Feed your future. Feed your energy. Feed your health. Feed your dreams.
If this was the Instagram account @dissapointingaffirmations then the next line would be ‘Feed your dog, he’s hungry you asshole’.
But alas, this is not @inspiringmemes. This is a diet ad.
Specifically it’s a diet ad for a diet that pretends it’s not a diet: ZOE. Its founder and spokesperson, Tim Spector, effusively talks about how calorie counting doesn’t work and the ZOE website claims it’s a ‘new way’ of eating – while Tim himself famously doesn’t eat bananas.
ZOE is about health. It’s about shifting your mindset. It’s about making positive changes.
It’s a *little bit* about losing weight. But it’s not a diet. It’s a personalised nutrition programme. It’s not about restriction. It’s about SATISFACTION! But mostly it’s about empowering you to live your Best Life™.
ZOE is hardly unique in adopting the language of choice, empowerment, and ‘health gains’ in its branding. WW, Noom, diets low in ultra-processed food, Deliciously Ella, Veganuary1 and many more frame their version of restriction as a set of positive choices made in the name of health, that need not sacrifice pleasure.
Millennial and Gen-Z women are savvy to the pitfalls of dieting and overt restriction (and if you’re not, read this). We saw the fall of ‘clean eating’, and ‘diet culture’ is part of our vernacular in a way it wasn’t for our mothers and grandmothers. So while ‘diet’ is now a four-letter word and carries a stigma if you talk about it openly, diet companies have had to find new ways of appealing to consumers. Slimming shakes are out. Psychology-powered, sustainable lifestyle changes are in. ‘Healthy’ is the new skinny. Weight loss has been replaced with wellness. Instead of obsessing over how many calories we’ve eaten, we worry about the diversity of our gut microbiome.
There is a name for this not-a-diet diet. It’s called ‘The Do-Diet’ and it was first described by sociologists Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston in their paper Choosing health: embodied neoliberalism, postfeminism, and the ‘do-diet’. Their research combines interviews with over 100 women, with textual analysis of women’s magazines and healthy eating blogs.
The do-diet isn’t a specific diet, but ‘a healthy eating discourse that reframes dietary restrictions as positive choices, while maintaining an emphasis on body discipline, expert knowledge, and self-control.’ It has two key hallmarks: it offers both choice and control.
The name ‘do-diet’ is derived from a (now defunct) column in a Canadian women’s magazine called Chatelaine. The magazine asks ‘Tired of living in a world of diet don’ts? So are we. That’s why we developed the Do Diet, a radical new way to eat that’s full of easy dos to get you on the right track’.
‘Radical’, in this context, means not depriving yourself and allowing yourself a square of dark chocolate after dinner… The Do-Diet column is packed full of ‘expert’ dietitian-approved advice, research tidbits based on tiny studies on individual foods, and disordered eating dressed up as an aspirational lifestyle. It’s all topped off with the shiny veneer of toxic positivity disguising it’s insidious underbelly; ‘it’s about eating foods you enjoy so you have a positive relationship with food — not a guilt-ridden one’ reads one entry, moments after telling people to identify ‘red flag foods’ like homemade brownies. Le sigh.
Like the prototype Do-Diet in Chatelaine magazine, do-diets of today trade in a version of ‘healthy eating’ that preaches satisfaction over restriction, abundance over deprivation, focussing on what you can have instead of what you can’t. It’s all about a ‘positive mindset’. The do-diet makes it ‘simple’ and ‘easy’ to make the right choices. There are no rules. No ‘good’ and ‘bad’ foods. No ‘guilt’. Just flexibility!
All you need to do it: make a very specific plan; cook everything from scratch; meal prep and batch cook; follow exacting standards for how to compose each meal and snack; eat the right kind of breakfast; DO NOT EAT CROISSANTS; have a POSITIVE mindset; and don’t forget to have LOTS OF FUN. (Seriously, this is the tl;dr of this Deliciously Ella post - sounds real fun, Ella…)
‘Choosing health’ gives the appearance of subverting body ideals. It distances us from seedy diet companies who bank on our repeat business and stand to make billions from our subjugation. But health? Health is something I’m doing just for me! Afterall, what does gender equality mean if we can’t exercise bodily autonomy and freedom and choose to be healthy?
Despite this apparent ‘choice’, women still have to exert considerable control and effort over their day-to-day eating. They still require expert guidance from Women’s Health magazine or apps like ZOE or Deliciously Ella’s Feel Better app. Far from being liberatory, the do-diet requires significant investment of resources (financial, cognitive, and otherwise) in monitoring, surveillance, and micromanagement of food and the body. We claim to have subverted body ideals, when really we are upholding a new, slightly different standard.
‘Choice’ in this context can be understood as a postfeminist sensibility, emphasising women’s agency and autonomy, offering an illusion of empowerment. But under closer inspection ‘choice’ is a muddling together of feminist and anti-feminist ideologies. In a postfeminist context, diets ‘for health’ are framed as an expression of empowerment, choice, and self-worth without critically engaging in how the do-diet replicates power structures and body hierarchies. The do-diet doesn’t liberate women from feminine body ideals. It just rebrands them as ‘individuality’. ‘inspiration’, and even a spiritual ‘journey’.
Cairns and Johnston quote Susan Bordo’s The Body and The Reproduction of Femininity to show how the do-diet oppresses women and femmes: ‘[t]hrough the pursuit of an ever-changing, homogenizing, elusive ideal of femininity ... female bodies become what Foucault calls ‘docile bodies,’—bodies whose forces and energies are habituated to external regulation, subjection, transformation, and ‘improvement’.’
We are sold ‘power’ and ‘purpose’ from venture capitalist backed companies with B corp certification, to distract us from what is at the heart of their product: anti-fatness, submission, and self-obliteration. If our individual ‘thriving’ is tied to replicating harmful ideals of what constitutes a ‘healthy’ body, then it is not revolutionary.
And don’t be fooled - just because a do-diet (or your mate who is doing Noom) use ‘body positive’ language and ‘plus’ or ‘curve’ models to sell their products, does not mean that they aren’t complicit in upholding harmful ideals. In fact, this might be exactly why many millennial and Gen Z women are drawn to them. On top of being about ‘health’ and ‘choice’, the do-diet has an explicitly anti-diet message, co-opting ideas from fat liberationists and watering them down to be palatable to thin white women who hold lightly feminist ideals. However much we protest, the do-diet still upholds the thin, white, young, able-bodied ideal. Rather than moving the needle on collective body liberation, the do-diet further entrenches anti-fat sentiment.
Cairns and Johnston also make a point of how ‘choosing’ health is a privilege only afforded to those who already have the most social and cultural capital. ‘The discourse of choosing health over body image is not equally accessible to all women. Women possessing various kinds of social privilege, including the privilege of embodying the slender feminine ideal more readily articulated the do-diet discourse’. The authors are arguing that it’s really fucking easy to say you’re doing something ‘for your health’ and to reject diet culture in a superficial way, when you also meet (or are pretty close to), the normative thin body ideal.
As well as giving the illusion of ‘choice’, do-diets play into neoliberal imperatives to control our bodies and manage risk. ‘Neoliberal’ has different connotations in different contexts, but for the purpose of our discussion I’ll borrow Cairns and Johnston’s definition where they describe neoliberal values like this: ‘market-culture is valorized, state responsibility is minimized, and individual responsibility is prioritized.’
In late-stage capitalism, women are expected to be Good Citizens who are up to speed with the latest ‘gut-health’ trends, consume 30 plants a week, and eat in a way that compliments their menstrual cycle. They are required to manage their bodies, assume individual responsibility for mitigating risk of cancer, depression, and Alzheimer's disease, and control their shape and size while not appearing as though they are doing any of those things. They should have an innate knowledge of how to navigate the latest nutrition fad, without defaulting to ‘rabbit-food’; food should be appetising, delicious, and effortless.
The do-diet helps square the circle of exercising militant control over the body, while committing ourselves to the project of capitalism – where we are told that we have to buy our way to health, thinness, and belonging. We have to embody control and discipline to show our ‘deservedness’ in society, while simultaneously displaying our individuality and freedom through tasteful middle-class consumption. This is why we will pay ZOE more than £300 to tell us precisely how to eat. It checks the box of lavish consumption, while being controlled and careful. ‘Thin disciplined bodies are rewarded as the successful neoliberal citizen, while the fat body is pathologized as a site of failure’, write Cairn and Johnston.
Neoliberal governance of bodies operates by individualising structural inequity and transforming it into private burdens. We carry these burdens in our bodies. It feels intuitive and logical that the solution lies in our own personal projects. Personal ‘healing’ with compassion based binge-eating ‘treatment’ on Noom. Hacking our metabolism with a ZOE blood glucose monitor. Eating 30 plants a week with Deliciously Ella. Capitalism keeps us isolated and separate.
This is why the do-diet is so compelling. But continuing to conceptualise structural issues as individualised responsibility only helps those who already have the most privilege.
To borrow from Cairns and Johnston ‘The logic of health as personal responsibility reaffirms the boundary work of white middle-class populations able to adopt ‘healthy lifestyle’ practices, working to distance themselves from unhealthy Others’.
This is no more apparent than in conversations around ultra-processed foods (UPFs). UPFs are used as short-hand to signify ‘dietary incontinence’ (h/t to Karen Throsby for this gem). Diets high in UPF signal ‘poor’ choices made by ‘poor’ people; the Bad Citizen who fails to fulfil their dual and conflicting neoliberal duties to exercise self-control and consume ferociously. Even when couched in the rhetoric of fighting ‘Big Food’, and demands for policy change, the subtext is clear – people who eat UPFs are irresponsible and need to be disciplined by the middle-class taste makers who shape policy. Even in books such as Ultra Processed People – where there is an ostensible resistance to individualising what is considered to be a systemic issue – the issue is framed as ignorance. If only people knew what the food companies are doing to us! The author, Chris Van Tulleken, suggested in a recent interview that to overcome so-called ‘UPF addiction’, you should just read the ingredients label of the food you’re eating. It will disgust you into never eating that food again. This individualised ‘solution’ to a structural issue undermines his own position of not being interested in individual responsibility. If we were really interested in tackling structural issues, we would tackle structural issues. Van Tulleken is an infectious diseases doctor; he of all people should know about treating root causes rather than symptoms.
Do-diet discourse reveals another of the (many, many) tensions of femininity:
‘Those who openly restrict food choices risk being viewed as disempowered and image-obsessed, but those who do not monitor and control their eating may fail to embody the healthy (read: thin) ideal. Staking out desirable femininities between these two extremes requires ongoing calibration.’
Women have to navigate a perilous balance of performing not dieting, while simultaneously keeping their bodies in-check. This is, of course, down to the constant scrutiny, surveillance, and evaluation of women’s bodies. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think the do-diet is a radical form of self-care that moves us closer to true body liberation.
As Cairns and Johnston ask rhetorically in their paper: ‘Does this new diet context allow women more corporeal freedom as they are spared from the grapefruit diets of yesteryear?’. If you ask me? You can roll shit in glitter, but it still stinks.