De-bunking toxic diet culture myths with Julia Wolman
The importance of taking up space on social media with the facts to flush out diet culture content.
“Diet culture messages are often packaged as health, wellness or self-improvement and we are made to feel that if we don’t live our lives in this way that we are somehow failing."
Julia Wolman, Family Nutritionist
Written by Charlotte Beattie
Content Guidance: discusses poor mental health as a result of toxic diet culture content on social media.
Despite the rise in body positivity trending on social media a few years ago, we are unfortunately seeing an influx of toxic diet culture content once again disguised as ‘wellness’ or as an essential for health. These trends are thriving from societal beauty standards pushed onto us as consumers of social media who increase profit for this so called ‘wellness’ advertising.
I don’t know about you, but my feed is beginning to decrease in versatile body types and representation, I’m seeing more ‘what I eat in a day’ videos and beauty products or foods promoted as slimming or toning. It is so disheartening to know that these words have gained connotations of being end goals for health and happiness.
My campaign so far has raised awareness for the façade of social media and its ability to promote toxic diet culture for profit and the reinforcement of societal beauty standards. However, I realised that I needed to take it a step further by bringing in the facts to directly combat diet culture trends on social media. In April this year, Julia Wolman reached out to my account and expressed her interest in collaboration and combining our knowledge and reach to de-bunk diet culture myths with professionally advised facts.
Who is Julia Wolman?
Julia Wolman is a nutritionist specialising in support for “parents, their children and whole family to eat healthily and happily”. I asked Julia to explain this niche in a little more detail and she explained that “this means nurturing positive relationships with food and enjoying stress-free family mealtimes without focussing on food rules, restriction or letting diet culture messages creep in”. This ethos sounds very similar to the aims and intentions of the #DeInfluencingDietCulture campaign with combating toxic diet culture on social media at the heart of what I do. Julia was the perfect person to team up with to ensure this campaign provides the facts to oppose the fad diets and viral ‘wellness’ trends.
"Children are like sponges and soak up everything they learn about food from the adults around them"
Julia Wolman, Family Nutritionist
“I thought if I could help Charlotte in her fight against diet culture by using her platform to debunk nutrition misinformation, then this may help Gen-Z future parents take healthier attitudes around food into their own parenting experiences one day" explained Julia. Since parental attitudes and vocabulary towards food and exercise can have such a large impact on the way we treat our bodies, it is important to ensure we don’t follow the same path. These attitudes and behaviours all stem from societal expectations and standards which then present themselves in parenting behaviours therefore, creating further generations who begin struggling with body image and mental health from such a young age. In Julia’s words- “children are like sponges and soak up everything they learn about food from the adults around them.”
From Julia’s experience in this field she has “observed over the years that if parents have healthy attitudes and beliefs around food, and feel relaxed and don’t obsess about nutrition, their children tend to eat well and develop a good relationship with food.” Therefore, the answer to this problem is to encourage healthier attitudes around food by combating one of the most influential sources of diet culture- social media. Julia and I aimed to do this by running a mini summer series on Instagram de-bunking diet culture myths that we had seen online.
What is Julia doing to combat diet culture in online spaces?
Like the De-Influencing Diet Culture campaign, Julia has been using social media to combat diet culture myths around food and exercise by using her speciality knowledge and advice. Julia noted that the content inspiring her to share this message is usually catered towards parents which “might be messages about what they should or shouldn’t feed their children, or influencers talking about what their own children eat.” From her experience working alongside parents with their nutrition, Julia has noticed how this content “creates intense feelings of guilt, shame or inadequacy among parents.” As a parent herself, Julia expressed how this makes her feel “upset because parenting is hard enough as it is without added stress from diet culture and social media.”
To achieve her motive to help parents more specifically, Julia is “trying to be more consistent with my social media and share messages which promote relationship with, over nutritional content of, food”. It’s important to create uplifting and factual posts on social media to flood out the toxic stream of diet culture content in our algorithms. Julia is taking up space in her own blog and on her Instagram page by talking “very little about what to eat and more about how to eat”. This is exactly what we need to be doing when body acceptance and positivity begin to get flushed away by toxic blabber. The more we make and push content that reinforces the facts and pushes out support for wellbeing; the more content we have as consumers to re-build our algorithms and support ourselves.
Julia’s advice:
To end my interview with Julia, I asked her what her stand out advice would be to give to a young student struggling with their mental health or eating habits as a result of social media consumption and diet culture myths. This is what she said:
“The most obvious piece of advice would be to stop the scroll, or at least limit it, but I know only too well how hard that is in reality. Instead, perhaps start noticing when you see anything that makes you feel bad about yourself, your diet, lifestyle or your body - and unfollow them immediately! Then re-train your algorithm to show fewer of these unhelpful posts by reading, liking and watching the videos of pages run by registered nutritionists or dietitians. You could even create a new folder and save all the posts that promote a healthy relationship with food and bodies, and come back to it when you need a reminder or positive boost.”
Re-train YOUR algorithm!
Try practicing Julia’s advice to guide you to a healthier social media algorithm today:
Unfollow content that makes you feel negatively towards your body
Like and view content that is factual and uplifting (this will encourage your algorithm to keep showing you this content!)
Create a saved folder of content that helped your body image and/or eating habits (go back to this whenever your algorithm starts shifting back to toxicity).
To read our full series de-bunking diet culture myths, visit our Instagram pages:
Need nutrition advice for your family?
Find Julia’s website here.
NEED HELP NOW?
Text ‘SHOUT’ to 85258
OR
Reach out to SWEDA, Mind Charity or Beat Eating Disorders
Visit your local GP and schedule a free assessment on the Eating Recovery Centre website
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