It’s important to remember that the diet industry is… well, just that. An industry. A $60 billion industry, to be exact. The reality is, it doesn’t care about your health one bit. All it cares about is making money and, subsequently, maintaining that influx of cash. So, what is one fire way to make sure that people keep coming back and buying your products? Make products that don’t work to begin with.
This is the exact tactic the diet industry relies upon. Think about it. How many diets have you gone on only to end up gaining the weight back? One, two? More like ten! If dieting really worked, you’d only have to do it once and that would be it. According to Psychology Today, the US Federal Trade Commission suggests a 98% failure rate for dieting which, might make you mad, but makes the diet industry extremely happy.
This means that customers will continuously buy into whatever new products – books, meal services, diet pills, etc. – the diet industry is promoting.
I know what you must be thinking: “But science has proven that dieting is good and that certain foods are bad for your health!” Do you know who has funded the research behind these claims? THE DIET INDUSTRY and the pharmaceutical companies that produce weight loss pills! If you really examine the evidence supporting the idea that being fat is unhealthy, you’ll see just how weak it really is. And when the science doesn’t support the idea that dieting is good for you, they just discard the study entirely (source: The F**k It Diet”).
Instead of subscribing to diet culture, I highly suggest you do some research on the Health At Every Size or HAES. This is a kickass movement promoting the idea that health is dependent on so much more than body weight, and that weight loss does not produce positive health outcomes. It rejects the concept of weight as a choice, and that you can easily choose to lose weight if you really tried hard enough.
The truth is that we all have a genetic set point that our bodies will naturally fight to keep us at, regardless of our attempts to shed some pounds.
Dieting only messes up our metabolisms and makes our set points rise. Not that gaining weight is necessarily a bad thing. I am just trying to point out the fact that dieting is completely counterintuitive, and actually really harmful to your body. It throws your hormones out of whack and catalyzes powerful biological processes that work to increase your hunger and decrease your energy expenditure.
Feeling mad? Feeling deceived by the diet industry? Me too. More than that, though, I feel empowered. Knowing the truth about the diet industry gives us the opportunity to fight back against the injustice of the fatphobia that it promotes. This is a call to action. Reject diet culture and all of its lies. Become a fat ally. Heaven knows we could always use some more.
Photo by Luis Reynoso on Unsplash
