What is Diet Culture and Does it Affect us in Menopause?
What is Diet Culture and Does it Affect us in Menopause?
Google “what is DIET CULTURE?”
and you will get many different responses.
Many of them from women who have no idea what diet culture feels like in menopause.
Diet Culture. Does it Affect us in Menopause?
You bet it does.
The question is, are you able to see it’s effect on you? It’s an effect that has built over a lifetime.
Shifting your thinking about what health means in menopause might mean a shift in your thinking.
DIET THINKING.
You need to UNDERSTAND what diet culture is, before you decide whether or not to UNLEARN diet culture, in the first place.
What IS Diet Culture?
The term diet culture is used to define a belief system.
Diet culture is a belief system that promotes thinness as health.
It’s a belief that being thin is preferred, over other things, like your mental well being, or even gentle nutrition.
Diet culture is also:
A big business.
A set of rules based on control.
Ignores cultural foods.
Based on racism. Wellness and whiteness go hand in hand.
That deserves a whole other blog post.A way people bond. How many times have you praised your friends for losing weight? It’s a form of bonding and belonging. What are you really saying when you praise someone for losing weight?
A way people segregate others.
Sells thin as the way to health.
A way to moralize food, as in good or bad, and ultimately make you feel like YOU are good or bad as a person.
A negative influence on self image.
A potential gateway to eating disorders and disordered eating.
As you move into menopause, with conflicting feelings about your inevitably changing body, diets will not help you with the emotional shifts that come with aging.
This system quietly judges you, when you can’t quite get with the program. With all the hormonal changes, the NATURAL EVOLUTION OF AGING, and living in a society that values youthfulness, weight loss promoting diets may leave you feeling less than human in menopause.
Diet culture also ignores:
Diversity and inclusion.
Genetics.
ACE’s or Adverse Childhood Events, that may play into your food relationship.
Your Social Determinants of Health: things like your education, financial statues, race, and work environment, which all play into health. =
What is Diet Culture in Menopause and it’s link to overall health?
With news that focuses on statistics about heart disease, diabetes, and dementia, YES, we worry about our own health.
But is dieting the answer to these conditions?
I don’t think so.
Yet many women in their 50’s have high health anxiety, and worry about longevity and staying free from chronic disease.
Weight loss is positioned to keep you from disease. Calorie counting may decrease much needed nutrients at this life stage, and decrease your gut bacteria due to restriction of food groups.
Nutrition IS a factor in health, and there ARE some people who benefit physically and emotionally from tweaking what they eat. But overall there are STILL aspects about health we have no control over.
If restricting your diet causes you to binge, there are health effects of this as well.
Diet culture has conditioned us to equate size as a measure of health. People are still buying shakes, teas and powders in an effort to shrink to fit in and be “healthy”.
Diet Culture is hard to see. It’s sneaky.
It’s a little harder for some of us in our fifties to tune in to Diet Culture. WHY?
We were raised on diet culture.
You might not think you were, but if your mother dieted, or you bought magazines talking about diets and showing thin (probably white) women, you were raised on diet culture.
And chances are, it’s affecting your body image in your fifties.
You don't have to be dieting to be a participant in diet culture.
Maybe your mom didn’t diet, but it doesn’t mean you weren’t exposed to subliminal messages of “thin being IN”.
I think back to all the magazines I read as a teen, the clothes I wanted to wear, and how my friends reacted to me, if I ate way more cookies than they did.
I think back to my idols in high school. They were models. What did your high school idols look like? I was way too immersed in outer beauty back then.
Many of the women I looked up to, were thin, and sent me on cleanses and diets to change my body. That was diet culture, then and now.
We just didn’t call it that.
What is Diet Culture? A right of passage
It felt so NORMAL, to diet. Our moms talked about it, it was something we could share, and it still can feel SO normal, right?
Our moms didn’t want to be the target of bias about bodies, and they didn’t want their daughters to be either.
This is where you may have picked up diet culture attitudes, that may have told you that “your body is a problem.”
Carrying these thin obsessed messages from society, into menopause, only increases the risk for disordered eating in this chapter of life. There are some things we may want to repeat from our youth, but I’m guessing an eating disorder is not one of them.
If diet culture is harmful, and diets DON”T work, what’s the answer?
Let me ask you: The Answer to WHAT?
Weight Loss?
Longevity?
Feeling good in your body in your 50’s?
They are not the same.
The answer is: The Add In Approach, or the Addition “Diet”
Mindful Eating is part of The Add In Approach, or the Non Diet Approach to health.
Shifting into a trust model, of leaning in to your OWN body in menopause, honors who YOU uniquely are, by helping you understand your own needs, when it comes to food and health.
You’ll tap into your OWN wisdom.
One of the simple ways to get started on a Non Diet Health Journey is to learn Mindful Eating and tap INTO your food habits.
This Approach, which encompasses self compassion, and listening to your body, is NECESSARY as we enter midlife.
I’d love to hear your thoughts below,
XO
Tanya
Sources:
https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-018-1116-5
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11920-019-1057-5