Dieting

Dieting refers to social practices with the goal of losing weight, such as decreasing food intake, increasing exercise, “watching” what one eats, and sharing food as well as discourse practices that socialize individuals into gender-appropriate body images and weight-loss norms.

[Page 452]The practice of dieting is commonplace in Western countries and is increasingly becoming a global issue. In the United States, a 2006 study by Edward Weiss and colleagues found that 34 percent of men and 48 percent of women had tried to lose weight during the previous year. The most common weight-loss practices reported were food restrictions, followed by exercising, eating less fat, and switching to lower-calorie foods. Marita McCabe and Lina Ricciardelli report that dieting is far more prevalent among women than among men as adolescent boys and men typically endorse an ideal male body that is both lean and muscular. As a result, men who are dissatisfied with their bodies are less concerned with dieting and more concerned with sculpting their muscles and toning their bodies.

Media images are a pervasive component of everyday life in the twenty-first century. Mimi Nichter estimates that Americans view between 400 and 600 advertisements daily, many of which use ultra-thin models to sell products. These ideal models lead individuals to think of their own identity in terms of ideal body shapes and foster dissatisfaction with self. Mass-media messages encourage people to achieve the thin body ideal through dieting and self-control while flooding the public with advertisements for junk foods, fast foods, and soda.

The social meaning of body weight and shape and the need to diet has shifted throughout history. During the mid-nineteenth century, corpulence symbolized economic prosperity in the United States, whereas by the end of the nineteenth century, social power was more closely connected to the ability to control labor resources than it was to material wealth or body size. At the beginning of the twentieth century, health and body-image norms became institutionalized through the medical practice of measuring, weighing, and documenting individuals' body size and weight. By the mid-1900s, insurance companies were using biomedical standards of height and weight to assess morbidity risk in individuals. This practice further institutionalized a normative standard for body weight as well as the ranking of individuals according to their adherence to this standard.

Women have been judged at the site of the body for many years. Fashion and media of the 1920s promoted a slender image of the female body and a postwar shift in attitude from conservative to carefree, prompting women to replace the outward constraint of the corset with the internal constraint of dieting and slimming. Movies and fashion magazines began encouraging girls to constantly “try on new identities” through clothing, makeup, and hairstyles. Whereas dieting efforts of girls in the 1920s tended to be intermittent, by the 1960s, dieting efforts of girls were more consistent. As fashionable clothing for women continued to become more revealing, baring a woman's midriff and thighs, women's obsession with dieting continued.

In the 1980s, diet and fitness industries expanded along with mass-media advertisements to sell slimming products. Increasingly, the locus of control and management of the body focused more on the consumer, who was considered responsible for his or her own body weight. As a result, overweight bodies increasingly came to represent laziness, weakness, and a lack of impulse control, while thin, toned bodies indexed discipline and willpower. Anthony Giddens reminds us that underpinning the increasing focus on the slim, controlled body is an emphasis on the body's perceived malleability. In effect, Giddens notes, “we have become responsible for the design of our own bodies” (1991, 102).

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