about why aren't we following these plans? What do we really need to make significant change?
Yeah, just a little side note we actually don't give anybody food plans anymore because no one follows them, so and the last time a did was recently and she was like I'm so overwhelmed. Okay, so today on our first podcast for actually going to be talking about our general obsession with weight and weight loss diet has been perpetuated by diet culture which is a pretty hefty topic to start us out with.
Yeah but it's like the root of everything else that we're gonna be talking about. It is just so important because in working with our clients we've seen how they create so much suffering in their lives through over-restriction or denying themselves pleasure in life for from food, talking bad about themselves, feeling guilty, etc. There's so much stuff that is negative. It doesn't feel good and it's all coming from this diet culture mindset that we have all adopted over the last many generations.
I did a quick background check to see where did diet culture start. In general, I've known about some of the ones that started in the early nineteen hundreds with post cereal and Kellogg they had come out with like these high fiber cereals that were supposed to help us with morality and eating in a very bland way. But it actually goes back further to the Greeks and the Romans. They felt that a healthy body equaled a healthy mind and that if you had over fatness that you actually didn't have a healthy mind. But at the same time their body ideals were a little bit different because they were more muscular, they did still have a little bit more body fat than what our current quote-on-quote norm of what is ideal right now but they still did not want to have over fatness. It really continued on to the early Christians with gluttony and over fatness was a sin and so it really took off where fatness became a morality issue and that if you carried too much bodyweight then you were not moral.
And so there were lots of diets that came out. In the fifteen hundreds this Italian man, he ate egg yolks and drank fourteen ounces of wine a day. So can you imagine? I was like WHAT? I can't imagine what his bowel movements were like. Then it just kind of continued on variations on what we currently see on protein and veggies, skip the carbs, eat more fat, like it's already all been done multiple times since the early seventeen hundreds. It's really in the eighteen fifties in America where diet culture and the spreading of how to eat and dieting really took off and like how all bodies had to look a certain way and it just has been a matter of like what was the body shape of that time using corsets or not, slim clothes versus not, but always that there was a level of which excess body fat was a problem.
Even now just in our lifetime, there have been different body shapes that were ideal.
Yeah because think about Twiggy reigniting that really thin look in the sixties.
In the sixties and the nineties, I think we're like oh you have to be as this as possible and then now it's like yea be thin but also have a butt. There's just so many different standards, no wonder we are obsessed with weight. It's been something that has been happening for hundreds of years it's not just us in this lifetime so and it's been perpetuated in ads since before our grandparents. It's literally generational body shame trauma.
As if my own personal trauma was not enough now I have the trauma of my ancestors to figure out.
Jessica, can you tell me what your definition of diet culture means?
I just see diet culture as the overall message that has been sold to us that says if your body could just be a certain way then you will be promised to feel better physically you'll be happy and whatever recycling is going to be the answer to get you to where you think you should be. you know obviously, that's not true because if it were that easy we would just by one thing get to where we want to be and then be done with it. It does not address our mental health at all, it doesn't think about the full journey, how do we feel day to day, it just like sucks all of the joy out of our life with the promise that we're going to obtain it later.
Yeah, one day will be happy.
I don't think that diet culture thinks of us as whole people, it's just a means to an end but at what cost and why? I don't know what do you think is your kind of definition of it?
To me, it's that drive towards constantly wanting to lose weight and to do so by restricting what you eat and oftentimes there's usually some form of exercise for the sole purpose of losing weight. It is those two components where we're always going to be restricting something that we eat and exercising even though we have no desire to do it. We wouldn't do it for any other reason.
Diet culture, to me, also includes those very subtle messages that you may not pick up on like on the headlines across magazines that say do this for now for a fitter body for the summer and all that jazz. All those messages just keep promoting how again like you said that were never good enough for worthy enough for happy enough unless we look like whatever is the ideal and right now.
It's super confusing since the ideal composes of things that don't exist together like being thin, muscular, and having luscious booties.
That's the thing about chasing a moving target. You're never going to get to where you think you're supposed to be.
Most people's bodies don't look like what is displayed out there. There are different versions of that within that each person but it's just so frustrating because everybody has their own body type and what their bodies need and what health looks like to them so to me that's diet culture.
It makes me think of all the traps. There's the trap of assuming that size equates health which is untrue. You can be larger-bodied and be healthy or unhealthy and you can be slim and be healthy or unhealthy. There's so much more in between besides just the size and shape of your body. Then there's the trap of putting off your own life until you get to this body that you think you're supposed to have. People say I'm not gonna get married or have kids or buy a house or get this job or buy the dress until I get this body. We are just constantly torturing ourselves for this ideal that has been sold to us that we think we're supposed to have and that messaging is just everywhere in like you said subtle ways or not-so-subtle ways.
What do we want the people to know about diet culture and dieting? They're gonna go okay we get it we're obsessed with weight, we understand there's diet culture but what if I still want to change my body? how can I change my body and not do the diet culture thing, is that even possible?
It's a thousand percent possible and it is the only way forward. you can a hundred percent want to change yourself and love yourself at the same time.
So how do I find pleasure in foods that nourish me? How do I move my body and in a way that I enjoyed? Do I like to run? You might not! Do you like to roller skate? You might love it! I have more than one client right now that does some version of pole as their movement and I'm like yes I'm super jealous because I do not have any upper body strength to do such a thing but I'm so excited for them because they're choosing movement that is going to bring them joy rather than doing something that they don't enjoy.
It is literally the only way forward is to love yourself and you can create change but only through doing what you desire to do.
Why do you think it's so hard for people to understand? I see that it creates a lot of fear for most clients. We have that conversation at the beginning which is about like hey you deserve happiness now and we need to embody everything about what you think you're going to have in the future now so that you can change your body and take the actions that are nourishing to you. Why is that so hard for us to get?
Well, that's a tough question. I think the main reason why is that people feel like if they accept themselves the way they are now then they wouldn't actually change and they don't believe that you can love yourself at any size so they feel like I'm just giving up. I one hundred percent agree with that answer it's like acceptance is giving up but that's not true. I also think acceptance is hard for some people because you don't want to see what you're doing now a lot of times. You have to accept where you're at which means all of it, right? Right.
Instead, we just wanna jump into like I do all these great things for myself all the time but that's not me I don't take out three times a day or whatever it is. You know and it's like you have to see your whole self first and learn how to see your own truth before you can move forward and I think that's really hard to do nobody wants to admit it.
It’s really hard to look at those things because those are the habits that they put aside temporarily when they are on a diet and so they muster up enough willpower to shove down that they might emotionally eat whether from stress or sadness or something along those lines. They might not be honest about the fact that they might actually skip meals and undernourished themselves and then when they're under stress and so then they end up binging when they relax and they finally get the hunger cues and so then that cycle of restricting and feeding under various emotional states are hard to look at because there are a lot of emotions behind why we eat or don't eat.
Yes, diet culture has really demonized hunger. There's a lot of stuff that's like take this pill to reduce your hunger as if hunger is a negative thing or like we need to be constantly eating less in order to be smaller but it's not even true.
Look at Olympic athletes. They have to eat a lot of food for energy and to maintain the muscle mass they have so it really is no wonder people are frustrated.
And just to preface for future episodes and what we will talk about. There are some underlying reasons why somebody might hold on to more body fat than is their natural weight. So even if they are eating the things to fully nourish them and moving their body in a way that's joyful to them and their labs are showing something that is off or they feel inflamed, there are other reasons.
There's toxicity and environmental toxicity from our foods and all sorts of things I won't get into it.
There are some reasons why sometimes our body will hold on to more weight than it would otherwise under the same circumstances. Yeah, there's a lot of different reasons why. those are also definitely ignored with diet culture. Meanwhile, someone might be having chronic IBS and all this other stuff is going on that is not even addressed. We're definitely going to be opening up a lot more in this conversation but we wanted to talk about a little bit about diet culture because we could talk about this all day long.
It's definitely something that will weave its way into the future episodes but really wanted to just get our initial viewpoints out so we have a good starting place for what's to come. Because it's the actions that you take and the only way through, the only way to make change is to love yourself first or to at least accept yourself and then make the changes. Taking action from a place of shame and guilt and self-loathing, that's not going to create what you want. It never works when you hate yourself. It can only be so motivating and people think it's motivating. There's a lot of weight loss memes and diet memes that are self-loathing or self-deprecating like quote-unquote funny. I still laugh at them because that's like this old mindset and it's funny but then I think oh this is so wrong it just perpetuates the mindset that we have to hate ourselves to get to a new place and that is so not true.
Do you have anything to add to this first beautiful podcast that we are putting out into the world? Yes and no, obviously I could but I feel like we've really done a great job of explaining where we're at right now. We will just keep continuing this conversation.
If this topic resonated with you and if you enjoyed this short chat with Beth and I follow our podcast, DM us on Instagram at @path_nutrition. We will be back next week with a new episode. Goodbye, everyone.
