Eat this, not that. This one food will cure everything. That food is poison. Cut this food out. Try this diet. Don’t eat at these times. Eat this food and you’ll lose weight. With society’s obsession with food, health and weight, statements like these are all over social media, gyms and even health care offices.
But do you need to follow rules like these to be healthy? Most often the answer is no, because health and nutrition is much more complex and nuanced than a simple list of what to eat and what to avoid. Despite this, rules about health and nutrition are so common because of diet culture – a morality imposed by society that sees falling outside the arbitrary ideal of thinness as a personal failure. Diet culture and the people promoting it expect you to pursue or maintain thinness at all times.
Diet culture norms have led to a multibillion-dollar industry promoting diets that each come with their own set of rules, with each claiming it’s the only way to be healthy or lose weight. When access to nutrition information is at an all-time high online, people are often left digging through conflicting information when trying to figure out what to eat or what a healthy diet look likes.
As a registered dietitian specializing in eating disorders, the majority of my clients have been, and continue to be, harmed by diet culture. They wrestle with guilt and shame around food, and their health is often negatively affected by rigid rules about nutrition. Rather than improving health, research has shown that diet culture increases your risk of unhealthy behaviors, including yo-yo dieting, weight cycling and eating disorders.
If the solution to health isn’t following the rules of diet culture, what is the answer? I believe an all-foods-fit approach to nutrition can offer an antidote.
What is all foods fit?
All foods fit may sound like “eat whatever you want, whenever you want,” but that is an oversimplification of this approach to nutrition. Rather, this model is based on the idea that all foods can fit into a healthy diet by balancing food and nutrition in a way that promotes health. It does this by enabling flexibility in your diet through listening to internal body cues to decide what and when to eat instead of following external rules.
