Diet or Disordered: Unnormalizing diet culture

Fad diets have been around for centuries. In the mid-18th century, diet pills containing arsenic became a popular weight-loss method. Lord Byron, considered the most attractive man of the Victorian era, promoted food deprivation and binge-eating. In the 1950s, people starved themselves eating copious amounts of cabbage soup. Today, with social media, diets that aren’t based on any scientific evidence are spreading to millions of people.

 

This inundation of often-false dieting advice is getting harder to ignore. Eating disorders have also reached an epidemic-level high . Hospitalizations for young women in Canada (aged 10-17) with eating disorders increased by nearly 60 per cent — or from 52 hospitalizations per 100,000 people to 82 hospitalizations per 100,000 people — between 2019 and 2021.

                                                           

Sheri Segal Glick has been living with anorexia for almost 40 years. She says our current environment is particularly difficult for people who are genetically pre-disposed to eating disorders. “If you’re susceptible to an eating disorder and you’re being faced with all of these messages to lose weight or telling you you’re not thin enough, you are going to develop anorexia,” she says.

 

Anorexia is a biopsychosocial condition, meaning there are biological, psychological, and social factors involved in the condition. Segal Glick says social pressures to look thin are rampant in our current social media landscape. These pressures can trigger the biological mechanisms and lead to anorexia.

 

Segal Glick was diagnosed with anorexia as a teenager in the late-1980s. At the time, the beauty standard was changing in the popular media, going from curvy and athletic to ‘heroin-chic.’ Segal Glick wasn’t as skinny as her two younger siblings, and her parents instilled in her that she was less cute and loveable as a result. She started restricting her food years before her diagnosis. She was only 12. First, she gave up sweets and pastries, then fried food, then snacks, then meat and bread.

 

Her family didn’t worry about her health, they praised her “self-control.” Segal Glick’s mother even told her Grade-8 teacher she was good at math because she was used to counting calories. “It turned into anorexia very quickly,” she says.

 

Segal Glick’s now 50 but speaks with such animation that it seems like these events took place more recently than they did. She wears colourful bracelets that clink together as she gestures with her hands over coffee.

 

“Probably the worst thing is this acceptance of disordered eating,” she says.

 

Disordered eating is frequently the gateway to an eating disorder. Disordered eating is any abnormal pattern of eating that limits food choices, restricts food intake, or creates emotions such as shame or guilt. This is often the case in many common diets. An eating disorder is usually when disordered eating gets to the point that the individual’s eating habits impair their health or ability to live their life normally.

 

Christa Burnette is a disordered eating counsellor at Carleton University. She says the issue with normalizing dieting and restriction is that many people mistake their eating disorder for a healthy diet. “We’re living with an illness that takes over our lives, but we don’t even realize it’s happening,” she says.

 

Burnette’s office is largely empty aside from a desk, a few chairs, and several posters advertising “kindness” and “hope” in huge, bright letters. Despite the optimism on the walls, she is pessimistic when speaking about the current state of diet culture.

 

Burnette worked at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario before joining Carleton. “The hospital, CHEO, was asking for community help to support the amount of eating disorders coming in the door. That was before COVID,” she sighs. “And then the numbers [of eating disorders] went up 67 per cent at the CHEO ER.”

 

Burnette says COVID-19 was an eating disorder’s best friend. She says people had too much time to think about their bodies, what’s going into them, and what they should look like. Burnette says social media and diet trends have only made matters worse. “Everyone has a different interpretation of what healthy is. I find there’s a lot of social media influencers that talk about healthy eating or healthy lifestyles. I see red flags.”

 

“What I eat in a day” is a popular TikTok trend in which users share everything they consume in the course of a day. It often includes a “body check” at the start of the video, where they’ll show off their bodies to the camera; this creates the assumption that if you eat like the influencer, you’ll look like them. The top “what I eat in a day” hashtag on TikTok has nearly 20 billion views. One of the first videos under the hashtag stars an influencer who claims the key to staying slim is only eating vegetables and fruit. Another man claims eating nothing but steak, salt, and butter for six months made him feel like “a superhuman.”

 

“It’s an overwhelming amount of messaging about food and bodies that is disordered that we are bombarded with every day,” says Burnette.

 

I personally came to this realization two months ago as I added Greek yogurt and cottage cheese to my shopping cart. I’m dairy sensitive and the thought of cottage cheese has always made me want to throw up, but influencers on TikTok told me if I wanted to gain muscle, I had to be eating 150g of low-fat, high-protein dairy products… so I did. Two years ago, TikTok influencers told me if I loved the environment and animals and wanted to stop putting chemicals in my body, I had to go vegan… so I did.

 

A difference of two years and I’d gone from a plant-loving, tofu-eating, ‘clean’ consumer to carnivorous and protein-obsessed.

Keelia O’Malley was also captured by the sheer number of people looking to social media for nutritional guidance. O’Malley and a team of researchers from Tulane University conducted a study into how these trending diets affect health and environmental outcomes.

 

They used the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to examine 16,000 individual diets. The pescetarian diet — characterized by restricting meat consumption but still eating fish, eggs, and dairy — scored the highest for nutritional quality. That said, O’Malley explains looking at the diets person-by-person allowed them to see that no matter how you eat there are ways to get your nutrients. Unlike what TikTok influencers say, there is no one right answer to how you should eat.

 

“One of the big takeaways was that there are multiple patterns and ways in which you can eat that are more health promoting and environmentally friendly,” she says. “It’s not black and white.” 

 

Despite the research, diet culture continues to lead countless people to normalize severe restriction.

 

This normalization led Segal Glick to believe she had mostly recovered from anorexia after being in and out of the hospital as a teenager. She went to university and law school, got married, and had three children. After having her third child, she decided to see a psychologist to clear up any remaining behaviours from her eating disorder that she could potentially pass on to her kids. The psychologist asked what her lingering behaviours were.

 

“I said ‘oh well I have to exercise a certain amount every day, I have to walk everywhere, and I measure all my food, I weigh all my food, I have to know the exact calorie count that goes into my mouth, and I can’t eat at peoples’ houses.’” The psychologist told Segal Glick if she didn’t still have anorexia, she should be able to just stop these behaviours. “I went home and I was like ‘I can’t stop it.’ That was the moment I realized I still had anorexia.”

 

Dieting and restricting has become so normalized that around 50 per cent of teenage girls and 20-30 per cent of teenage boys have already attempted weight loss at some point in their life. According to the Canadian Paediatric Society, our bodies are meant to grow and change through puberty. Children who diet are at risk of stunted growth, nutritional deficiencies, and mental health conditions.

 

Burnette says putting children on diets is too common. “Kids dieting is a problem,” she says. “They need the nutrients to allow their bodies to grow properly.”

 

Since Segal Glick was originally diagnosed, diet information has become even more accessible to children.

 

“When we were looking at magazines, even though we didn’t necessarily know that it was airbrushed, we did know it wasn’t the general population,” says Segal Glick. “When we’re looking at social media with kids who aren’t informed it’s really easy for them to think everyone looks like these filtered images.”

 

Burnette echoes these thoughts. “Messaging about bodies in our culture is a huge problem, it’s just much more accessible now. Young people have the ability to cruise and peruse social media without any questioning of it.”

 

Emma Johnston researches algorithmic culture and social trends. She’s focussed her research on Bloom Greens and Superfoods, a viral powder endorsed by several of my favourite influencers. The company claims Bloom will “relieve uncomfortable bloat, support gut health, and promote energy.” On TikTok, anyone from Alix Earle, a popular influencer with eight million followers, to your neighbourhood micro influencer with 2,000 followers, can be seen spooning the dark green powder into water and mixing it with a frother. It's just another trend in the ‘clean’ foods’ aesthetic without any actual clear health impacts.

 

Johnston says consumers latch on to key words like “debloats” and “weight loss” without really knowing if the product works. “If that’s all you’re hearing, it’s harmful,” she says. People want a quick fix; it’s why magazines have been printing headlines like “drop 50lbs in one month” for decades.

 

“I’ve been victim to it, I’ve seen so many diet trends on TikTok in particular,” Johnston says.

 

So who is to blame for all of this. Influencers? Parents? The calorie labels Ontario makes chain restaurants put on their menus? Burnette says it’s a perfect storm.

 

“People are unintentionally reinforcing negative body image messaging all the time. It’s not on purpose, it’s because they don’t know better.” She says most of her patients have at least one parent who struggled with disordered eating. As for the influencers on social media, they probably think they’re helping by sharing how they met their fat loss goals. But most have no expertise on the topic.

 

Burnette says we need to stop normalizing these behaviours. This is what causes disordered eating to go unnoticed and manifest into eating disorders. Most of the time when patients get to Burnette, they’ve been living with an eating disorder for several years.

 

Segal Glick says the solution goes well beyond food. She says we need to change the way we talk about ourselves and to work together to critique diet culture, not our bodies. “It’s so normalized for women to talk about our bodies or dieting or to say disparaging things about our bodies. That should just not be acceptable. That should not be something we talk about,” she says, emphasizing every word.

 

“It’s such a waste of our precious lives to try to be smaller, cause you’re also making your life smaller.”