Recognizing & Resisting Spring’s Diet Culture Surge: 5 Tips to Stay Grounded
I got a promotional email earlier this week from a gym with the subject line, “SPRING into your summer body! Sign up for a membership now and get 30% off your first three months!” I opened the email and read a paragraph or two that pitched and promised that joining their gym today would provide me the tools to achieve a more fit, fun, and confident me, and I can reap the benefits of this transformation by summer. The promises came with the reminder that spring is upon us and summer is fast approaching but that I still have time to “get ready” for summer. The email ended by telling me I deserve to make this investment in myself.
Even when I try to tune it out, I’m reminded just how loud the weight loss messaging becomes around this time of year; it’s hard to escape. We are inundated with texts, emails, images, posts, conversations, and internal dissonance that try to convince us that we have to get ready for summer and that by “get ready,” they don’t mean to bring out your kids’ outdoor toys or go buy a porch plant. By “get ready,” they mean that we need to assess and alter our bodies to make them suitable to participate in the upcoming season.
Recognizing Springtime Diet Culture Trends
Every year, spring becomes a petri dish where fitness and diet industries thrive off of people’s insecurities about their bodies. For someone in recovery for an eating disorder or someone who has pervasive body image struggles, this can become a source of significant pressure, stress, and temptation to fall back into disordered thoughts and behaviors. One way to resist that springtime diet culture surge is to anticipate and be on guard for an uptick in fitness and diet trends around this time of year. Some of the trends circulating:
“Bikini body” marketing
“Bikini body” comes through in phrases like “Shed the last of your winter weight,” “There is still time to achieve your bikini body!” or “Get summer-ready” in ads and on social media. These are paired with pictures of (often thin and perfectly tanned) people on enjoying the sun in their bikini.
GLP-1 marketing
The normalization of medications like Ozempic and Wegovy being used for weight loss has made the conversion around these much less taboo. I heard someone joke the other day about “just wanting to start Ozempic” because they “didn’t have the time or desire to work out” but still wanted to “look good in their bathing suit” this summer.
(So many) detoxes and cleanses
Sudden promotion of juice cleanses, fasting programs, miracle juices, or “reset” diets. These are typically framed as quick ways to achieve results, reduce bloat for spring break, or jumpstart a new lifestyle.
Exercise as punishment
You may see workouts framed as a way to “burn off” food instead of enjoying movement. When workouts are always framed as being a means to achieve something, it makes sense that so many people have a complicated relationship with exercise.
Clothing-related pressure
This pressure leads people to feel like certain body sizes or shapes are required for certain outfits. You’ve seen the ads and posts: “Start now to be ‘bikini ready” by June. I saw an ad for a line of new sundresses with the title “Legs for Days” with the model’s legs as the focal point of the photo. These kinds of messages reinforce the idea that in order to wear a bikini or a sundress, your body needs to look a certain way.
5 Reminders and Tips to Help Resist the Spring Diet Culture Trends
1. Reminder: Your body is always bikini-ready.
If you have a body, you are bikini-ready (if you want to wear a bikini, of course!). You do not need to undergo any kind of “transformation” for your body to be ready for summer.
2. Curate your environment
Unfollow accounts or avoid spaces that promote harmful messaging to the best of your ability. Of course, it isn’t possible to disengage from these spaces entirely — you still get emails, are audience to and maybe part of conversations about people’s diets and cleanses and gym routines. Exercising agency over spaces where you can avoid this, though, can help your days feel far less saturated by the s[ring and summer diet and fitness trends.
3. Practice intuitive movement
Take inventory of the movement you’re engaging in. Be cautious about any exercise or movement that you are doing in an attempt to “fix” your body or make up for eating. As someone who is prone to obsessive exercising, I know how enticing it can be to start attending that new gym that you get an email about to have a chance at “feeling and looking the best you ever have.” Exercise and movement can be great as long as you are doing it because you enjoy that form of movement, and not in response to a perceived need to alter your body.
4. Challenge harmful thoughts
When the messaging and marketing gets loud and you are tempted to try the new cleanse, join a weight loss challenge to *prepare for summer,* or even just to restrict here and there, pause and consider what is really motivating you to do these things. If you catch yourself being critical of your body, ask: “Who benefits from me feeling this way?” There is almost always a market that benefits from us being discontent with our bodies. And the catch here is that the beauty, fitness, and “wellness” standards are ever-changing, so you will find yourself pouring everything you have into a program, trend, or lifestyle, only to realize that the results don’t provide the lasting contentment that they promised and to learn that the standard has changed anyway.
5. Surround yourself with support
I realize that this piece of advice can read as trite, but I cannot overstate how important it is to surround yourself with people who will help you move into and maintain healthy habits. If you are in recovery for an eating disorder, be sure that you are staying connected with your care team and being transparent about the pressure you feel around this time of year. If you’re not in eating disorder recovery but feel seasonal pressure to change your body, seek support from friends or family who won’t reinforce harmful diet and wellness trends. And if you are not yet connected to a therapist or support team and feel like you may benefit from professional support, it can be so helpful to connect with a HAES-aligned therapist who specializes in eating disorder recovery and body image struggles.
Remember: Your Body Is Not a Project
Diet and wellness culture thrive off of making us feel like we are not enough as we are, and it is possible to liberate yourself from the seasonal panic and pressure to respond by trying to change your body. If you are putting up safeguards and feel like these messages are still affecting you, please don’t feel guilty. Diet culture is loud, and the promises of experiencing happiness, confidence, and feeling and looking the “best you ever have” can be enticing. And with almost every corner of our work, school, shopping, and social media spaces filled with messages and marketing about spring and summer diet trends, disengaging and unlearning can take time. As you move further into spring and toward summer, remember that your worth is not tied to a season or a clothing size and that your body is not a project: you don’t and will never need to change it in anticipation for (or any) summer. Part of recovery – or just maintaining a healthy relationship with food, exercise, and your body — is resisting the pressure to shrink to fit impossible standards that cause us to lose ourselves. You deserve the freedom to unapologetically take up space, no matter the season.
By: Erika Muller, Assistant for Wildflower Therapy LLC
All images via Unsplash
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