How are we doing after '00s diet culture?
An RD shares what a healthy relationship with food looks like today.
TW: This story discusses disordered eating.
When I started at Best Health magazine five years ago, the majority of our most-clicked stories were of the weight loss variety. Five reasons your new diet isn’t giving you the results you hoped for. What to eat to burn belly fat. A weight-loss meal plan to lose 10 pounds in six weeks. Five ways to stop premature ejaculation. Wait, what? Oh yes—our other most popular stories were about improving a subpar sex life, but we’ll save that for another newsletter.
Now, my first year at the mag was around the same time the Body Positivity Movement came around, and suddenly (finally) weight loss stories were being recognized for all that they were—fat-phobic and damaging to our mental and physical health. So we, like other wellness mags including Self and Women’s Health dropped our weight loss-oriented content completely. Meaning, we stopped producing new stories focused around weight, and deleted or buried the old ones.
This change was major: Millennials (in particular) grew up not being able to escape weight loss propaganda in magazines—or anywhere for that matter. We were inundated with fat jokes in sitcoms, pictures of stick-thin celebs on entertainment shows, and blog posts highlighting actress’s cellulite on sites like Perez Hilton. The messages were loud and clear: You had to be thin or you’d be embarrassed. A decade later, it wasn’t enough to just consume as few calories as possible—the calories also had to be from SuPeRfOoDs. It was the age of orthorexia, an obsession with eating only foods that were deemed “good” and demonizing anything that didn’t come from Whole Foods.
Flash forward to the late 2010s and people began realizing how problematic our universal weight obsession had been, and poof, diet content has been wiped away like it never existed. A healthy relationship with food is now deemed as eating whatever you want without guilt. And as for dieting? Don’t you dare mention that dirty word.
The problem: Shifting away from that weight-obsessed programming isn’t as easy as clearing cache from our mental hard drive. We need to know how. There was a meme going around Instagram this week about what not to say to Girl Scouts offering you a box of cookies. You know what people might say—something about being concerned about eating the whole box, suggesting they fear gaining weight or eating too much “junk food” (using quotations because it’s a horrible term). We can imagine how this language impacts young girls, and we know firsthand how easy it is to adopt. However, while many of us have gotten good at not voicing these thoughts out loud, it’s hard not to still have them.
“I'm still trying to unlearn these ideas about what I 'should' look like,” wrote fellow millennial Stacy Lee Kong in a story for Friday Things in 2021. “No lie: on Tuesday…I literally thought to myself, ‘are you hungry, or did you not drink enough water today?’” she wrote, referring to this popular tweet. I checked in with Stacy to see how she’s doing, three years later, and she said she’s been trying hard to break up with these habits and has gotten better at not seeing foods as good and bad. “I haven’t doubted whether I was actually hungry in a long time. But I definitely still catch myself thinking about the habits, even if I don’t actively do them.”
I hear that—old weight-obsessed speak keeps gurgling back up into my head too. For example, every day I feel like I have a group of comments-section-like people in my brain yelling old and new contradicting weight loss/health-obsessed speak at me. You just finished off another brick of butter? It’s okay because you’ve been enjoying it on fresh baguettes all week and that’s made you happy! But you go through a pack every single week, no? Yes but it’s okay because it’s good to have fat with every meal. But that’s not a healthy fat—how’s your cholesterol doing?
Texas-based registered dietitian Kathleen Garcia-Benson, also a millennial, tells me she has a lot of 30-something clients who go to her confused about how a healthy relationship with food should look today. She says the book Intuitive Eating by dietitians Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch helped her personally deconstruct her food-obsessed mindset, and she used it create a program to help others do the same.
“It takes time to build positive food voices,” says Kathleen. But you’re on your way to improving how you talk and think about food when you implement these five practices:
Be nonjudgmental about food choices and eat without guilt: “Food is neutral,” says Kathleen. It’s neither good nor bad, because it always serves a purpose, whatever that may be. For example: Graham crackers will provide you with more energy than, say, kale, helping you have a better workout. A side of fries might offer more comfort than sautéed greens, delivering a salty crunch of happiness.
Pay attention to your body's signals and wants: Stay in tune with how your body feels and recognize what it needs, she says, whether that be more fibre to aid in digestion or more fats to help keep you satiated.
Don’t restrict foods: Kathleen advises against restricting the foods you love, which can help prevent binging on them when they’re in sight. Aim to stay in the middle in the restrict-binge pendulum.
Cope with challenges without self-criticism: Sometimes, the best food option is the convenient one, and that’s totally fine.
Nourish your body: Kathleen says people often reach for more processed foods that aren’t so nourishing when they’re actually not eating enough. “Once you eat more of the food that has the nourishment your body needs, you end up not wanting as much of those other foods,” she says.
This week, I cut my butter consumption in half—for absolutely zero reason but because that one guy may have had a good point about my cholesterol. But I feel like my relationship with food since moving to Paris has been the healthiest it’s ever been, and it’s because I’ve inadvertently followed Kathleen’s advice: Eat foods that make your body feel good and be healthy, and never say no to the ones you really love.
(Confession: I had to re-write that sentence about Paris three times because I used language that demonized pastries, calling them my weakness. Unlearning what diet culture’s taught us certainly takes a lot of time and effort.)
Until next Sunday,
Renée