“If I didn’t change soon, I was going to live a life where my major relationship was with a bottle of wine, and I’d finally die fat and alone,” says main character Bridget Jones in the 2001 cult classic film “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” The movie centers around Jones, whose weight is depicted as a major source of discontent in her life, as she considers herself extremely fat and believes she can only find love and happiness by losing weight. Although Jones eventually comes to terms with her body, her initial inner monologue is one that many people relate to, as it is constantly reinforced in society, spreading the message that not being skinny means you can’t be happy.
Several forms of media created in the early 2000s such as “Mean Girls,” “Friends” and “Shallow Hal” have reflected the belief that fatness equates to unhappiness and unhealthiness. The only reason Monica from the popular sitcom “Friends” lost weight was because someone made fun of her for it, and her former body serves as a running joke in the series. However in reality, weight is dependent upon a variety of factors like genetics and medical history, and the “healthiest weight” for each person varies greatly. Ideas that center around holding skinniness as synonymous with healthiness and beauty standards are a key part of diet culture, an issue that has remained prevalent for decades.
Although diet culture has made several appearances throughout history in 80’s weight loss drugs and 2000’s films, now — as social media infiltrates every aspect of our lives — diet culture is also reaching a larger audience and younger demographic. This can be seen through the “clean girl” aesthetic that romanticizes eating and living healthy, but can veer into orthorexia. Videos following this aesthetic consist of fitness routines and diets that emphasize discipline in order to gain the perfect body and often lead to body dissatisfaction in viewers who cannot achieve their “ideal physique.” People’s reliance on online platforms means that messages like that are getting spread to everyone, from insecure teens to young, impressionable children.
Furthermore, popular online figures such as Instagram and former Tiktok influencer Liv Schmidt have gained a following by promoting calorie-cutting diets and endorsing the belief that people should cut back on food intake, not for health reasons, but simply in order to achieve skinniness. As Schmidt once said, “It’s not a sin to want to be thin.” This mindset can lead to physical health issues, because it encourages extreme dieting and restricts regular food intake. By glamorizing food restriction and treating the body as something to be controlled rather than taken care of, the attitudes of influential figures online end up making unhealthy behaviors seem like something we should aspire to.
Similar to Schmidt, many online influencers claim to advocate for healthiness by promoting nutrition facts, workouts or popular diets, but are often spreading false news and ultimately harming people’s physical and mental health. Over half of the content creators who speak on body image talk about it negatively, curating this pessimistic content towards teens and other young adults, infiltrating their feeds with repetitive messages that their bodies aren’t the beauty standard. By fostering low self-esteem in vulnerable adolescents, online creators often make many teens feel pressure to change their bodies to fit in, and even if some achieve their ideal body, 95% of dieters end up regaining the weight they lost in one to five years, leading to further feelings of shame known as body grief.
As a result of this cycle of body grief and low-self esteem, many adolescents develop body dysmorphia, which can evolve into anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa, which are both eating disorders that are associated with losing weight. One concerning trend that perpetuates this harmful mindset is the “girl dinner” trend recently popularized on social media, where users post snack-like plates in place of full meals. By normalizing this behavior, it shows the idea that young people skipping essential nutrients is okay, even though their growing bodies need them. This sparks a chain of negative physical effects that ultimately hurt people’s bodies and puts them in the category of “unhealthy” that they were trying to escape.
By contrast, advocates of diet culture may argue that, despite promoting restrictive eating habits, diet culture can still do its goal and raise awareness about “healthier” living. They believe that it encourages individuals to be more mindful of their food choices and overall well-being. They also suggest that it can have a positive impact on people’s lifestyles by emphasizing the importance of regular exercise and physical fitness, potentially leading to improved health outcomes.
However, while some exercise programs and diets may prove beneficial to certain people, not all bodies are the same and not all people will get the same outcome after following the same trend. For example, in 2023, researchers found that nearly two-thirds of the most popular fitness influencer accounts promoted body ideals that were unhealthy or unrealistic. Despite the well known health issues associated with diet culture, many still find themselves following its ideals due to comments on social media platforms that are often cruel and judgemental. Hate comments like “please eat less and go to the gym more,” or “you’re still not worthy,” and even the patronizing “guys don’t be mean to her she already has too much on her plate” can be found under videos when someone doesn’t fit into traditional beauty standards, pressuring many into changing for societal approval.
By tackling diet culture from a biological perspective, we can both dismantle the stigma that being skinny is synonymous with health and establish the fact that fatness is not an indicator of some sort of failure, reducing the pressure people face from others. We can improve education on the diversity in appearance of healthy bodies by implementing curriculum on realistic nutrition standards in schools from a young age, starting in elementary school and getting specific in freshman bio classes. Additionally, working as a community to intentionally expand beauty standards so that they are more inclusive through media and advertisements will make it so no one else has to endure years of television telling them they don’t “look right.” By doing this, feelings of “abnormality” teens may develop in the future will fade as they will know that there are various ways a body can be healthy, destigmatizing divergence from beauty standards.
Despite the mountains of scientific research that disprove diet culture, the concept is still around because it has never really been about promoting healthiness; it’s always been about forcing people who don’t fit into the beauty standard to change themselves. And, students at MVHS, like any other teenagers, are vulnerable to these problems, so we need to take it upon ourselves to educate ourselves better as the lack of knowledge surrounding what is a “healthy body” clouds our judgment. MVHS and other schools can do this by implementing a stronger curriculum on the relationship between weight, health and image in freshman biology classes.
Another solution is adding more advisories that talk about the importance of nutrition and the dangers associated with lacking it. By taking direct efforts like these to improve and amend the information on self-health MVHS already spreads, we as a community can begin to educate our family members and friends, shedding much needed light on this issue. This will stop the spread of unhealthy mindsets in teens by educating them before they can fall victim to online manipulation. Only then can we reevaluate beauty standards and ultimately, redefine diet culture.
