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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
