Unhealthy Diet Culture, Body Image, & Its Harmful Effect On Women
By: Michelle Richards
It is common knowledge that eating healthy and consistent exercise are key to a healthy lifestyle. At the same time, our society often emphasizes outward appearances - specifically thinness - and promotes a “quick fix” mentality as opposed to consistency when maintaining our health.
Diet culture often leads to unhealthy body image, particularly for young girls, which endangers their health.
Females have always been expected to look a certain way, an expectation that does not apply in the same way for boys and men.
When reading magazines, watching TV, or using the internet, young girls receive a certain message about how they are “supposed” to look. Oftentimes, this means thin bodies, flawless skin, and zero wrinkles or other “imperfections.”
As Christy Harrison, M.P.H., R.D., C.D.N., the author of “Anti-Diet” and the host of the “Food Psych” podcast, said in an article published in Good Housekeeping, “Diet culture has many definitions and facets but, in a nutshell, it’s a set of beliefs that worships thinness and equates it with health and moral virtue. It has become our dominant culture, often in ways that we don't even notice, since it is the water in which we swim. Diet culture creates this idea, and reinforces it at every turn that you have to be thin in order to be successful, accepted, loved, healthy.”
Judith Matz, L.C.S.W, the author of The Body Positivity Card Deck and Diet’s Survivor Handbook adds, “Think of diet culture as the lens through which most of us in this country view beauty, health, and our own bodies; a lens that colors your judgments and decisions about how you feel about and treat yourself.
Diet culture places thinness as the pinnacle of success and beauty, and in diet culture, there is a conferred status to people who are thinner, and it assumes that eating in a certain way will result in the right body size — the ‘correct’ body size — and good health, and that it's attainable for anybody who has the 'right' willpower, the 'right' determination.”
It is important that we have open conversations with our children, particularly young girls, about healthy body image, healthy eating, and proper exercise. Otherwise, we risk them believing the rhetoric that is fed to them by society and social media…that their worth is dictated by their dress size. They need to know that the “perfect” women that they see on television are not the rule, but, rather, the exception. Real life women come in all different shapes, sizes, and ages.
Our worth does not diminish as we age.
We can change this narrative by surrounding our girls with female role models who speak positively about our own bodies and lead by example in proving that beauty is much further than skin-deep. □
About the Writer
Michelle Richards lives in Wilmington, Delaware with her husband and two daughters. When she isn’t writing for H3R, Michelle works as a Care Counselor with Cerebral. She believes that access to quality, affordable Mental Health services is essential and wants to help to break the stigma of asking for support. Michelle loves the beach, reading, writing, true crime, exercising outside, watching movies with her daughters, and date nights with her husband.
Article Credits:
Michelle’s Linktree: https://linktr.ee/Shelldez
Resources: The Unbearable Weight of Diet Culture, Jessica Teich (2021) The Good Housekeeping Institute
Photographer: Monica Kozub
