Dear Diet Culture Letter: Food Restriction Causes Problems

Dear Diet Culture,

It’s Me, Sunday.

As I took some time to fully enjoy my most favorite chips today (plain, kettle-baked, super crunchy) with my turkey club sandwich, I was reflecting on how much you ruin fun, playful snack foods. You demonize things like chips, pretzels, crackers, check mix, cheetos/doritos, goldfish, and so much more. Really all the snack foods that most of us grew up eating in some fashion.

It’s like you made your rule by declaring, “if it’s crunchy, salty and delicious, no one can eat it!” But why?

Yes yes, I know that you love to demonize carbohydrates, especially the fried type. But, it’s almost as if you don’t care at all about the impact of food restriction on human brains and how telling people to eat less of something, to monitor their food intake, or to forbid themselves from eating food actually causes them to eat MORE of the food that you are telling them to stop eating. But you know what, I bet you already know that.

I bet you already know that there are parts of the human brain, the parts that light up with dopamine when someone experiences pleasure, that increase the dopamine release in the context of food restriction to reinforce eating. I bet you already know that there are specific neurotransmitters (I like to call them little brain messengers) whose sole purpose it to make sure a human body is getting enough carbs and when it’s not, they are released which causes intense cravings as a way to assure carbohydrate consumption.

I also bet you know that telling people to not eat something is only temporary because they will eventually eat it and then they will eat more than they desire because the threat of never having it again is very real which sets them up on a vicious cycle of restrict, shame, binge, repeat. And I bet you know that the anxiety caused by intentional food restriction causes more harm to the body than any food ever could.

You see, Diet Culture, there are ways of impacting change on one’s relationship with food that have nothing to do with giving them a long list of foods or food groups that they cannot have.

Curiously, people overtime actually increase their overall food variety and naturally include a diverse amount of foods when they are NOT restricting, which makes them less susceptible to nutrient deficiencies, among other things. You take away human agency by creating scenarios in which we can no longer choose the foods we actually want.

Your advice sets people up to keep coming back to you. It’s a fail-safe way of assuring that they will blame themselves for not “being able to control” themselves when there are yummy, crunchy, salty snack foods in the house without acknowledging that YOU, Diet Culture, are the one that caused the challenges to begin with.

Per usual, a strategic but very harmful business model that brings you repeat customers.

And we are over it. Pass the chips, please.

Sincerely,

Sunday, aka your most determined non-diet Dietitian Katherine who wants you to know that eating fun snack foods is part of being human and that food restriction is what drives your difficulty in having these foods in the house