Is our obsession with dieting finally over?

We’re all really weird about food. From the mainstreaming of appetite suppressants like Ozempic, to the health anxieties swirling around everything from seed oils to processed bread, it doesn’t seem like we derive much pleasure from eating any more.

Evidence of this is everywhere online. As India Espy-Jones wrote in her article ‘Are you actually as unhealthy as you think?’, social media has convinced us that our health is in a constant state of emergency. We’re led to believe that Khloe Kardashian’s new protein popcorn will save us from a protein deficiency we didn’t know we had. Diet and fitness influencers who eat only raw meat, milk and butter promise the same thing: these “ancestral” foods are the key to hormonal balance, gut health and a longer, better life. Eating is no longer a source of enjoyment, culture or community: it’s a biohacking project, a moral imperative, an underhanded method for optimising the body for productivity, longevity and ‘thinness’.

This hasn’t come out of nowhere. We’ve been selectively restricting our diets for a long time. However, today’s heightened focus on ”clean” eating stems from a very real political failure. Even though the US has some of the highest rates of chronic illness in the Global North, its food system remains saturated with chemicals, many of which are untested, unregulated or banned elsewhere. The Democratic Party has done little to address this, creating fertile ground for Republican figures like RFK Jr to step in with ableist, unscientific wellness narratives that offer false hope and easy scapegoats.

protein popcorn protein pop tart protein pancake. someone take me out back behind the protein barn and shoot me w a protein rifle https://t.co/tH6Q3rM0gZ

— trash jones (@jzux) April 23, 2025

But we know that food restriction – and the obsessive fixation with everything that goes into our bodies – isn’t healthy or sustainable. Even Gwyneth Paltrow, queen of wellness and founder of Goop, has started to shift her stance. After years on a strict paleo diet following her father’s throat cancer diagnosis, she recently revealed that she’s reintroducing sourdough, pasta and cheese. “I think it’s a good template, right?” she says on her latest Goop podcast. “Eating foods that are as whole and fresh as possible. I don’t think there’s any doctor or nutritionist who would refute that – it’s a good starting point.”

It is a good starting point. Because while restrictive eating is often sold as a route to better health, it can be deeply damaging. On her podcast Maybe Baby, writer and culture critic Haley Nahman explores this in an episode titled “Rethinking Disordered Eating,” reflecting on her own relationship with food. “The problem is when you restrict in a really intense way or in a way that makes you hyper-vigilant about what you’re eating, there are immediate repercussions,” she explains. She argues that even short-term “wellness” diets can fracture our relationship with food.

Nahman’s episode was inspired by Emmeline Clein’s book Dead Weight, which challenges dominant narratives around health, dieting and fatness. Clein suggests that the real danger might not be fatness itself, but the constant cycle of dieting, weight loss and regain. She points to research showing that many studies linking fatness to poor health fail to account for confounding variables, most notably the prevalence of weight cycling among people categorised as “obese”. A 2019 study from Columbia University found that women with a history of “yo-yo” dieting had more cardiovascular risk factors than those who maintained a consistent weight, regardless of whether that weight was considered “healthy”.

can we ever just talk about food normally or https://t.co/1tK1OLnpdp

— halima (@halimaajibril) November 12, 2024

Clein concludes that much of what’s reported as data on the dangers of fatness may, in fact, reflect the harms of chronic dieting. Most studies don’t look at people who have remained stably fat, they track “chronic dieters consistently attempting to change their size”, she writes. Dead Weight offers an essential counterpoint to mainstream health discourse around restriction. It allows us to imagine a world where food isn’t this terrifying beast. Of course, there are still very real problems with how our food is produced, but there are also limits to how much control we can and should exert.

In the first season of HBO’s Girls, there is a scene between Adam (Adam Driver) and Hannah (Lena Dunham) that has always stayed with me. After having sex, Adam is playing with Hannah’s tummy fat and asks if she’s ever tried to lose weight. She replies, “No, I have not tried a lot to lose weight. Because I decided I was gonna have other concerns in my life.” He then asks if she eats for fun. “As opposed to what?” she says. Adam explains he eats mainly for fuel, remembering to feed himself only when his eyes get cloudy.

While Hannah talks a lot about her issues with her appearance in the show, I’ve always loved that scene. In Adam’s weird, disgusting flat, she holds her ground. She believes in eating for enjoyment and refuses to let it become anything other than that. Maybe we should all try a little harder to have other concerns in our lives, so that, one day, we can just be normal about the food we eat. 

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