Because I operate in a social media bubble, I am sometimes led to believe that dieting is a thing of the past. We’re all body-confident queens who wear the damn shorts and enjoy our daily little treats.
The reality is far from the utopian landscape I have curated on my Instagram feed. We might have evolved beyond the Cabbage Soup diet, and Slimfast shakes, but diet culture is still very much a prevalent part of our society (especially for women.)
The weight loss industry has simply taken on a new guise, thanks to the minds of some pretty clever marketers. As both a copywriter and avid campaigner against toxic diet culture, I am pretty interested in how these organisations use language to teach their methodologies and - just like a cult - ensure people stay (and, most importantly, keep paying).
In Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism, author Amanda Montell argues that “the key to manufacturing intense ideology, community, and us/them attitudes all comes down to language.” In many ways, these weight loss clubs and ideologies (e.g. keto) are cults. You are enticed to join, take part in ritualistic meetings, and are praised or punished depending on your results in any given week.
The one difference between Slimming World and a traditional cult, is that with SW you are always welcomed back. In fact, SW benefits if you leave, gain weight again, and return, because the longer you remain a paying member, the more profit they make.
The reason I get so worked up about this topic, in particular, is because these companies take advantage of people when they are at their most vulnerable. I am not against people choosing to reach or maintain a healthy weight. I even wrote about my own personal post-pandemic weight loss mission back in 2021. What I am ardently opposed to is when companies profit while creating and perpetuating disordered eating habits through the use of manipulative language.
I’m being good
Since leaving the corporate workforce, I thought I’d heard the last of “being good.” And yet, more often than not, I hear older family members discussing their eating habits through this lens of morality. I think it’s easy to forget that, while we millennials were raised in a world of Tumblr thinspo and Kate Moss quotes (you know the one), it’s actually our mothers’ generation who were suffering at the hands of body-shaming gossip magazines and the Special K diet.
If you imagine someone with an eating disorder, you won’t be alone in picturing a white, teenage girl. They have been the face of eating disorders for so long, and yet this skewed perception has led to a pattern of underdiagnosis and poor treatment for those who fall outside of the stereotype. In fact, older women are one of the fastest-growing demographics presenting disordered eating behaviours.
In this piece for The Guardian, Gillian Harvey writes about her own experiences as an older woman with an eating disorder. Harvey writes about how her own habits date back to her teenage years, thus demonstrating that these women are not experiencing anything new; it’s something they have carried for their entire adult lives.
While the rise of ‘body confidence’ on social media may have penetrated our millennial psyches, millions of women of all ages are ready to shell out their hard-earned cash to join a slimming club. Companies like Slimming World, Weight Watchers and Noom all know that we, as a society, are trying to move away from weight = self-worth. So, to keep the sign-ups coming, they strive to stay ahead of the game using some pretty clever marketing tactics that so many people find irresistible.
Gamification and the dopamine cycle
I’ve written before about dopamine and how it drives us to seek rewards. Weight Watchers’ Points system plays perfectly into the hands of this cheeky little brain chemical as it turns the activity of calorie counting into a game.
While I am no expert on WW or any slimming club, I understand that you are given a Points Budget that you are allowed to “spend” on certain food items during the day. You can use an app to track this and find foods that fit within your budget. Of course, WW produces several zero-point items that you can purchase, so they can continue to cash-in on the insecurities that they helped to create.
WW talks on their website about how to “tame hunger” - this is something worth unpacking. Hunger, in itself, is not something to be tamed, in the same way that we don’t need to tame our bladders or sleep schedules. In fact, we are encouraged to sleep more to improve our cognitive and physical health. When you really think about it, hunger is the only human sensation that we are told we need to control.
Controlling hunger is a losing game because we need the energy provided by calories to survive. WW aims to motivate users to go against their own nature by providing a short-term dopamine-releasing cycle through the gamification of its programme.
The morality of words
Slimming World is another big player in the diet industry and one I find particularly interesting as a professional copywriter. SW is the home of free food, body magic, and perhaps most famously, syns.
If a word could ever give me the ick, it’s syns.
As far as I understand, certain foods have zero, one or multiple syns, and you’re allowed a set number of syns per day. It’s pretty similar to the WW points system but with a side of religious transgression.
The wolf in sheep’s clothing
A relatively new addition to the weight loss world is Noom. It shows true dedication to this newsletter that I visited the Noom website to research how the brand uses language, because they have one of the most aggressive remarketing strategies I have ever known. My entire Instagram feed is Noom now.
Noom positions itself as the anti-diet diet company. The website literally says: “Stop dieting” just before it proceeds to tell you about how to diet using its three-colour system.
Noom is trying to dismantle the idea of restrictive eating… all while promoting restrictive eating. This piece in Business Insider takes a deep dive into how the way Noom is marketed attracts the most vulnerable people who are really struggling with their journey.
10 former users told Insider they found Noom was not only unhelpful but felt it exacerbated their previous issues with disordered eating.
Deprogramming ourselves
This is the hard part. If you are like me, then you were raised in an environment where, for the women in your life, the best thing you could possibly be is thin. And it’s not their fault, either, as they were told this by the media every, single day.
From being complimented on how I didn’t “look 20 weeks pregnant” through to comments about “losing the baby weight”, I’ve never had so many people comment on my body as I have in the last two years.
I look at my daughter’s body, and I just see the most wonderful thing in the whole world. She has tummy rolls and cellulite. Chubby babies are revered by Western society. And yet, even before puberty, we are hit with the messaging that girls should be smaller than boys (even though research shows this isn’t actually true.)
While I hope teenagers of today are breaking the intergenerational cycle of yo-yo dieting, body shaming and disordered eating, I still worry that for the women who raised us, they may never enjoy a guilt-free slice of cake or exercise simply to enjoy the movement rather than to burn calories.
I’ll end this by saying that I don’t think people who join slimming clubs are bad. We all seek validation in different ways, and by being alongside other people with similar goals, you can often feel more comfortable facing your vulnerabilities. What I do take issue with, however, is these organisations that take advantage of - and profit from - our vulnerabilities. And, through clever use of language and gamification tactics, they foster pre-existing insecurities and perpetuate disordered eating behaviour.
So, next time you’re at a family gathering, and someone says they’re “being good” or, worse, comments on what you’re eating or how you look, then don’t let it go unchecked. But remember, they too are a product of their environment.
I tend to just turn it into a joke.
Oh, you think I’ve lost weight? Yeah, I lost 7lb9oz when my baby was born 🥁
You’re being good? Cool, well I’ll be over here eating this bad, bad biscuit 🥁
Food is fuel for our bodies. Feeling hungry is fine. There is no such thing as good or bad food.
Further reading/listening on this topic…
📚 Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
🎙️Almond Moms (No Worries If Not #2)
🎙️Sounds Like a Cult - Diet Culture
The rapid encroaching of darker evenings seems to have impacted my mood lately. Last week, I wrote about how important it is to go outside for our moods, and yet shortly after, we were hit with Storm Babet, meaning it wasn’t really the right conditions to take a baby and two dogs for a local stroll, nevermind to the beach or the woods.
But, on Saturday afternoon, the clouds seemed to clear, and I forced the whole family to jump in the car and head to a local National Trust spot for a little walk and a scone.
A few other things I’ve enjoyed this week so far…
📚 The Ormering Tide by Kathryn Williams - A dark and poetic short read about a mystery set on a Channel Island.
🎥 Evil Dead Rise (Netflix) - The most recent instalment in one of my favourite horror movie franchises. If you are looking for a good spooky flick, by the way, I highly recommend checking out
‘s latest issue of .
That’s all from me this week, see you next Thursday morning for more of the same.
Ellen x
Thanks so much for writing this. I am now a woman in my 50s with a pretty good relationship with food. I was raised by a mother with an eating disorder and I have always tried my best to talk positively about food and bodies around my daughters. As a teenager I read diet books and I knew the calories to all foods - I can still quote them now!
My family were obsessed with diets and weightloss, I never felt good enough because I was never skinny.
Did ever have that feeling of gaining energy when being on a diet? That is the best thing to get out of dieting. It is No game whatsoever, always the same effect when you take in less.