DownloadWhat causes and maintains diet culture?
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Building a positive relationship with food and your body
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Body Image and Healthy Eating
Session 7
Breaking free from diet culture
Track your progress
Normal eating or disordered eating?
Drag and drop the sentences into the correct bubble below...
Disordered eating
This is correct
Normal eating
Incorrect! Try again
Do you think the statements below are normal eating or disordered eating?
Drag the sentences into the correct bubble
Sometimes overeating and sometimes undereating
Avoiding whole food groups due to food rules (all carbs are 'bad')
Food and weight occupying most of your waking thoughts
Allowing food to have moral value (eating a specific food makes you a bad person)
Measuring and weighing food
Choosing desired foods without guilt
Eating regular balanced meals and snacks of normal portion (e.g. 3 larger meals and small snack or multiple smaller snacks)
Meeting nutritional needs through varied diet
Ignoring your body's hunger signals
Being able to maintain a healthy body through regular and relaxed intake
Answers
What does 'normal'
eating look
like?
Includes
social foods.
Includes having
varied food
groups.
Variable in the
amount and type.
Usually comprises of
3 main meals
and 2-3 snacks, however,
this can vary based
on many factors
e.g. how active
you are, your appetite,
the environment
etc.
Flexible.
Listening to hunger
and fullness cues.
Eating regularly is
the best way to
manage appetite.
Enjoying your food.
Sometimes
eating
fast food or
takeaways.
Using some
restraint in your
food selection
to get the right
balance
of foods.
What affects our ability
to eat 'normally'?
Take a moment to list some ideas:
What we read on social
media, magazines and the internet.
The eating habits
observed or learnt
from childhood.
Pressures from
peers and society
to look a certain
way.
Our knowledge of food and
what normal eating
behaviours are.
The diet culture
we live in.
Diet culture
A system that values weight, shape and size over health and wellbeing!
What does diet culture mean to you?
Labelling
foods
Ignoring body
cues
Associating
worth with
how you look
Equating thinness
with health
Associating
worth with what
you eat
Food rules
Food anxiety
Avoiding foods
too high in fats,
carbs or calories
Food label gives
you permission
to eat
Eliminating food
groups
Food guilt
Examples of
diet culture!
Avoiding
situations
because of food
Feeling or need
to justify eating
Exercise for
punishment
Diet talk
Complimenting
weight loss
Scale dictates
happiness or
worth
Believing you must
take supplements
for health
It's my cheat day!
This is so bad for you.
I start my new diet tomorrow.
What influences diet culture?
Advertising!
The UK diet industry is worth $2 billion a year
Competition and comparison
Social
media
Things to bear in mind...
Anyone can call themselves a "nutritionist".
It is not a legally protected title – an Instagram “nutritionist guru" may have no qualification.
Research reveals social media influencers give bad diet and fitness advice.
Breaking food rules
His
Stop comparing your food choices to someone else’s.
Hers
It’s okay if you eat more than someone else, man or woman!
Do you have any rules around how you eat or the foods you eat?
Do you have any deliberately avoided foods?
Make some notes below...
Most days
Eats a mix of both.
Also no food rules
Having grapes for dessert because it’s what you want.
Some days
Eats mostly processed foods.
Other days
Eats mostly 'whole' foods.
Most days
Eats a mix of both.
Mental
Not physically hungry but have a craving for some chocolate.
Hunger
Totally okay, eat mindfully to identify satisfaction and enjoy without guilt!
Using your list of rules and avoided foods. Cut these up into individual pieces of paper and fold to place in a jar.
Choose one or more out of the jar to challenge each week.
You can challenge that rule as frequently as daily or as little as once in the week.
Challenging food rules
and avoided foods
Consider where this rule came from:
Is it based on evidence and a credible source?
Is it relevant to your age group?
Is it relevant to your gender?
Is it designed for a healthy population or for medical purposes?
Consider the impact of the rules or avoided foods
on other parts of your life:
Does this rule or avoided food stop you from being able to do social activities?
Does it stop you attending social events?
Does it impact your mood negatively?
Does it negatively impact your physical health? Such as, fatigue, illness,
dizziness, weight, energy levels etc.
Note: It will likely take more than one attempt, so consider placing them back in the jar for another attempt.
The harm of diet culture
Harmful to health
Normalises disordered eating
Dominates your thoughts
Promotes eating disorders
Steals joy from life
Waste of time
Waste of money
Increases guilt and shame
Makes digestion worse
Increases risk of physically ill health
Hurts relationships
Exercise becomes punishment
What are your take home messages about diet culture?
Why diets don’t work
Diets are usually short term interventions focused on rigid, strict and restricting food plans with the aim of losing weight.
Physiological and psychological effects:
- Diets are often overly prescriptive in the deficit of intake that leads to semi-starving of the body and physical body feeling deprived. Physiologically and psychologically, the body starts to increase it’s signalling to get what it needs… food.
- Young people may feel like they are constantly thinking about food, preoccupied by making food choices or have a building sense of craving food.
- This deprivation of brain and body can lead to overconsumption of food intake and poor food choices, which can undo the aims of the initial diet.
- Following overconsumption, young people may then feel guilty about eating too much and feel a need to restrict further to make up for the overeating. This leads to a vicious cycle.
Creation of food rules:
- Diets usually promote labelling foods into categories of 'good foods' and 'bad foods'.
- Psychologically, this can lead to over restriction of the 'bad foods' and significant guilt if a young person gives in and eats a 'bad food'. Eating a bad food or banned food, can make a young person feel like they have failed in their diet.
- This can trigger thoughts that they might as well eat as much as they can since they failed anyway, with a view of then going back to denying themselves the food in the future.
Diet culture influence
Diets are usually short term interventions focused on rigid, strict and restricting food plans with the aim
of losing weight.
In the body image sessions, one task was to complete two self-worth pie charts. One chart focused on aspects currently highlighted as influencing your self-worth, and the second pie chart focused on how you would like your future self-worth pie chart to look (based on goals, values, beliefs and desires).
In a blank pie chart, draw out how much space dieting, or controlling what you eat and how you look takes up.
Are there other aspects of your life that have been neglected due to your focus on diet and image?
How would you like your pie chart to look in regard to what you hold important?
Some ideas...
Build awareness
Begin to notice the messages around you that are from diet culture. This includes conversations about weight, body shape and dieting.
Know the facts
Recognise the unhelpfulness of diet culture. Know that skinny doesn’t always equal healthy. Remember why fats and sugars are ok, and even needed, in our diets.
Walk away from diet culture
When you see it say “no not today” to diet culture.
It’s ok to leave these conversations – or even call them out! Talk about something else.
Do something else – engage in hobbies, voluntary work or learning something new.
Surround yourself with anti-diet culture messages
Listen to podcasts and follow social media around intuitive eating and body kindness.
Find friends that have similar beliefs to you.
Empower others to break free of diet culture.
Create a diet culture free zone
Clean up your social media feeds.
Avoid diet products – food and drinks, supplements, books and magazines.
A healthy relationship to food is not based on a restrictive diet.
You are awesome as you are!
Don't go on a diet.
Superfoods don’t exist.
All food is neutral.
Challenging diet culture
How can we challenge diet culture?
Can you think of a good magazine or news headline to challenge diet culture?
Try to choose what you genuinely want.
Think about how hungry you are, and remember some of the mindful eating and intuitive eating ideas discussed in the previous presentation.
Try not to order based on any food rules
you have or diet culture influences.
Task
Ordering off a menu
What would you like to order today?
The pad Thai because
they like the cuisine and
peanut taste.
Task
What did you order and why?
Examples from other young people:
The quesadilla
because they love
cheese.
The souvlaki because it
reminded them of a
holiday in Greece.
Reflections
Well Done!
- Completed
You have
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My Notes
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