The first time I realised the full-throttle, untrammeled power of diet culture was in a ballroom packed with women attending some kind of empowerment event. It must have been related to Women’s Day. I was there in my capacity as a person open to any empowerment on offer, which is to say I've completely forgotten what particular stripe of affirmation and/or product was being pedalled on that occasion.
The “why” of it is wiped from my memory, but I do have total recall of the crazy moment when a woman stood up in front of 200 strangers and told her story. She outlined how she'd struggled and toiled under perilous, dramatic and life-challenging conditions but had, against all odds, lost 20kg in six months. The entire room then erupted in cheers, ululations, whoops of delight and maybe even some tears — unanimously celebrating this wondrous demonstration of her fortitude, courage and personal endurance in the face of such trials and tribulations. Maybe it was the second coming, maybe it was diet culture.
The struggle is real. The world as we know it is geared to fatten us all up like small sacrificial lambs to the big food industrial complex. These days all food is processed to within an inch of plasticity, infused with truckloads of sugar and deep fried in paint. Chemists spend their days and nights in pursuit of the most addictive combinations of flavours and oral sensations so that once you've succumbed to the barrage of extreme marketing and the carefully calibrated morsel passes your lips you may as well check yourself directly into rehab, because it’s downhill from there. You don’t stand a chance against the mighty forces of global capital arrayed against you and your gut.
You are just a mouth that feeds their coffers with your frighteningly ever-expanding waistline. “Don’t blame yourself”, was the mantra of the past few decades — big is beautiful. And I agree but, positive affirmations aside, it really isn't our fault. How are we meant to withstand this onslaught? Our metabolisms don’t stand a chance against these dark forces gathered to mess with our endocrine systems and primed to cause us diabetes.
No wonder people gave the “biggest loser” in the room a standing ovation on that Women’s Day. Everyone in there knew from personal experience what it had actually taken for that woman to fight her way back into her thin jeans.
“Oh please,” you say, “you're being overly dramatic for the sake of your column.” I wish I was. The world is now fatter than ever. In most places on the planet more than half the population is now clinically obese. Something has changed in the water. Scientists call it the “obesenogenic lifestyle” — as in, no time or opportunity to move your body and cheap- as-chips food sources designed to keep you hungry. I mean, there are really no pavements in Sandton — just try walking to Micky D’s on your lunch break and tell me how that works out for you? Never mind prising the youngsters away from their devices so that they can run around chasing balls. How quaint!
“These days all food is processed to within an inch of plasticity, infused with truckloads of sugar and deep fried in paint ... you don’t stand a chance against the mighty forces of global capital arrayed against you and your gut”
There's an even darker side of this lucrative coin; the diet industry is a place littered with obsessive compulsive disorders, tiny scales for your portions of pain and AI-driven ones that measure out your personal failings in minute, soul-destroying milligrams with all the hidden body composition stuff judging you in an algorithm of shame on a daily basis. Before they banned them, everyone was high on gargantuan quantities of speed masquerading as diet pills, while propping up the tranquilliser market as they popped them by the handful so that they could finally fall asleep, only to face the whole circus again the next day as they judged themselves in the mirror and found everything wanting.
In other news in the battle of the bulge, WeightWatchers — the billion-dollar business supporting you in your personal tragedy — has filed for liquidation, because even Oprah had to confess to shooting up Ozempic. Why would we look at the bigger picture and try to fight for the right to better, cleaner, less addictive food substances, or to clean up the internet so that the “ano-inspiration” (being inspired by anorexia sufferers, which is currently all over social media) can just go away — when we can instead simply self-medicate with a jab that kills your appetite and your muscle mass?
Now, you really can't be too rich or too thin. The drug companies are laughing all the way to the bank and your waistline tells the whole sorry story. The poor of the Earth will just get fatter as the rich get a quick fix and carry on as they were — investing in big food, big pharma and the algorithms, ever bikini-ready, with a bloated share portfolio.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.