Diet Culture in Fitness Industry Marketing is Brainwashing You

In season 2 of the Fixing Fitness with Kelly podcast I touched on the newly mainstream concept of diet culture. The internet definition of diet culture is a set of beliefs that values thinness, appearance, and shape above health & well-being. Typically these beliefs are associated with restricted eating habits, negative self-talk, normalized obsessiveness around food and exercise, and anxiety about the social and physical consequences of failing to engage in any of these behaviors.

But where do the beliefs that drive these behaviors even come from?

It’s really not that big of a puzzle.

For our entire lives, mainstream media has pummeled us with messages that glorify thinness. And note I do mean thinness, not fitness. It was in magazines that we grew up with; it was in every television show and movie; it was in the social stigmas about weight gain and “letting yourself go”; it was in the fashion industry where every style trend favored skinny women; it was in the insidious idea that famous women who were thin were beautiful, but famous women who were fat had to be funny.

And if you were especially unlucky, it might have come directly from family members. Mothers and grandmothers urging you to play outside instead of having a snack. Asking you if you were really going to eat something even though you’d just had a meal. Admonishing you with catchy phrases like “a moment on the lips but a lifetime on the hips”. Tugging your t-shirt down to cover up your waist as though you should be ashamed of it.

I could go on but hopefully a dozen examples of diet culture in action have resonated with most of you.

And fitness industry marketing uses all of this.

So now as adults, we’ve spent a lifetime being obsessed with making ourselves thinner. Body shaming those who are overweight, while secretly hating those who are genetically pre-disposed to thinness.

And all of this fuels the fitness industry to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Depending which source you look at, the fitness industry as a whole had a market value of between $87 and $100 billion dollars in 2022, and is expected to grow a whopping 171.75% to 434.74 billion USD by 2028.

And here’s why that is so annoying.

Fitness marketing tactics haven’t changed in decades. In any other industry, if you don’t pivot and adapt your marketing strategy to meet the evolving needs of your client base, your business is going to dry up.

But the fitness industry gets to be ridiculously lazy about this because diet culture is doing all of its marketing for it.

Think about this.

The vast majority of fitspo instagram bios I check promise something like, “I help women get results”, or “I help women achieve their dream body”, or even a simple “Get fit with me”.

‘Results’, ‘dream body’, and ‘fit’ are never defined.

Why not? Because they don’t have to be.

Diet culture has planted the visual in your head already.

Think about trick or treaters on Halloween. Now, in my house growing up, once October hit my mother started stockpiling candy for trick or treat. But we were never allowed to open those bags of candy to have any. Those were for the trick or treaters, she told us, and we would get ours come Halloween. I’m sure on some level she was trying to make sure that all the candy she bought wouldn’t disappear over the course of the month so she’d have to buy more, but the effect of this was that October was basically a no-candy month. We were more or less restricted from eating sweets until the night of trick or treat. And it’s no secret to anyone who watches kids on trick or treat night that they go BALLISTIC. Yes, the costumes and festivities add to the hype, but the real goal is to get as much candy as physically possible, which they will then binge for the next several days unless the parents step back in to regulate their intake.

It’s a period of restriction, followed by no-holds-barred access (i.e. a binge), and since they don’t know anything other than those two extremes, the parents have to regulate them again.

We’ve already been fed image after image after image of what results should look like, of what our ideal body should be, and how being fit means being thin. None of these trainers are doing anything different from one another; they themselves are are caught up in diet culture and have just leveraged their own endless journey to achieve this nebulous “ideal” into a business.

Many of them sing the praises of discipline and claim that they just prioritize their nutrition to look the way that they do, which is more or less competition-level shredded year round. And it’s hard not to believe them. After all, where is the line between prioritizing nutrition and exercise, and disordered eating habits?

The answer to this one is definitely unique to the individual, but I think in broad strokes we can identify that line with one word: Binging.

There is a fitspo account I follow on Instagram that recently posted side by side shots from being on vacation. The first image was her usual, extremely shredded self, and the second was a few days into her vacation where all her muscle definition had been bloated away. The caption was emphasizing how this was normal when you go on vacation. She talked about how it’s common for her to gain up to 8lbs when she goes on vacation, but it’s okay since it’s not fat gain. It’s just bloat, and after a few days of getting back to a normal routine it would all go away.

When I see posts like this, all I can think of is when Shakespeare wrote, “thou doth protest too much”. Which, for my non-Shakespearean listeners, translates to: the harder you argue a point, the more I think it’s you that you’re trying to convince.

Because here’s the thing. If you have a healthy relationship with food and with your body, you don’t binge to the tune of eight pounds of uncomfortable bloating and digestive issues when you’re on vacation. Behavior like this is a telltale sign of extremely restrictive eating habits; when you have the opportunity to lift those restrictions, you seize them and end up binging.

As adults, this vacation-binge behavior is the same thing. If you restrict yourself all the time, you don’t know how to enjoy so-called “treats” in a way that feels good to your body. So when you give yourself access to them, you’re going to go hog-wild without paying attention to how it’s making your body feel.

But if you don’t restrict yourself from enjoying all foods year round, you can establish a relationship with your body that lets you know when you’ve had enough, so you can more or less maintain your usual diet even when you’re on vacation. Of COURSE you’re going to have the fancy cocktail, order the extra appetizer, and hit up that dessert buffet. But you aren’t acting like the kid on Halloween who hasn’t been allowed to have chocolate all month and knows she’s not getting chocolate again until Easter. So you’re more likely to enjoy it without binging because you know you don’t need to desperately stuff it all in; it’s available to you all the time because you don’t restrict.

It's up to us to flip our mindset about fitness industry marketing.

And honestly, doesn’t that sound better? To know that you can have a couple of cookies with your afternoon coffee without needing to eat the whole bag? So why don’t more of us do it this way?

Well.

We’re fed the notion that 1) we’re only “fit” if we’re thin and shredded, and 2) the only way to be that thin and shredded is through extreme discipline and restricted eating.

Further, much of this disordered eating is disguised in principles that seem to make sense. For example, there’s lots of studies demonstrating correlations between pre-packaged foods and different lifestyle diseases. So it seems like an intelligent step to eliminate those foods from your diet because you’re health-conscious, and being very thin is just a byproduct of that choice.

And I do think there are people who truly do choose this lifestyle. But you know how you tell the difference?

They’re not binging on all of those pre-packaged foods as soon as they have the opportunity.

Social media makes marketing in the fitness industry a breeze.

Unfortunately, on social media, it’s impossible to know whether that is happening unless they post about it.

And this is one of the biggest dangers of social media; fitness accounts who do this can hide it. So if you’re following their example, determined to look on the outside like a well-disciplined, health-minded individual, while suffering from a poor relationship with food in the background, what is that doing for your health, both physical and mental?

And even worse, do you care, or does it not matter because diet culture has you convinced that as long as you LOOK a certain way, the rest doesn’t matter?

Do you see how this is a dangerous recipe for not only developing disordered eating habits, but normalizing them??

Because it truly seems impossible to maintain a shredded, thin physique, AND have a healthy approach to eating without restrictions.

And if restrictions and extreme discipline with food are the only way to achieve that diet culture image of fitness and beauty, what are you supposed to do?

This is the biggest frickin’ tightrope in the world, and we are all on it.

Because I don’t believe that anyone really wants to be that disciplined when it comes to what they eat, and yet we’ve all been conditioned to believe that we want our bodies to look like we are.

And I will go so far as to say that any woman who claims that she’s never felt like this in her life, is lying.

And the fitness industry knows it.

Every program, influencer, and company is telling you that they have the solution to that impossible balancing act, by hiding the truth and perpetuating the idea that to be “fit” you have to be thin and shredded.

So what would happen if fitness was measured less by what we look like, and more by how we feel? How effortless our relationship with food was? How capable our bodies are? How strong and nimble our muscles and joints are? Our posture? Our balance? Reductions in stress and anxiety? How confident we feel?

Because when you get down to the real question here, what benefit does it give us, what does it add to our lives, to force our bodies to look thin and shredded, if we’re are happily, truly fit, by a healthier form of measurement? The only benefit, truthfully, is that we’re showing the world we’ve achieved what diet culture has told us we should achieve.

But diet culture is, figuratively, a cancer. And by that I mean something malignant that spreads destructively. Continuing to feed into it, unquestioned, unchallenged, is just doing long-term harm to ourselves.

Overcoming this would require shifting what we care about, what our culture cares about, away from thinness and toward overall health and well-being.

But I’m willing to bet that something deep inside you panics a little when I say, “Stop caring about being thin.” Because we’ve been brainwashed. For a lifetime. We’ve been taught to believe that it is possible, and even healthy, to be disciplined with our exercise and restrict what we eat.

And of course, exercise is important. Prioritizing nutrition is important. But not with the goal of being thin and meeting a social standard. That is the difference. That is the mindset flip that we need to execute. And it’s the flip that the fitness industry doesn’t want us to make. Because if we learn to move and eat for REAL fitness, and not thinness, then this stops being a mega-billion-dollar industry. Because you can reach your new fitness ideal in a realistic, sustainable way, and get off the metaphorical treadmill that keeps you racing toward a goal that cannot be achieved in a physically and mentally healthy way.

There is so much work to do on this front, and it starts with recognizing the issue for what it is so we know when to push back.