What does the word ‘diet’ mean to you?
Ditching Dieting – speak out against the misery caused by the diet industry
This year we have started a campaign to expose the role of the diet industry in de-stabilising women and girls’ appetites and desires. We believe that eating disorders and the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’ are merely more visible extremes of a much bigger, everyday phenomena: that we are accepting fear and hatred of our own bodies like gravity, that we are accepting ‘I am not good enough’ as a fact.In the past weeks we have once again been swamped with headlines announcing an obesity crisis and we have seen news stories with the message that children may be taken away from their parents if the kids’ BMIs are deemed offensive or threatening. This ‘crisis’ is constructed from research funded by the industries that can make money from it, such as pharmaceutical and diet industries.
The diet industry claims to offer solutions – to the ‘crisis’ it has just funded researchers to determine. However, there is overwhelming research stating that it is the process of restricting food that leads to a consequent weight gain, meaning that diets ultimately make you fat.