Should I Delete That? - The Shocking History of Diet Culture

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

New year, new me? Welcome to our expansive eight-part series deconstructing our relationships with body image.From the historical origins of diet culture, to the present day where injectable weight loss drugs are available from high street pharmacies, Alex and Em will strip back our assumptions about diet culture and body image, to find out how we got here, and how we can find a healthy way to look forward. By speaking to a range of experts, from dieticians to fitness influencers - we’ll explore the damaging effects of tabloid media and weight loss TV shows, we will examine the phenomenon of the ‘Almond Mom’ and we will uncover diet culture’s ‘wellness’ rebrand - to equip our listeners with the knowledge and practical steps to navigate a world where diet culture lurks around every corner. Today - we’re starting off by taking a look at the origins of diet culture, because to really get a sense of the magnitude of diet culture and the effects that it has had on our lives, we need to go back to its roots. So, in this episode, we’re going back in time to the advent of diet culture, in the hope it helps us figure out how these debilitating body issues that burden so many women have come to be – and why… Is it all innate? Do we have a biological predisposition to desiring to be thin? Let’s dig in.If you want to dig further into diet culture, self-acceptance and making peace with your body - Alex’s book You Are Not A Before Picture is available now. You can buy your copy here!If you would like to get in touch - you can email us on [e-mail] us on Instagram:@shouldideletethat@em_clarkson@alexlight_ldnShould I Delete That is produced by Faye LawrenceMusic: Dex RoyStudio Manager: Dex RoyTrailers: Sophie RichardsonVideo Editor: Celia GomezSocial Media Manager: Emma-Kirsty FraserArtwork: Alex Andrew Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one. It's been over 30 years since Naomi Wolf first made this observation in her book, The Beauty Myth. One might have hoped this would signify a shift in culture, one that would wake us up to the pervasive and insidiously misogynistic powers of the diet industry, and empower us to break free from the shackles of diet culture and live wholly as fed, confident, satisfied women. As it was, over the interluding decades, rather than loosening its grip on us,

the cultural fixation with female thinness, to which she refers, intensified to such an extent that we're no longer quiet in our madness. From cabbage soup to ketosis, weight watches to ozempic, low carb thigh gaps, spiralising, body checking, hit classes 5'2, intermittent fasting, deficits to daily step goals, the noise is louder than ever. And over the next eight weeks, we are going to explore all of it. Diet culture has permeated every area of our lives and shaped us into who we are. From the insecurities passed down to us from our mothers and the ones they inherited from theirs,

to the brutalistic and dehumanizing headlines that filled the tabloid medias of our childhoods, to the TV shows that drew us in in the millions. So many built on the fail-safe combination of a nation's concurrent personal insecurities, and almost indecent fascination with anyone deemed not to meet the beauty standard. We'll travel through Diet Culture's Wellness Rebrand of the 2010, an era that demanded we trade in our overt aspirations of thinness and instead make our health the priority to the boom of the body positive movement and the cultural shift towards inclusivity that brought with it.

Right up to the present day, thin is back, and the lengths we are willing to go to to achieve it are as radical as ever. Buckle in, it's a biggie. As regular listeners of this podcast will well know, The range of topics we cover here is broad. From prison doctors to hoarding cleaners to activists, supermodels, magicians, crisis negotiators and even to a woman jilted at the altar, we don't leave many stones unturned. But a consistent theme in our work and a topic we come back to time and time again is body image.

And this is in no small part due to the fact that it's a topic incredibly close to both of our hearts. We've been very open in the past about having suffered with desperately low body image in eating problems to the detriment of ourselves and our lives in different ways. Me, Al, I've suffered with low body image from, literally I think from the minute I became aware of my body as a visible thing that was perceived in our society. So I started dieting at a super, super young age and what followed was years of constant chronic yo-yo dieting, which led to disordered eating, obviously. and then ultimately eating disorders, which really dominated the vast majority of my 20s.

I've really run the gamut in terms of eating disorders I've been diagnosed with bulimia, anorexia, and ultimately binge eating disorder. Each of these had their own difficulties in different ways, and all of them collectively were incredibly hard to recover from. But I was really lucky that I had access to therapy and sustained access to therapy. And it was through that that I began to recover and started focusing my work on body image, as I realized this wasn't just a problem affecting me, but a problem in various different forms affecting almost every woman on this planet.

I was a journalist writing about fashion and beauty for a long time. And then as this interest and passion in body image started to develop, I moved my work over to Instagram and I eventually wrote a book called You Are Not a Before picture. which I like to think of as like a big body image Bible. I am, by start contrast, have fewer credentials. I have no authority to speak on the topic particularly, other than to say I was, like most of us, hugely affected by diet culture. At various points and in various ways throughout my life,

I, like Alex, had very low self-esteem as a teenager, particularly. I think I had a lot of complicated feelings. around my body. Overwhelmingly, they were negative. And I spent my teen years very unhappy and insecure. In my 20s, I developed what I'm sure someone would diagnose as disordered eating. I will get into it. But yeah, by the time I was in my early 20s, I had a really complicated relationship, I think, with food, exercise and mostly health, which was an angle that we really wanted to get into as part of this series because I think this actually was probably the thing that affected me the most. And it's only been in the last, I don't know, five to seven

years that I have been able to learn to love myself. And that sounds wanky and it is. But it's also true and not irrelevant to this. Like you, it became a big part of my work. I also work on Instagram and as a journalist. Obviously, we host this podcast together. And I've tried to share through the last few years becoming a mother, the changes that brings with it. Self-love, self-acceptance, definitely it became a big part of my work, yes, but also kind of how I wanted to live my life and definitely the mother that I wanted to be. I think this has really shifted for me in the last few years to become a very feminist issue. I have really taken this with anger. I have seen how much of this is about control, how much of this is

about misogyny, how much of this is about keeping women small and down. And it's pissed me off. That's our reasons personally for interest in this area. But another key reason is because we are all too aware of the fact that body image remains, unfortunately, something that plagues a vast amount of women and girls. Men too, of course. And we can't ignore that body image has a huge impact on men also. But given that women have historically and predominantly born the way of beauty standards and that beauty and thinness have always been the primary social currencies for women, something that has consequently very negatively affected the way that we see and treat our bodies, combined, of course, with the fact that we are both women ourselves, it feels only right that

this series looks at body image through the female lens. Now look, we know the ubiquity of body image issues anecdotally. After all, how many women in your life are truly happy with the way that they look? But we've got the stats to back it up to. Research suggests that only 21% of adults feel satisfied with their body image. Meanwhile, 66% of children feel negative or very negative about their body image most of the time. And with eating disorder, hospital admissions increasing by 84% in the last five years, struggles with food and weight feel more prevalent than ever. This is all, of course, founded by the deafening diet culture noise that haunts the month of January, where we find ourselves right now. Having been encouraged to spend December feasting on all the indulgent

Christmas foods and drinks, think mined pies, bailey's, chocolate, the cultural narrative does a very sharp about turn on the first of Jan when we're hit with a barrage of New Year's weight loss ads that, falsely, promise a new year for the new year. Before the Christmas trees even come down, we find ourselves under intense pressure to shift the Christmas pounds, detox, and make this the year you finally reach your goal weight. It's manipulative at best, cruel at worst, and we really, really wanted to counteract that noise. At a time when generated self-loading is at fever pitch, we have created this series in a bid to try and cut through the noise and offer a different, far kinder and arguably more achievable goal this year, making peace with yourself. But of course, we know that's no mean feat. does, after all, run deep. But the first step in anything is acknowledgement and acceptance.

And in a very big way, we wanted this series to give you that. We want to break down the extensive and exhaustive ways in which diet culture exists and quite how prevalent it is in all of our lives. And we want to do this because we want it understood that if you hate your body or if you feel a long way from loving it, why that is. And contrary to everything you've ever heard. It's not because there is anything wrong with it or you. It's not because you're bad or because you've failed. It's because you've been targeted with an agenda that absolutely counts on your insecurities for a profit. Not only were we not taught how to love our bodies, we were actively encouraged to hate them. And that's what we wanted this series to show you.

And we knew we had our work cut out to really cover this topic properly and to do it justice. We realised that in order to fully understand it, we needed to investigate it. And as part of that, we needed to make it bigger than just us. We needed stories, research and experts. And as we started to write the series and sift through all the layers that have contributed to our complicated relationships with our bodies, we realised that our visions of a four-parter felt woefully insufficient. So we landed on eight, yes, you heard right, eight parts.

Eight episodes entirely dedicated to body image and the deconstruction of both societies and our relationship with our bodies. We'll be exploring the almond mom phenomenon, this idea of generational diet trauma and just how much the way we feel about our bodies was formed as a direct result of our mother's relationships with their own. This is a hugely complicated and nuanced issue and one that we wanted to handle as gently as we could. The last thing on earth we'd ever want to do is assign more blame to women who are not only, by and large, doing their best, but who overwhelmingly bear the brunt of more than their fair share of responsibility. Not least of all, because they

themselves were, as we will get into, victims of diet culture themselves. In order to do this topic justice, we needed to have this conversation with empathy and openness. And we were so lucky to have been joined by a reformed almond mom and her daughter, a psychiatrist and a campaigner for good body image in children to have this conversation with us. We're also going to look into the extraordinary influence of the media, with the toxic tabloids of the 90s and naughties hungrily highlighting, or rather circling, women cellulite and regularly printing the best and worst beach bodies on covers, to films like Bridget Jones and Love Actually making us feel horrendous for being anything over a size 10,

the archives were extensive. And we spoke to those who both featured in them and those involved in curating them, from a Heat magazine journalist who worked on the Circle of Shame feature, to the executive producer of some of the most toxic TV shows of our childhood, to a paparazzi who lifted the lid on the true value

of a reputation-roaning photograph. Beyond that, we'll be looking at the wellness craze of the 2010, which was essentially the very successful rebrand of diet culture that was arguably just as toxic as the previous iteration. from fitness influencers and chefs who became the face of this shiny movement to the doctors who stepped up to cut through the crap, we explored the extent to which this rebrand morphed diet culture into perhaps the most formidable threat. Then we'll look at how the wellness era gave way to body positivity, the movement that

truly changed the faces of so many industries in a way that we could have only dreamt of as kids and how as a result of that it looked like things were on the up. It felt as if we were finally eradicating body image toxicity and encouraging shock horror self-acceptance. But as brands cottoned onto this shift, the marketability potential morphed the movement for what it was meant to be, into something thought to be causing almost as much harm as it was curing. We explore the evolution of the movement, the importance of it, and the simultaneous controversies in an in-depth episode with body-positive activists who've since stepped away from the movement. And then we're spooling forwards to today. The Victoria's

Secret Fashion Show is back, weight loss drugs are sweeping the market, and Thin is very much back in. This felt hugely important. Misinformation is rife and OZempic is the word on everybody's lips. So we're calling in the big brains for this one. Is it really as bad as all that? Stick with us and we'll work it out. We've got it all to come over the next eight weeks. But before we get into that,

we felt that to really get a sense of the magnitude of diet culture and the effects that it's had on our lives, we need to go back to its roots. So in this episode, we're going back in time to the advent of diet culture. In the hope it helps us figure out how these debilities, body issues that burdens so many women have come to be and why. Is it all innate? Do we have a biological predisposition to desiring to be thin? Let's dig in. First up, what is diet culture? It's somewhat of an abstract term that is hard to define, but put simply, diet culture is a set of

beliefs that our society lives by that puts thinness, shape and size above all else and equates with it health, success, happiness and moral virtue, which is done in part by glorifying a particular way of eating and demonising certain food and food groups. The diet industry capitalises on these social narratives and the thin ideal by selling products that claim to move consumers closer to it. Diet culture is rooted in the idea that being thin is the best and most morally superior thing that a human can achieve and therefore encourages individuals to stop at nothing to achieve thinness. It demands that we devote precious time, energy and crucially money to shrinking our bodies. It hasn't always been like this, though. For most of our

existence, humans have been preoccupied with getting enough food to survive, not denying ourselves food in order to lose weight. For this reason, fat used to be a signal of wealth and health, and it carried a higher social status. It equaled fertility and resistance to disease and famine, whereas thinness signified poverty, illness and potentially death. As a result, countless kings, pharaohs, gods and goddesses in the ancient world were depicted with fat bodies. Fatness is still considered desirable in certain parts of the world, of course, in many African cultures, being fat is a symbol of good life and wealth. In parts of Mauritania and Nigeria, girls and soon-to-be brides are actually even force-fed to make them plump and therefore attractive for their

wedding. Perfect proof that the idea that thin is best slash most attractive is simply conditioning and not an innate human preference. So when did we, in the West at least, begin to see certain smaller body shapes as desirable and make associations between food and moral value? It's difficult to pinpoint exactly, but here's what we do know. What's thought to be the very first diet book came out in 1558?

Luigi Cornero was a 40-year-old, large Italian man who, tired of his size and inability to have sex, limited himself to 12 ounces of food a day and 14 ounces of wine. His book, The Art of Living Long, advised others to do the same. 14 ounces of wine is nearly half a litre. Fast forward to the early 1800s. Poet, politician and self-professed womanised at Lord Byron,

who was also a real sex symbol in England at the time, was very vocal about his desire to stay thin, which saw him turn to extreme methods. He would starve, binge eat, then try to sweat it off under layers of clothing, eating nothing. but either biscuits or potatoes drenched in vinegar, which sounds disgusting. Eventually, he turned to drinking quantities of vinegar, combining this with water several times a day in an attempt to flush out the fat.

The poet also openly condemned people, especially women, who ate what was, in his opinion, in excess. He was, of course, very unwell, and in 2011, Professor Arthur Crisp, a professor of psychiatric medicine said that he believed Byron suffered from severe anorexia nervosa. Diet culture turned another corner when British man, William Banting, decided to lose weight in 1862 due to a health concern and a growing cultural dislike for fatness.

He found a doctor, an ear, nose and throat specialist, because why not, who agreed to assist him with an experimental diet that cut out all food containing starch and sugar. And in 1863, he wrote a booklet that detailed the diet he followed. It was incredibly popular and sold out several times. So many people followed it that the term I am Banting meant I am on a diet. The diet itself was low in carbs and high in meat and fat, similar to the Atkins, but with six glasses of alcohol a day to help counteract the constipation accompanied

by eating practically nothing but meat. Seriously, these guys were lacking the daily mail. We need a couple of headlines about how too many glasses have read is not good. for your stomach. It's actually unbelievable. In 2015, South African scientist Tim Noakes adapted the original diet and documented his version in a book titled Real Meal Revolution. The diet swept South Africa and soon there was at least one banting option on countless

menus across the country. I actually went to South Africa around this time and I remember being so baffled by how many Banting offerings they were on menus, but also so happy as well because I was of course car-free myself at that time. Banting's book recommended frequent weighing and due to its popularity, scales to establish body weight soon became a collective preoccupation. By 1885, they were present in drugstores, pharmacies, train stations and even banks and offices, cementing a fixation on weight. Extraordinary to think that it was this guy. You know, know what I mean.

Right. That we just have, we all have these scales now. Right. Because this guy was like, guys, get obsessive about this. Now it's commonplace. Yeah. And I tell you what you should know. And that's your gravitational pull upon this earth.

It feels like an important thing for you to find out every morning. Every single day. Yeah. Without fail. At the same time, ideally get obsessed about it. And I want you to be very, very, very sad if one day it's a little bit high. than the next. Because how dare our bodies fluctuate?

Ridiculous. It hasn't always been like this though. Women in the Victorian era did not aspire to be thin. The ideal women's body was plump and hourglass shaped. This was seen as highly feminine and a sign that their husbands could afford to feed them and care for them financially. Now that I can get on board with it. I want to be kept well fed.

The hourglass figure was achieved with the help of the corset. to enhance a woman's curves by pulling in her waist. The corset was extremely popular, but often detrimental to women's health. Some doctors blame the corset for damage to internal organs, rib deformities, birth defects and miscarriages. Despite the very slim waist, the body ideal was still volumptuous and adored Victorian actress Lillian Russell, whose full shape was widely coveted, was around a UK size 16 to 18. mad right given that we know what's coming that that was at one point a size 16 to 18 was at one point a coveted body shape i also would be remiss not to get irate about the effect unsurprising

of the corset right the 19th century was a time of fast progress in science and technology and the victorians had a great appetite for novelty so unsurprisingly fad diets came along with increasing pace and diet culture took hold. For example, in 1903, Horace Fletcher, an art dealer from San Francisco, was told he was too fat to qualify for insurance, so he invented his own weight loss plan, chewing each mouthful 32 times, or once for each tooth, and then spitting out the rest. Munching parties became popular, where attendants stood around and counted their jaw movements up to 100.

Humans are fucked, I swear. Yeah, they are, but they also just didn't have Netflix. I feel like it shows. What else were they going to do? We might as well munch. The industrial revolution that began in the late 18th century bought about technological innovations that led to the mechanisation and mass production of clothing.

Prior to this, the only way to get clothes was to visit a seamstress or make them yourself, both of which meant fitting the clothes to your body shape. In the 20th century, we became used to cheaper mass-produced clothes. Women in particular wanted to be able to afford versions of the latest trends. But the problem was, and always will be, that women's bodies come in all shapes and sizes. How could clothes be mass produced to fit all of us? A move got underway to standardise sizing, driven by profit loss due to the need for alterations. Measurements were taken to determine

average proportions of women and dress sizes were based on this. However, it was largely white women who were measured for this. Troublingly, women of colour were excluded. So, starting from the 1950s, we got a version of the dress sizes that were familiar with today. Now, rather than clothes being made to fit your unique body, shape and size, your body was expected to fit the clothes. This also gave us a simple metric for comparing our bodies with others and, you could argue, gave the world a useful tool for body shame. We can see how it's all starting to come together, right? In the West, there was a distinct racial aspect to our growing fascination with an ideal body shape. Industrialisation also led to a significant surge of immigration as the factories needed

a cheap source of labour. The emerging white middle class was looking for ways to assert and maintain a dominant position in relation to the new immigrants and body size became a key point of comparison, wrote registered dietitian and author Chrissy Harrison in her book, Anti-Diate. Increasingly, in the late 19th century, the middle class began to see thinness as an opportunity to cement their higher social status. Charles Darwin published his book The Origin of the Species in 1858. Evolutionary theory

predominantly led by white men of northern European descent, deemed white races more evolutionarily advanced and thus superior. Fatness was more identifiable in blackness. Therefore, thinness was seen as more evolved and ultimately more desired. Essentially, fat phobia is rooted in

racism. Sabrina Strings wrote in her book, Fearing the Black Body, the racial origins of fatphobia. Discussions about racialized and gendered fat slash slender bodies circulated largely in elite white space and among white people prior to the mid-20th century. They served as a mechanism for white men and women to denigrate the racially othered body. They also worked to police and applaud the correct behaviors of other white people, especially white women, wrote Sabrina Strings in her book, Fearing the Black body the racial origins of fat phobia. The image of fat black women as savage and barbarous

in art, philosophy and science and as diseased in medicine has been used to both degrade black women and discipline white women. Fat phobia and the cultural desire for thinness started to influence medicine with doctors ultimately deeming fatness as unhealthy, despite a lack of scientific evidence to prove so. At the beginning of the 20th century, health insurance companies began using the Ketelae Index, which was later named the Body Mass Index, or BMI, to categorise people by weight. The categories were normal, overweight and underweight, and the insurance companies began to associate excessive weight with decreased life expectancy based on some preliminary data that is widely considered dubious. Now is a good time to look at a brief history of the Ketalai Index.

It was invented in the 1830s by a Belgium academic named Adolf Ketalai as a method to test whether the laws of probability could be applied to human beings at a population level. It was derived from a simple math formula and was never intended for clinical use on an individual scale. Furthermore, the method was based on statistics and data collected from European men, meaning that it didn't take into account different genders or races. Oh, I can't wait to do a series in the future about the gender data gap. But for now, the beauty ideal became significantly thinner. than it ever had been, with women relentlessly being encouraged to lose weight.

The advent of the 1920s flapper signalled the end of the fuller figure of the Victorian era. Magazines started to print pictures of tall, thin women, and the Western world subsequently began to covet a more slender, androgynous physique. Women turned to hiding their waists and wearing clothes that bound their breast to create a flat-chested appearance. Unsurprisingly, there were ever more experts on hand to advise women how they could force their bodies to achieve this newly desired shape. Calories became formally recognised as a way to measure the energy value of foods in 18196. Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters is thought to be one of the first people to count calories

and to advise others to do the same. Her 1918 book, Diet and Health with Key to the Calories, which sold a staggering 2 million copies in 55 editions, advised women to stick to 1,200 calories per day, all eaten in 100 calorie portions. This was 12 meals, 12 tiny bird meal. 12 very tiny tiny little meals a day. Amounts to the same recommended calorie amount for a toddler.

This was, of course, around the same time that women won the right to vote in many countries after a long and often brutal fight. Both Harrison and feminist writer Naomi Wolf believe this timing is far from coincidental. It's hard to smash the patriarchy. on an empty stomach or with a head full of food and body concerns and that's exactly the point of diet culture, wrote Harrison. While Wolf famously said, as we open the episode, dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one. This makes me so cross because it's absolutely right. And obviously the

only awareness I have of the 1920s is what I garnered from watching down. Mountain Abbey, but I can absolutely see how this played out. Well, just on an anecdotal level, you know what it's like to be on a diet. It's all consuming. Trying to stop your body from playing out one of its basic biological functions is really hard. It takes up all of your time, all of your energy, and consumes all of your thoughts. It doesn't leave much space for anything else. Of course not. And while we've got, you know, at this time, women aren't able to work. So their entire purpose, as far as they're taught, is to be desirable to make. And if there's one thing men, patriarchy upholding men, love, it's women to not have

annoying opinions and be smarter than them or look a way that they don't want them to look. And obviously a woman getting involved in politics, not very sexy to the fragile little men of the 1920s. And that's the thing. On a very fundamental level, diet culture allows the patriarchy. to thrive. It's interesting then that the era of thin boyish flapper immediately followed women getting the vote and the 1980s obsession with aerobics and fad diets came after the strides made by the second wave feminists in the 1960s and 70s. Keeping women busy with body concerns is one way

of making sure they stay quiet and obedient of keeping them shrinking literally and metaphorically. Despite the lack of sufficient data surrounding the theory that higher weights correlated to poor health, the diet industry was fast growing and promised to line the pockets of many. So it quickly became an unchallenged fact. Weight loss products had begun to take off from the late Victorian era with laxatives, soaps that wash fat away, compression garments and tapeworms. Yes, tapeworms, people would swallow a tapeworm or tapeworm pills. The worm would then live in their stomach and consume any food ingested.

Being advertised in magazines, any films, look, I don't want to do. judge. And that's a recurring theme of this series. We're going to go through it. We're going to talk about all the diets. We're not going to shame people for not thinking them through or thinking about the long term adverse effects of some of the methods suggested. But what on earth were they thinking with a tapeworm? I have an omission that might even be too bleak to include in this series. So whether this stays in or not remains to be seen. But at one point, at one particularly low point, I did do some research into how I might get my hands on a tapeworm.

And what was the barrier for you in the end? All of it. Well, I couldn't actually access one, which is a very good thing. For anybody who might be tempted by this, I'm going to just put you off with one, sad little story of one of my mum's dogs who got a tapeworm. that she had to pull with her bare hands out of his bum hole. Oh, God. And that's about as bleak a situation as I can imagine finding myself in

and will therefore mean that I will do everything in my power for the rest of time to never ingest a tapeworm. Thank God no one had to do that to me. I would not. Not to it. Nope. I also wouldn't ask you, so don't worry. For the plot.

if I could film it. At this time, diet pills became very popular too, generally containing amphetamine, which is speed, or an amphetamine derivative at best, iodine, arsenic, and other poisons at worst. Why do I still judge them more for the tapeworm? In the mid-1930s, hundreds of thousands of pills that contained dinotrophenol, a highly toxic industrial chemical was sold,

but many who tried it went blind or even died, and by 1938, it was deemed not fit for human consumption. That seemed a lot later than when it started. I think they could have come to that in eight years between its inception later. Women began to enjoy more social freedoms in the 1920s and 30s, including smoking in public, which had previously been taboo. Cigarette companies were quick to jump on this and soon marketed cigarettes as health aids

that benefited digestion and helped smokers to stop. stay slim. Toxic admission of my own. Please. That was always a perk of smoking for me. Right. I thought, Kate Moss says, I'll be thin. That's very common, right?

100%. Yeah, it cures your appetite. Yeah. It gives you lung cancer. Cards your appetite. Arguably more importantly. The 1920s also saw the arrival of the Golden Age of Hollywood, arguably one of the strongest influences on beauty standards thus far. Americans were able to visit their local movie theatre

to watch short, silent movies starring impossibly glamorous thin women like Greta Garbo and Clara Bow. There was some pushback against dieting in this period with doctors speaking out against dangerous diet products and the new beauty standard of thinness. But the diet industry continue to flourish regardless, with brushes, chewing them, bath oils and drinks, all promising,

to provide weight loss. From dangerous to ridiculous, diet culture runs the gamut, never leaving a stone or a possible money-making opportunity unturned. The 1930s produced many diets still peddled today, like the body pH and the grapefruit diet, also known as the Hollywood diet. The latter consisted of eating half a grapefruit with each meal followed by not much else. It's founded on the claim that grapefruit has a fat burning enzyme. I feel like you've tried it.

Of course I have. How was it? miserable. I actually quite like grapefruit. So it was one of the more enjoyable diets that I followed. But I don't believe the claims. Another popular diet to come out of the 30s was the alkaline diet, founded by Dr. William Hay. It involved dividing all foods into alkaline, acid or neutral and claimed you shouldn't combine acid and alkaline. There is no scientific evidence to back up his claims, yet the alkaline diet still exists today. Gwyneth Paltrow is long reported to be a fan. There was a slight dip in diet culture frenzy in the early 1940s due to the Second World War and food rationing, with people being encouraged to finish all the food on their plate. But it soon picked back up with magazines offering exercise routines alongside suggested diets.

The lemonade diet, or master cleanse, where you drink nothing but one teaspoon each of lemon juice and maple syrup, with cayenne pepper in a glass of water six to 12 times a day. became popular and the first ever weight loss support group was formed. Esther Manz created Tops, which stood for Take Off Pound Sensibly, in 1948 for people who wanted to get together, discuss their mutual food struggles and track their weight. If there's one thing I can comment her for, it's the use of the word sensibly.

Marilyn Monroe emerged as the 1950s epitome of beauty, full of figured and curvy, she became the ultimate pin-up, and yet again the ideal shifted. This sparked a new demand for the perfect hourglass shape, tiny waists and big busts. Diet advertisements started to air on television, as did group exercise programmes, and this decade also saw the first ever bariatric surgery, weight loss surgery. It had been devised to be used in rare, urgent cases, but physician Howard Payne saw a way to make money.

He coined the term morbid obesity in an attempt to paint the surgery as life-saving, because, well, morbid doesn't sound great, does it? Certainly doesn't. By 1959, Tops had 30,000 members. But in 1961, housewife Jean Nidec founded the most famous dieting group to date, Weight Watchers, after gathering a group of friends in her house to talk about weight loss. She was frustrated with her yo-yo dieting passed

and was eager to lean on support from others. Within five years of its launch, Weight Watchers, with its point system for calculating calories, but a staggering 5 million members worldwide. Problematic take from me, but I do like to see women entering the workforce in this way. And capitalizing, like, listen to everything we've just said. Men have been capitalizing on this for years.

They're going to keep going for decades longer. You've got a point. Go off, Jean. Yeah, exactly. Get it, girl. Thanks for all the trauma, body image-wise. Yeah. But also, it's like.

Following Marilyn celebrated hourglass physique of the 1950s, the desired body began to slim down. But there was a noticeable shift in the 1960s when British fashion model Leslie Lawson, known as Twiggy, shot to fame. Twiggy, who was still only a developing teenager at the time, made waves in the fashion industry for her waif-like androgynous figure, and she became the face and body of the 1960s. Women all over the world now coveted this look, but it was incredibly hard to attain for the vast majority. Hence, a more urgent desire to lose weight, which resulted in even more and far-fetched diet products. A liquid shake called MetraCal, which was to replace meals, came onto the market. I literally gagged as she did. As I read ahead, the taste of which

was often likened to babysick. Elvis Presley, known for his weight struggles, tried, brace yourself, the sleeping beauty diet, which involves taking sleeping pills and being unable to eat for a few days because, well, you weren't conscious. That's not a diet. That's a drug addiction. I'm going to take loads of sleeping pills. I imagine he felt so well rested, though, waking up after a few days of sleep. I wouldn't mind a few days of sleep.

Why am I jealous? Garments like corsets and binding materials were replaced by diet and exercise and the incidence of women being admitted to hospital for anorexia nervosa rose significantly. Slimmingwell was founded in 1969 in a church hall in Derbyshire by Margaret Mills Bramwell, characterised by a system that divided up foods into categories like free foods, healthy extras and sins. Diet pills were still very popular and by 1970, 8% of all prescriptions were for amphetamins. That's staggering. I mean, this is at the time we know that women with any mental health illness, were literally being lobotomized.

It's not a great time. Again, I feel compelled to give a little shout out to Margaret from Derbyshire. Go, Mark. Creating another hugely successful business from a church hall. It's a win. You know, a win's a win. In a roundabout way. The 1970s saw the rise of fat liberation groups,

who worked hard to debunk the myths around weight, health, and the efficacy of dieting. The National Association to Advanced Fat Acceptance, or NAPA, was founded in 1969 and the organisation worked hard to address weight bias and discrimination against fat people as a civil rights issue, while the fat underground was founded in the early 1970s by a group of women in Los Angeles as a radical offshoot. The group asserted that American culture fears fat because it fears powerful women and tirelessly sifted through medical journals to find statistics and studies that proves.

the widespread fat phobia it identified in the medical establishment. The organisation disbanded in 1983, but it was responsible for paving the way for the ensuing fat liberation activism. Despite their efforts, Thin remained the ideal and diet culture continue to dominate, with more and more diets, diet products and diet groups available, along with wildly inaccurate nutritional information to support the various diets. In 1972, cardiologist Robert Atkins published Dr. Atkins' Diet revolution. a book that detailed a compelling case against eating carbs.

It was revolutionary in the sense that you did not have to count calories or limit how much you were eating, as long as you were eating the right foods. Poultry, meat, butter, cheese, fats and oils. Nuts and salad greens were only to be introduced in later stages of the diet. The diet caused a stir and, at the height of its popularity, one in 11 Americans were on Atkins. I've said it once, I'll say it 100 times. if bread was that bad, Jesus wouldn't have fed all those people with it. But the tide turned in the 1980s were dieters reverting to a low-fat approach for weight loss

and diet products reached their peak with supermarket shelves lined with low-calorie or low-fat options. The fat had been replaced by starches and sugar and was substantially less filling. A notable dieting moment from the 1980s came in the form of Oprah Winfrey dragging a wagon holding 67 pounds of fat across the stage on her TV show to represent the weight she'd lost on a liquid diet. The weight, by the way, she put back on once she started to eat food again. Jane Fonda helped shift the focus from skinny to strong as her aerobics became an international craze. Supermodels like Cindy Crawford, Christine Brinkley and Elle McPherson embodied the perfect body of this era with their tall, toned and athletic physiques. Long, lean legs and broad shoulders became highly coveted

and shoulder pads with a defining fashion must have of the decade. Supermodels stormed the early 1990s with Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington representing the body de Jure, tall and thin yet still athletic and curvaceous. Despite not meeting the normal height criteria for models thin willowy 17-year-old model Kate Moore skyrocketed to fame in the mid-1990s during the horrifyingly named Heroin Sheet.

era, a style characterised by pale skin, dark under-eye circles, emaciated features, androgeny and unkempt hair. Meanwhile, low carb was back. The Atkins diet from the 1970s resurfaced and reached new levels of popularity with the release of Dr. Atkins' new diet revolution in 1992. Atkins' low-carb products could be found in most supermarkets, alongside a host of other diet options, such as calorie-portioned popular snacks like crisps and biscuits. Do you notice the pattern of demonising different fruit groups? Fats bad, then carbs of the devil, then sugar is the real villain, and then we cycle back through them all over again.

Diet culture is relentless. In 1994, the American Psychiatric Association recognized anorexia and bulimia and added eating disorders non-specified to their list of mental disorders, but binge eating wasn't to be recognised until 2013. Pamela Anderson first appeared in Baywatch, in her iconic red bikini in 1991, and the girl next door look combined with large, round breasts, became the ideal for many.

By the early 2000s, it was all about boobs and breast implants had become increasingly popular, with glamour model Katie Price undergoing a series of operations that took her up to a size 32-G. I just had to have a baby to get there. The 2000s saw diets like South Beach, paleo, Medifas, and Dukam become popular. I tried all of them, of course, and spoiler alert, non-worked.

My favourite thing to think back off from this time is the special K diet, which of course was literally just telling people to eat cereal for three meals a day on the promise that they'd lose weight. What a clever marketing point, honestly. Honestly, because the only thing you need is special K. It's genius. So nutritious. No, no, absolutely not.

Tiny pieces of cardboard floating in milk. But survive on special K. I have to say that I think Atkins had the biggest effect on me. I've tried all of them, but Atkins was the one that stuck with me because it made me so ill. Wow. I mean, it made me thin, but it also made me really ill. I looked grey slash green towards the end of it. So no carbohydrates?

Zero carbohydrates. Which, of course, includes fruit and vegetables. of course I think that's not so widely understood there were like different phases of the diet and once you got past like the intense initial phase then you're allowed to add like greens salad green not like chunky greens but like salad greens

like leaves to your diet and some nuts but there were specific ones like I remember specifically like macadamia nuts because they were very high in fat and not so high in carbs but apart from that it was just it was just everything think with a huge amount of fatten. Interestingly, I didn't diet as a teenager.

No. But not because I didn't want to. I was desperate to. I was just really shit at it. And that contributed completely to my self-loathing. Because I was like, I can't even do this. Like, I haven't even got the willpower. I used to sneak into, and my mum didn't,

my mum was always on a diet. But I would sneak into the cupboard and eat. I said it's a fade the other day, not proud. icing sugar with a teaspoon. Oh, God. Because there were no snacks in the house. That's a very powdery thing to consume. Incredibly so.

That reminds me of like the cinnamon challenge. Famously difficult. I can't tell you the amount of times I'd cough or sneeze. It'd go everywhere. I'd be like, oh, no, how incriminating. But I'm going to do it again. I'm trying to be subtle. And there's just icing sugar everywhere.

That feels desperate. It was desperate, but that's it. That was the kind of end that I was at. I was more desperate for like, I think my mum was probably, feeding me a very quote unquote healthy diet you know what I mean like she was just feeding me what a growing girl needed and that was like it's not enough pitch I need icing sugar I need the sweet stuff yeah but I never would have I don't think I could have dieted I don't think I was always too hungry and I think I probably would have been in trouble dieting is hard it is so hard it is so hard

it remains one of the most difficult things easier as an adult actually I think I don't know I think as a child, oh my God, I could not start my day until I'd had my bagel. It was, it was big. I needed my bagel. And even when I was fat-shamed by my friend having two bagels for breakfast and I was really upset about it and I've carried this grudge for a casual 20 years with both mothers now. She's a really nice woman. I see her all the time.

She's fat-shamed me for having two bagels for breakfast. But even then, I hated myself, but I couldn't, I wouldn't have not eaten them. You were a growing gal. You needed it? I was, yeah. Interesting, though. this is what this I mean we'll get into this in the series but this it came to me a lot later this dieting stuff yeah yeah couldn't hack it's so early I mean I need to work out what what age I was

in wait watches but I think it's about 13 that I was in there did you ask your mom to take you I think I accompanied my mom actually I think she was going anyway and I was like oh my god I need to go too yeah and I went and I do I do I remember distinctly someone saying you're too young to be here and being like no it's just as important that I lose weight as much as you but again I was never very good at it

because I was just a baby you're hungry I'm hungry you're growing you're going through puberty the thing is actually I think we will I think we remain that hungry I think we remain needing the food just as much if we're doing we're teenagers

but we are crueler to ourselves as we get older I think we have the means by which to be meaner to ourselves we develop this self-control or whatever it is. Interestingly, and I'm just thinking back to attending those meetings and not losing weight and feeling this already at that age, despite, I mean, had I been through puberty?

Probably just, yes. Dabbling with it. Just being through puberty. Distinctly remember feeling that shame around not having lost any weight and knowing that it was my personal responsibility and that I'd failed and making up all of these excuses. I'd be like, oh, I had soup last night. And I remember distinctly saying this to the leader, the group leader being like, I had soup last night. And it was, I had loads of it. And I think it's, I think it's, I think it's all the liquid in my body. That's so sad, isn't it? We digress.

Yeah, I want to give you a hug. Not now, but the little me. Little out. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's horrible. All right. So back to the noughties. Diet pills were still being sold, but luckily their ingredients were not as toxic or as dangerous as they had been in previous decades and now contained natural stimulants like green tea and acci berries. In 2009, the FDA approved Ali as effective for weight loss, a drug containing active ingredient or estat, which interferes with how you digest fats as well as not actually working. This caused digestion issues for many.

Uncontrollable bowel movements were a very common complaint. Can I just jump in here to give you an analogue? that I was I was in town with a friend who was taking Ellie and she shits herself in Devonims. Okay. What's her name? Fitness gadgets also became popular with wearable electronic devices calculating calories, carbs and protein intake, as well as sleep patterns and calories burned.

The media took a sinister turn in the late 1990s into the 2000s and it was open season on women in the public eye as we're going to get into. later in this series, but celebrities like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Nicol Richie and the Spice girls were regularly attacked in the press. They were upskirted by paparazzi as they got into cars and the pictures were printed. These young women were photographed relentlessly to try to capture bad angles and their bodies were scrutinized daily. Like I said, we're going to dig into all of this in upcoming episodes but it's important to note that the unrelenting scrutiny of these women's bodies undoubtedly had a hugely negative effect on the women themselves. but also us, the people constantly consuming this overt body shaming.

With our body insecurities at an all-time high, juice diets became popular in the 2010s, with followers replacing all foods with fresh juices, as well as more high-tech options to attempt to lose weight like DNA kits bought online, which were sent off and returned with a personalized diet, the blood-type diet, popular among Hollywood stars like Demi Moore and Courtney Cox, Arquette, and the metabolic diet, were also. so fads that became mainstream during this decade. Despite the diet industry showing no signs of abating, think laxative tea is marketed as flat tummy tea, skinny jab weight loss injections and gastric band balloons that can be swallowed

to expand in the stomach, something else I also explored. Many started to grow disillusioned with dieting in the mid-2010s thanks to the rise of the body positivity movement and the anti-dieticulture movement. And some began to loudly say what on some level we had always known. These diets don't work, not in any meaningful way. And we'll get into all of this later in the series, but with a multi-billion dollar industry at stake, diet culture rebranded to keep up, pivoting to use terminology like well-being and lifestyle rather than weight and diet. In 2018, Weight Watch has changed their famous brand name to WW with the new tagline wellness that works. Weight loss app, Noom launched in 2016, marketing itself as a lifestyle change that implements

long-lasting behavioural change with the tagline, stop dieting, get lifelong results. It is cleverly branded as weight loss designed by psychologists that use a psychology-based approach to change eating habits for the better. It has tricked many. It promises to finally be the solution for the weight loss desires before users realised it was just another diet dressed up in fancy clothes.

It is essentially a calorie tracker, using a traffic light system to rank foods according to the calories they contain. yet it was once valued at a staggering $3.7 billion. That's until, of course, the emergence of OZMPIC and all of its GLP-1 counterparts into the mainstream. OZMPIC was a drug created to treat diabetes type 2, but it soon emerged that a side effect was rapid weight loss,

and OZMPIC became a very hot commodity and fast. We're going to get into all of this later in the series. So there we have it. I look back at the history of diet culture. It's been with us for a very long time, rooted in history and ingrained in the fabric of our society, making it inevitable, therefore, that we find ourselves entrenched in it. If you feel bad about your body, or if you've been a chronic dieter, that's not on you. That's on the diet industry.

And one thing is very clear. The diet industry knows it has a captive consumer and is exceptionally capable at adapting and morphing so that it continues to trick people into losing precious time, energy and of course money, with the promise that it can never keep. Diet culture won't end with OZempic. If there's one thing this series has taught us, it's that it works on a cycle. One that we hope to break individually and collectively.

But in order for us to do that, it's going to need to get personal. Which is exactly what we're going to do next week in episode two titled Almond Moms. See you then. Should I delete that as part of the ACAST creator network? Thank you.