Has saying you’re on a diet become the new taboo?

Between body positivity and weight-loss jabs, admitting to counting calories can feel like a source of shame. Helen Coffey investigates our shifting relationship with ‘diet culture’ and argues that thinking about how we fuel our bodies shouldn’t automatically be demonised.

In January, like every “New Year, New You” cliché in the book, I started a diet. In the time-honoured tradition immortalised by Bridget Jones and her famous red diary, I stripped off, creaked myself onto the scales, winced at the result, and diligently recorded the numbers in a freshly downloaded weight-loss app.

Keen to finally take my health seriously after a lifetime of alternating between carb-binging and pecking at spartan diet “snacks” that barely resembled food, I fully committed to the plan. My kitchen cupboards were soon stacked with quinoa and chia seeds and “nutritional yeast”, whatever the heck that was; my fridge shelves groaned with cottage cheese and greens and Greek yoghurt. I made every nutritionally balanced meal from scratch, stopped drinking anything other than water and herbal tea, kicked my refined sugar and snacking habits and strove to exercise four times a week. Within a month, I had lost more than a stone, was sleeping like a log and my mental health had never been better.

It wasn’t the first January diet I’d ever embarked upon, but this time around there was one stark difference: the whole endeavour was tinged with shame. Being “on a diet” felt like my dirty little secret, something sordid to “admit to” rather than being a cause for positivity. Although I knew my reasons were sound – overweight, alcohol dependent and eating processed crap 80 per cent of the time, I wanted more than anything to simply take care of my body for a change – I found myself proffering caveats, apologies and excuses any time I had to come out of the diet closet.

“I’m really just doing it for my health!” I’d say, madly overcompensating with cringe-making enthusiasm. “You don’t need to worry, I’m not going to get fixated! I’ve got a healthy relationship with my body! I love my body! Ha ha ha!!!”.

Some friends were quietly supportive; others immediately radiated concern, asking probing questions as if triaging me for an eating disorder. What had brought this on? Had I really explored my own internal motives? Why was I not eating breakfast – surely that wasn’t safe? (I had started out on an intermittent fasting plan – it was completely safe.) I felt the need to explain myself, over and over again, and provide endless reassurance that I was “OK, really, I promise”.

If I was struck by the fact that making lifestyle changes to better my mental and physical health had provoked embarrassment and guilt in myself – and frequently negative knee-jerk reactions in others – I was struck even more by how much diet culture has changed over the last 20 years.

To once again reference Ms Jones, Helen Fielding’s yo-yo dieting heroine – eternally preoccupied as she was with the number on the scales and her wildly fluctuating daily calorie intake – was representative of an entire generation. In the Nineties and Noughties, every woman I knew seemed to be on some brand of insane diet constantly and was entirely open about that fact. People would breezily tell you they were “on Atkins!” or the cabbage soup diet, drink SlimFast shakes in plain view and bring celery stick-stuffed Tupperware into work. I still remember doing my first ever “detox” as a teen – it consisted of a 24-hour fast before gradually reintroducing minuscule amounts of raw vegetables over the following three days – and starting WeightWatchers with my pal at the age of just 16, despite having a perfectly healthy BMI. During my GCSE revision, I was also learning the number of “points” in every single supermarket product off by heart (unnecessary knowledge I still carry with me to this day).

I’m under no illusions; none of this was “healthy”. Diet culture was so toxic yet normalised that it has prompted a generation of women to look back and realise they were brainwashed from their earliest years, resulting in a warped relationship with food and their bodies. Social media is awash with videos of millennials sharing clips from the 2000s – tabloids branding slim, gorgeous A-listers like Jessica Simpson “fat”, or TV presenters forcing female guests such as Victoria Beckham to get on the scales live on air – and blaming them for kicking off a lifetime of disordered eating.

When you grew up amid a Wild West media cycle that called size 10 women “curvy”, speculated on celebrities’ mental health any time they put on a kilo, and championed a rail-thin aesthetic branded “heroin chic”, it’s inevitable that the topic will be a fraught one. It’s not something that most of us are capable of being even remotely “objective” about, attached as it is to our deepest adolescent wounds and insecurities. In this context, the ingrained mistrust of the word “diet” and anxiety tangled up with anything even remotely approaching restrictive eating makes perfect sense.