Written by: Dr. Marcella Raimondo, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Thanks to the growing awareness of the ways in which diet culture does so much harm, mainstream attitudes toward dieting and food restriction are being examined through a more critical lens. Many are looking toward health and nourishment in lieu of weight loss and calorie counting, a shift which seems to indicate movement in a more positive direction. Unfortunately, diet culture is pervasive, with a tendency to sneak into places we don’t expect it and manifest in subtle, yet no less harmful, ways. And that’s exactly what’s been happening.
Noticing the trend of movement away from conventional dieting, companies are evolving – not, as one might hope, in a mass exodus from diet culture, but instead toward efforts to make their products, originally geared toward intentional weight loss, appear disconnected from diet culture. It’s manipulative at best and harmful for most, and it perpetuates a form of oppression that essentially acts as fatphobia in disguise: healthism.
What is Healthism?
Healthism is a form of medicalization that treats issues of health and disease as existing solely on an individual level. It generalizes what it means to be “healthy” and often distills the notion of health into physically observable attributes – most commonly the size and shape of one’s body. Healthism holds individuals fully responsible for their own physical well-being, without examination of the larger systems, institutions, and ideologies in play, and treats physical health as a moral imperative: something we owe to one another. This is problematic for many reasons.
As some people are slowly growing aware of the harm perpetuated by diet culture, rhetoric shifts in ways that seem benign but are actually deeply rooted in fatphobia, albeit more subtly.
One of the most common refrains of healthism is “it doesn’t matter what you weigh – as long as you’re healthy.” As Da’Shaun Harrison says, this statement makes three assumptions:
first, that health is available to everyone;
second, that an absence of health is due to negligence and irresponsibility on the part of the impacted individual;
and third, that health is conflated with character and morality.
Companies that profit off diet culture, and more broadly the Medical Industrial Complex as a whole, capitalize off these widely-held assumptions. And in many cases, instead of selling desirability through intentional weight loss, it’s being sold through the pursuit of “health.”
Healthism, Eating Disorders, and Emotional Manipulation
It’s long been known that diet culture influences people into disordered patterns of eating that can have devastating impacts on physical and mental health. When diet culture is repackaged as programs or services relating to health, the harm it perpetuates doesn’t just go away. Its subtle nature makes it harder to detect, but it’s there nonetheless – and everyone is vulnerable to it. Just like diet culture, healthism also promotes ideologies that can spur the development, or relapse, of eating disorders.
Why? Because companies like Noom make money selling diets that they claim aren’t actually diets. For those in recovery who are aiming to improve their health, or those who are at risk for eating disorders, diets that masquerade as comprehensive health plans are little more than danger in disguise.
We see this everywhere. Recently, while waiting in line to make a purchase at a store, I caught sight of these titles on the magazine rack:
To the casual observer, these might seem like nothing more than the harmless promotion of health. To someone who’s dedicated their career to helping people recover from disordered eating patterns, however, these are just as dangerous as the blatant beauty-oriented weight loss ads we used to see more of. By playing off our emotional desire to live a long, healthy, and happy life, these magazines send the following harmful messages:
The idea that health and wellness can be “hacked,” when in reality they are unique to each individual and can look different for every single body – no one magic recipe or formula for health exists, yet ads like these keep claiming to have found it.
The notion that we don’t really love or care for ourselves if we’re not eating specific kinds of foods or prioritizing our nutritional intake at all costs.
The assumption that fatness is inherently unhealthy and that those who exist in large bodies either do not care about pursuing health, or are too lazy to do so.
The reinforcement that it’s okay – healthy, even – to engage in disordered eating patterns and behaviors, as long as we’re doing it for the right reasons (i.e., seeking wellness).
The highly ableist and discriminatory idea that wellness is something we owe to ourselves and to each other, and that those who do not or cannot achieve it have failed on a particular moral or ethical level.
The truth is, every attempt that is made to promote “health” actually upholds some system of oppression: fatphobia, classism, ableism, and white supremacy are just a few examples. Media such as these magazines targets our emotional responses, exploiting our complicated relationships with our bodies for profit for the Medical Industrial Complex and the multi-billion-dollar weight loss industry. It’s social gaslighting on a massive scale, promising us outcomes that can’t be delivered and causing us to blame ourselves when we inevitably fail to achieve those outcomes. And all too often, it either triggers the formation of eating disorders, or relapse for those in recovery.
The Takeaway:
The desire for health is a common one, often associated with nourishment, liberation, connection, and positive self-image.
Often, health is positioned as a moral proxy, and people who do not or cannot pursue this mainstream version of wellness are vilified.
More and more people are beginning to see through the transparent messaging around ideal standards of beauty.
For these reasons, companies who profit off body insecurity have begun framing weight-loss products and services as necessary for health, rather than beauty.
In truth, the ideal vision of health isn’t accessible for everyone – particularly those who are chronically ill or disabled, or those who lack the resources (money, time, energy, or space, to name a few) to prepare and eat whole, organic foods.
Whether media promotes weight loss under the guise of wellness or beauty, the result is the same: people are manipulated into fad dieting, food restriction, cycles of shame, and self-hatred, and patterns of disordered eating that can quickly escalate and become life-threatening.
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Dr. Marcella Raimondo, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Dr. Marcella Raimondo, Ph.D., MPH is a passionate and spirited clinical trainer speaking from her heart on social justice and eating disorders since 1995. Marcella currently serves as a Licensed Clinical Psychologist (PSY # 27037) in Kaiser Permanente’s eating disorder clinic in Oakland and runs a private practice. She has dedicated her life to addressing eating disorders and body justice through her treatment and activism.
