Diet culture is everywhere, and sometimes it’s so well disguised that we can’t even recognise it.
From mainstream media to social media, hell, you’ll even find it in your doctor’s office, or casual conversations amongst friends. It promises us “Health”, beauty, and overall success through thinness, through the idea that if somehow we shrink our bodies, our lives will magically become so much better.
But where do these ideas even come from? And who do they serve? After 20 years in the trenches of diet culture, I finally realised it wasn’t serving me. It became clear once I started unlearning what had been fed to me that diet culture isn’t actually about our health, it’s about control, capitalism, and systemic oppression.
You might be thinking, how on earth can a little dieting be linked to systemic oppression? But let me explain!
The History of Bodily Hierarchies
We know that our bodies naturally come in all shapes and sizes, the world offers us an array of diversity when it comes to what we look like, so why are certain body types demonised while others are held on a pedestal?
Well, it comes down to bodily hierarchies, which can be traced back to the rise of colonialism. Where western ideals were not only placed on land and governance but our bodies too, people were taught to associate the western body types and thinness with “civilised” traits like discipline, moral purity and self-control, aligning thin bodies with western superiority and whiteness in contrast to the bodies of colonised people, which were often black, indigenous or from non-Eurocentric countries, and viewed as morally inferior, fat and gluttonous.
Art, Media, and the Racialisation of Fatness
In sociologist Sabrina Strings book “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia” she explores how anti-fatness is directly linked to anti-blackness, and focuses on the rise of its portrayal in art throughout the 17th-18th century, displaying black bodies as gluttonous and overly fleshy in contrast to western bodies being depicted as thin, white and modest.
These ideals began to shape a racialised bodily hierarchy where black bodies, especially if they were fat, symbolised a primitive nature and lack of control.
This was proven in colonial paintings and travel logs where African women were depicted with large bellies, breasts, and buttocks. A harrowing example of this can be seen in a Khoi Khoi woman from South Africa, named Sarah Baartman, who was considered a “freak show” attraction due to her large buttocks and body shape and was exhibited throughout Europe in the 1800s, as something to be gawked at and analysed.
Religious and Scientific Reinforcement
These bodily hierarchies continued into the 19th century, being upheld and enforced by Western religious moralism, where early diet reformers emphasised that gluttony is a vice and used black women’s bodies, often previously described as gluttonous, as the pole opposite of the ideal white Christian woman.
This coincided with the rise of race science, where pseudosciences categorised human bodies into hierarchies of worth based on their physical features by falsely claiming that some races are biologically superior to others. These racial sciences provided a false scientific basis for eugenic policies, leading to forced sterilisations and even genocides.
Sadly, these racialized bodily hierarchies did not remain confined to art and pseudoscience, they then began to inform public policy, healthcare and cultural norms, by the late 19th and 20th centuries these ideals made their way to the emerging field of health and medicine, in particularly with the introduction and application of the Body Mass Index (BMI).
The BMI: A Flawed Tool with a Dangerous Legacy
The BMI, as we so commonly know it today, was never actually designed to measure health. It was developed back in the 1830s by Belgian Astronomer and Mathematician Adolphe Quetelet and was known as The Quetelet Index. Quetelet wasn’t a doctor, and his goal wasn’t to assess health; his goal was to define the “average man” using statistical models.
The BMI equation he created was based solely on data from white European men. It doesn’t distinguish between fat and muscle, doesn’t account for fat distribution, and certainly doesn’t consider overall health.
In the late 19th century, trusted American Physiologist Ancel Keys released a “landmark” paper renaming The Quetelet Index to the Body Mass Index. In his study, he concluded that the “BMI” was the best available simple measure of body fat for population studies, but not individual diagnoses.
Shortly after this, the World Health Organisation and Centre for Disease Control and Prevention then began to include the BMI classifications as part of health standards and even though it completely ignores the differences in, muscle mass, bone density, sex, age and ethnicity, it reduces the complexity of human health, to a single number.
One that would become the cornerstone for medical fatphobia.
BMI and Capitalism: The Profit Motive
This was reinforced by insurance companies, and by the mid-20th century, the BMI had gone from a flawed statistic to a powerful gatekeeping tool in medicine. They had begun to use the BMI to categorise people into risk categories; the higher the BMI, the greater the risk.
This allowed insurance companies to increase premiums, deny coverage, refuse to cover certain treatments, or even force people to lose weight before receiving medically necessary care.
The system didn’t just reflect fatphobia, it financially incentivised it, by labelling fat people inherently “high risk” insurers can charge more and offer less, all under the guise of following “evidence based” practices and even though the BMI is not a diagnostic tool, it’s an easy shortcut in a profit driven system.
Medical fatphobia is now a well-documented experience amongst fat people.
Fat patients are often misdiagnosed or not taken seriously, doctors commonly attributing unrelated symptoms to weight alone, and preventative healthcare is often delayed or denied. Recent studies show that some fat people now fear seeking medical care altogether, due to shame or weight stigma. This, in turn, creates a deadly loop of fat people being told they’re unhealthy while systematically being denied access to adequate healthcare.
The Diet and Wellness Industry: A $427 Billion Machine
The weight loss industry thrives on these fears: the fear of fatness, the fear of judgment, the fear of not fitting in. It’s an industry worth a staggering 427 billion dollars a year, selling solutions to a problem it helps manufacture. From restrictive diets and clean eating trends to prescription injections, pills, and invasive surgeries. They offer us endless products that promise transformation, but rarely lasting health.
These solutions now often come disguised as “Wellness”, “Self-care”, and “Lifestyle changes”, making them harder to question and even easier to internalise, but the message is always clear: “Thinner is better, thinner is healthier”.
But let’s be honest, it’s not about health. It’s about control, capitalism, and systemic oppression, and these corporations are profiting off the systemic demonisation of fat bodies, pushing the narrative of shame and a cycle of false hope, with little regard for the long-term physical and psychological effects they cause.
Amidst this landscape of control, oppression, and violence against fat bodies, a powerful movement has emerged, and they will not be silenced: Fat liberation.
The Rise of Fat Liberation
Fat Liberation is more than just body positivity; it’s a political stance that seeks to dismantle the structures that oppress fat people. It recognises that anti-fatness is not just an individual issue but a systemic one, deeply entwined with racism, ableism, capitalism, and patriarchal standards.
Fat liberation demands not just acceptance but freedom: Freedom to exist without shame, equitable healthcare, access to public spaces and clothing, and the ability to define health individually.
Conclusion: Dismantling the SystemConclusion: Dismantling the System
To embrace fat liberation is to challenge the colonial and capitalist roots of bodily hierarchies.
It’s about affirming that all bodies are worthy of care, dignity, and joy, not just the ones that align with thin, Western ideals
