Diet culture is woven into our lives. Even if you've never been on a diet or tried to lose weight, you've certainly "picked up" something from it.
Every time you think something is "forbidden," that a certain food is "bad" (one lady told me she had been battling negative foods for years — I hope she has since sought professional help), or if you feel guilty after eating a certain meal… that's diet culture.
Diet culture looks at food solely from the perspective of calories and weight loss/gain. Food is viewed exclusively as something that affects how we look, while its impact on our health and quality of life is completely ignored. The only thing that matters is the number on the scale — not how we feel in our body or what our body composition is like. It doesn't matter whether we're healthy or struggling with health issues. What matters is that we're thin. 😁
For many years, I too looked at food exclusively from that perspective — I didn't know any better. I grew up with photoshopped images in magazines that were presented to me as the ideal, and I strived for that look. And it didn't help that almost every issue featured a new diet promising fantastic results.
If that way of eating hadn't affected my health, I might still be counting calories and starving myself today. Luckily (what an oxymoron), it's exactly what pushed me to start educating myself in time. And the more I learned, the clearer it became what nonsense I had been doing to myself.
Today, I put so much effort into raising awareness about proper nutrition and showing women just how important nutrition is for our health, our quality of life — and, as a consequence, how we look. Because guess what?
When we start eating for our health, our weight corrects itself over time! 😎
Proper nutrition is a way of life — it has no expiration date and no extreme rules.
There's no cutting out foods or macronutrients, nothing is forbidden, and food isn't divided into good and bad.
Proper nutrition is balanced, varied, and boring. It has no strict rules, no eliminating foods or nutrients, it doesn't go to extremes, and it doesn't promise fantastic results.
I know it's hard to find your way — we're surrounded by such an overwhelming amount of misinformation these days that it makes your head spin. But the old saying applies here: "If it sounds too good to be true, it is."
If all those weight loss products actually worked, there would be no overweight people. Everyone would be thin. But we're not — quite the opposite: Croatians are the most overweight nation in the European Union. Isn't that sad?