Diet Culture

Who among us hasn’t fantasized about dropping a few extra pounds? Who hasn’t read through the ten sure-fire tips on how to LOSE WEIGHT AND LOOK GREAT? Who hasn’t, at some point or another, gone on a diet?

It is nearly impossible to find such a person. Young and old, religious and not, female and male, all of us are regularly goaded by media moguls, health experts, and self-help stars, to watch what we eat. We will look better, feel better, and be healthy too!

Ours is a diet culture. We are obsessed with food—with what, when, how, and why to eat. We are equally obsessed with what happens to our bodies when we do—with what they weight, how much fat they carry, and how they look. Caught in the pincers of these dueling obsessions, we turn to diets to save us.

So pervasive is this diet culture that its many myths and rituals shape our experience of food, regardless of whether we are dieting or not.

What are those myths? We believe, for example, that food equals pleasure, and that more food equals more pleasure. We believe that our desire for such pleasure makes us fat. We believe that our best response is to harness the might of our minds over and against our desiring bodies. We believe that all it takes is will power.

As we believe, so we practice. We tighten our belts. We exercise all our frugal, practical, puritan restraint, and deny ourselves eating pleasure. With such faithful practice, we believe, we will have the lean and mean bodies we want.

The dream soon morphs into a nightmare. For the harder we work to control our desires, the stronger they grow. The more obsessed with food we become. We grow weary of the struggle against ourselves, and, in a moment we aren’t fully alert, we give up the fight. We eat what we know we shouldn’t. We blame ourselves and vow to try harder next time. It is a vicious cycle. And it is addictive. The rush of self control we experience at the beginning of any diet is impossible to sustain.

The illusion is crumbling.

Diets don’t work. As Gina Kolata’s Rethinking Thin reports, such is the conclusion of obesity researchers. To date, scientists have not been able to isolate a simple fat storage mechanism. The pathways are not only plural and variable, they are thoroughly entangled with the circuitry wiring our emotional, social, and intellectual selves.

So too, it seems that there are biological cues for regulating weight regardless of whether we are obese or not. People who lose many pounds manifest signs of starvation even when still overweight; while people forced to gain lose the weight again quickly. Some scientists argue that the expanding girth of Americans is a genetic capacity akin to height that our resource-rich environment is allowing us to express.

Kolata hopes that this information will liberate her readers from the tyranny of dieting myth and practice. However, it leaves a strange taste in the mouth. If we aren’t happy with what we are eating or with how we look, it won’t do to stop dieting and embrace our bodies as they are. How are we supposed to eat?

Cooks and commentators are jumping into the diet vacuum to tell us how, when, what, and why to eat. We should eat slow food (Maxine Waters), local food (Barbara Kingsolver), whole food (Michael Pollan), fresh and organic food (Anna Lappe, Nina Planck).

Yet, these efforts, as valuable as they are in raising awareness, don’t go far enough in challenging the myths of our diet culture. They serve our minds with alternative plans to impose upon those Twinkie-loving bodies of ours. The struggle continues.

We need more. We need a shift in our experience of eating. We are not information-rich minds fighting ignorant bodies. We are bodily selves. Our movements in thinking, sensing, and ingesting food are making us. And the movements we are making as we battle fat are making us unhappy.

There is an alternative. We can learn to find wisdom in our desire for food.

This task will be our focus for the next two months. This blog will discuss everything food. We will revisit the myths and rituals of diet culture one by one, and investigate how they fail us. In these failures, we will find new possibilities for thinking, feeling, and acting in relation to food that do not pit “us” against our desire for food.

We can learn to follow the arc of our eating pleasure to a sense of enough.
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Our desire for food is fundamental. Without food we cannot live. As with the movement of breathing, the movements we make as we choose, purchase, reach, chew, swallow, churn, absorb, and metabolize make us. Literally. And they not only make our bodies, they make us into people who think and feel and act in relation to food as we do. Eating is infused with emotions, enabled by a matrix of social relationships, and inflected by the dieting myths we have ingested along with our chips. It cannot not be.

The key to finding wisdom in our desire for food, then, lies in cultivating a sensory awareness of how our diet myths and rituals are making us. When we do, we will find in our patterns of frustration and disappointment the clues we need to move towards our eating pleasure.

Action: How do you feel about eating? When you sense a pang of hunger, how do you respond? How does that sensation register? What is it about food that gives you the most pleasure? Think of all the ingredients—taste, timing, hunger, availability, company, sustenance, source, price, quantity, feeling in your mouth, belly, and blood. What is it about food that makes it so enjoyable--so seductive--or not? Next time you are eating a meal, move through the cycle of breaths. What happens?

Next week: Food equals pleasure—or does it?