Defining "Diet Culture" "Weight Stigma" & "Fatphobia"
/You have probably heard the terms diet culture, weight stigma or fat phobia before. I get a lot of questions about those terms and what exactly they mean. It seems as if they are often used on social media channels without much explaining. I think it is very important to fully understand what they mean and why they are so harmful to our physical and mental health.
Diet Culture
You might think diet culture only applies to those who are currently on a diet. However, diet culture is a whole system of beliefs that a lot of us carry because we grew up being taught certain things about food and weight. Christy Harrison, author of the book Anti-Diet, and host of the podcast Food Psych (if you don’t already, go listen to it!) breaks diet culture down as follows:
A system that worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue. This can lead you to spend your whole life thinking you’re broken just because you don’t look like the thin “ideal”.
Promoting weight loss as a means of attaining higher status. This can make you feel compelled to spend a large amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body.
The demonization of certain ways of eating and glorifying others. This belief forces you to become highly aware of what you’re eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your intuitive pleasure.
A system that oppresses people who don't match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms certain groups (such as people in larger bodies or people of color). The oppression can damage both their mental and physical health.
You don’t have to be dieting and weight loss does not have to be in the center of attention to be stuck in diet culture. There are a lot of people who firmly believe they are not on a diet; they just “eat clean” or “value their health” but their behaviors quickly slip into the culture of dieting. Demonizing one food, while believing other foods are superior is exactly where diet culture sneaks into our life. The dieting industry is working very hard to keep us in the mindset that “food is medicine” and keeps adjusting the messaging according to trends. In order to move away from diet culture and heal our relationship with food, we need to understand that all foods fit into a healthy lifestyle and there is no food that can replace rest, mental health, or social support.
Weight Stigma
Also referred to as weight-based discrimination or weight-bias, weight stigma is a form of discrimination based on a person’s weight. It can be extremely damaging to one’s physical and mental health. Continuous stigmatization increases the risk for psychological issues, such as depression or poor body image. This ultimately leads to increased risk for eating disorders.
Weight stigma happens in all areas of life: at work, school, in the media, and even in healthcare settings. Research shows that physicians and other medical staff are very likely to express weight-bias. Healthcare providers have less respect for patients in bigger bodies and are likely to spend less time with them because they report it to be a “waste of time”. Additionally, heavier people get worse care: they are often ignored or advised to simply lose weight for each health problem they experience. The same study found that people with a higher BMI are three times more likely than people in a “normal” BMI range to be denied appropriate medical care. As a result, people tend to avoid seeking medical care and feel bad about themselves, almost feeling like a failure. This is very damaging to both mental and physical health. Stigmatized patients may get stuck in a vicious cycle of dieting and binge eating. Increased cortisol levels (a hormone that gets released when we are stressed) are believed to play a large role in weight gain.
This bias we have is rooted in diet culture and the belief that only the “ideal” body can be healthy. To change this, we need to understand that health can exist at every size and that every person has the right to equal and fair treatment.
Fatphobia
Fatphobia is the fear of fat bodies and causes us to cultivate the negative stereotypes against people living in larger bodies (or hatred towards ourselves). It is deeply rooted in diet culture and leads us to express high levels of weight-bias. Fat phobia also goes hand in hand with class privilege, thin privilege, or the idealization of white bodies which are all problematic aspects of our society (check out the book Fearing The Black Body by Sabrina Strings to learn more about the racist roots of diet culture). Many larger bodied folks are just as healthy as people who have a BMI within the “normal” range. It is harmful to assume that just because a person looks different than our ideal, they must be unhealthy.
To measure the prevalence of fat phobic behaviors, researchers have created a Fat Phobia Scale. When this scale was used in a group of people, it turned out that young, average weight females are much more likely to be fat phobic than males or people in larger bodies. Another research article found that those who were fat phobic are likely to describe bigger people with "likes food", "overeats, "inactive", or "no will power" which highlights the extreme biases society holds against bigger bodies.
Fat phobia is rooted in the irrational belief that being bigger means being unhealthy. It is irrational because weight does not determine health and we cannot tell someone's health simply by looking at their body. There are many people who are actually unhealthy but live in thin bodies and yet still get better treatment than healthy “overweight” people. Do you see how this is problematic? To dismantle the fatphobic beliefs we have, we need to emphasize that it is impossible to know anything about a person’s health based on how they look.