Has the diet industry changed for the better?!
I’m on the escalators at Tottenham Court Road tube station, mindlessly staring at the digital advert screens to my left and right, when a bright yellow slogan on a purple background catches my attention: “Listen to your body!”. I hold my gaze, intrigued to see what brand campaign the slogan was for, only to find that the brand in question is Fitbit, a wearable fitness watch that tracks your step count, the number of ‘active zone minutes’ you have completed, your food intake, and your calories burned whilst exercising. Hmm. Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but in my mind, using numbers on a device to judge whether you have exercised for long enough, or hard enough, is the antithesis of ‘listening to your body’, and Fitbit using it as an advertising slogan, is actually a bit of a piss-take.
It got me thinking, as the societal appetite for self-hatred and self-punishment has, in some ways, shrunk in recent years, the diet, weight-loss and fitness companies that benefit from our self-hatred and self-punishment, have had to mutate and adapt to keep up with the current environment. I have seen countless diet and fitness brands hijack vocabulary and messaging directly from the anti-diet, intuitive eating, body-positive and even the ED recovery community, despite the brands’ intentions actively working against these groups. They’ve realised that by adopting this language, they’re able to appear benevolent, forward-thinking and trustworthy, whilst changing shit-all about their product, and therefore still holding onto their fuck-off profits.
Former Weight Watchers have changed their name to “WW, (Weight Watchers Reimagined)”…reimagined how exactly is not so clear, given they still operate with the same point-based system, that sets a maximum daily limit of points for each user (food adds points and exercise takes points away), and rates foods according to their fat and calorie content, and rates different forms of exercise according to how many calories they burn…I mean they have switched it up by calling the points ‘SmartPoints’ as opposed to ‘points’, so credit where credit’s due.
WW have tried to white-wash themselves by employing an in-house ‘Behaviour Change Clinical Psychologist’ Allison Grupski, who is essentially there to convince people that joining WW will benefit, as opposed to damage, their mental health (give me a break). Grupski stars in various advertisements, reassuring those watching, that WW “won’t ever take any food off the menu…you don’t have to think that you’ll never eat bread or rice again, we can find a way to fit them in if you really really like them!”. Firstly, the very fact that bread and rice are singled out as if they were ‘treat’ foods is a screaming indicator that WW certainly doesn’t promote freedom with food as they like to suggest. Secondly, given that by ‘fitting bread in’ they mean swapping normal-fucking-bread for their special-low-calorie-cardboard-WW bread, I think it’s safe to say that whilst they might not be off the menu, plenty of foods are hidden away in a dark corner of shame and guilt.
WW is feigning remorse and ‘changing their ways’, to try and dissociate themselves from the toxic world of diets and weight loss, whilst promoting, and profiting from, diets and weight loss. They haven’t changed their ways, in fact, they’ve upped their game, by employing James Corden and Oprah as ambassadors, to boost sales of their new range of WW food substitutes.
Another company claiming to shun diet culture is Noom, a weight-loss app. Noom lauds itself for NOT being a diet. “There’s a reason diets don’t work” is one of their most-used slogans. It claims to be a “psychology-based approach” that “helps you change not just how you eat, but how you think” (again, give it a rest with the mental health card). Given that Noom is a self-proclaimed weight-loss business, I can’t imagine that the ’changing how you think’ aspect has anything to do with genuinely healing your relationship with food (which they claim to help you do). From what I can gather, it actually means ‘Noom will change how think about food, by making you unduly scared and wary of eating certain foods, and leave you feeling shit about yourself if you do dare to eat those foods’ ie: Noom will complicate your relationship with food further.
Like WW, in their advertising, Noom has tried to pitch themselves as advocates for long-term food freedom and intuitive eating (lol), by saying that “no foods are off limits”. Meanwhile, the app is designed (and I quote) “to steer you towards lower calorie foods”, with a good old food traffic light system: green for low calorie foods that you can eat most of the time, yellow for medium foods that you can have some of the time, and orange for high calorie foods that you should only have occasionally. So, forgive me if I’m wrong, but I’m not sure how “free” that leaves people feeling around their food choices, especially given that the ‘green’ category essentially consists of fruit, vegetables, skimmed milk and tofu, and the be-oh-so-careful orange category, includes fucking seeds and avocado. SEEDS… AND AVOCADO… Two foods that are almost universally seen as 'uber healthy’. The fact that these guys can genuinely look people in the eye and say they are ‘not a diet’, when they have literally replicated the tools of Slimming World and WW, is beyond infuriating. Noom are just regurgitating the same bullshit rhetoric we have seen every other fad diet use: “All your other attempts to lose weight failed, but doing it OUR way is scientifically guaranteed to work!”, giving insecure and vulnerable chronic dieters the false hope they need to cough up £50 a month, only to fall into the same trap again.
Diet companies aren’t the only ones playing this game. Low calorie and health-food companies have started touting various versions of the same, oxymoronic term, “Honour your cravings, without the guilt”. Another tactical theft of vocabulary from the food freedom and intuitive eating communities in order to make more sales and appear forward-thinking. But, let us be frank, a new knicker-bocker-glory flavoured protein bar, isn’t going to even vaguely satisfy your craving for an actual knicker-bocker-glory. Nor is chickpea and date ‘brownie’ going to satisfy your craving for chocolate. Your body is fucking smart, and can tell the difference between a blatant forgery and the real thing. Secondly, “without guilt” obviously implies that honouring your cravings is something to feel guilty for, which is at complete odds with the ethos of the intuitive eating framework that these brands are poorly trying to imitate.
These inauthentic mind games that diet, weight loss and fitness companies are playing, are not only enraging, but also really fucking irresponsible. The attempt to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes and masquerading as ‘new, woke and improved’ businesses is just gross. They are exploiting the countless numbers of people out there, who genuinely wish to better their relationship to food, but feel unable to do so due to their fear of what might happen if they do. The concept of actually listening to our bodies is terrifying because it contradicts the societal messaging we have all grown up with, that told us our bodies are inherently greedy, lazy and not to be trusted. Therefore, posing as if they can offer you the ‘best of both worlds’ of food freedom and weight loss (they can’t) is the perfect way to lure you in and get you to spend your money. Unfortunately, the diet industry is highly unlikely to genuinely change for the better, because if they did, they would be putting themselves out of business.
The one branch of the diet and fitness industry that seems to be taking serious steps towards positive change, is fitness wear. Fabletics, Nike, Gymshark and ModiBodi, all stock a wide variety of sizes, and use mannequins and models that are somewhat more representative of actual, real life bodies. Whilst having one or two token plus-size models in the shop-front, in the sea of tiny size 6’s with 0% body fat, doesn’t really cut it (Lululemon I’m talking to you), it’s important to hold onto the true change we can see, in amongst all the bullshit, otherwise we’ll simply lose the will to live!
