“You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin,” rails America Ferrera in Barbie. It was just one line in a searing soliloquy on the cognitive dissonance of being a modern woman – but watching it on 2 January this year, it was the line that hit home. It summed up everything I feel about diet culture throughout the year, but particularly in January, when the barrage of bogus health claims and body- and lifestyle-shaming articles reach a fever pitch, and my inbox is inundated with no-and-low ABV press releases. Sure, there’s less obviously dangerous dietary advice – “I dropped five stone in five days by eating nothing but celery/grapefruit/Special K” – being thrown around these days, but the culture hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s the same lean and hungry wolf, dressed in “healthier” clothes.
Don’t get me wrong; come New Year’s Day, I’m in no mood to continue the heady indulgence of December. I, too, crave long runs, fresh air, green vegetables and being in bed before the clock strikes 12. But in the haystack of carb-free, dairy-free, low fat and high fibre messaging, one needs a nit comb to pick out constructive advice from more insidious marketing campaigns, campaigns in which images of slender women and spurious nutritional advice are interwoven with sound principles such as consuming less meat, more plants, and less alcohol. It’s a minefield for those of us who want to focus on strength and wellbeing, not unattainable body ideals, and it undermines the golden rule for long-term healthy living: all things in moderation.
Veganuary is a classic example. Of course, cutting back on meat makes sense after a prolonged period of having four types of pork on one plate, plus turkey. It’s good for your wallet, good for the environment, and it’s good for you, so long as you’re getting enough protein and fat from natural sources. But unless you’re accustomed to it, or do your research, a vegan diet can be hard to sustain without defaulting to highly processed “alternatives” to meat and dairy. Rejecting many of the foods you enjoy most is not a one-way ticket to long-term health, and it overlooks the communal nature of eating and drinking, the connections which are forged and strengthened by eating the same thing around the same table.
Like its brother-in-abstinence, Dry January, it tends toward the extreme. The two are not directly comparable, of course, because booze and meat are very different beasts and – with the potential exception of red wine – no amount of alcohol is healthy, but there is an undercurrent of diet culture running through all those January decrees that focus on eating less rather than better and in moderation. Like the deprivation diets of the ’80s and ’90s, they put denial above all things: above conviviality, joy, different needs, appetites and – to be blunt – not being an insufferable person to hang out with. Maybe it’s my personality, maybe it’s my job, maybe it’s a history of eating disorders, but I find these month-long crusades concerning in their puritanical single-mindedness; their focus on food as a means to an end, rather than a source of pleasure to be shared, and their focus on 31 days of detox, rather than something more sustainable.
There is no one-size-fits all when it comes to food and drink, and the suggestion that there is is what creates diet culture. These campaigns, with their cute nicknames and portmanteaus, seem more designed for showing off and sharing on social media – how many people do you know who have done Dry Jan or Veganuary without telling anyone? – than they are for effecting change in the long term. Of course, January is the month for hunkering down and focusing on health rather than hedonism, but it is also cold and dark, all the more so for being shorn of fairy lights and Christmas trees. It is the month in which, throughout history, people in the Northern hemisphere have drawn upon the dairy, cured meats and pickles they prepared in summer for leaner times, and upon the hearty root vegetables which thrive in these conditions.
One could argue that such conditions are better combatted by carbs, good company and the odd glass of red than they are salad and retreating from the world. One could argue that the world of food and drink is complex, that mealtimes are more than the sum of their parts, and that our bodies know better than brands and their marketing budgets what they need. Being annually bombarded with ideas of abstinence only perpetuates the disconnect between fads and good food; between who we feel we should be, and who we are; between being thin and being well-nourished. The fresh start January offers is the perfect time to work out what healthy looks like for us as individuals – not as hungry wolves dressed up in sheep’s clothes.
