The language of diet culture is everywhere - and it's doing more harm than we realise
Most of us didn't choose this language but we can choose to put it down, writes body image expert Elle Mace.
There's a sentence I hear almost every week, from clients, from strangers at parties, from people who've never met me: "I was so good today, I only had a salad."
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And every time, I crease because that sentence is doing far more damage than the person saying it realises.
We've built an entire vocabulary around food that has nothing to do with nutrition and everything to do with morality. Food isn't good or bad. It's not clean or dirty. It doesn't earn you anything, and it doesn't need to be worked off, burned off, or made up for.
Yet we've absorbed this language so completely that most of us use it without a second thought, and we pass it straight on to our children before they've even learned about nutrition.
Language shapes belief, and belief shapes behaviour. When we tell ourselves we were "good" for skipping lunch, we're not describing a neutral choice; we're casting ourselves in a moral drama where restriction is virtue and appetite is failure. That's not a foundation for a healthy relationship with food. It's a foundation for guilt, secrecy, and the exhausting cycle of restriction and rebound that so many of us know all too well.
The same applies to bodies. "I've let myself go." "I need to earn my dinner." "Summer body." These phrases treat the body as a project that's perpetually unfinished, something to be managed, apologised for, or fixed. But your body isn't a moral object. It's the thing that carries you through your life, and it deserves a vocabulary that reflects that, not one that’s been created by diet culture.
So what should we say instead? Start by removing morality from the plate. Food is simply food: it has flavour, texture, nutrients, and memories attached to it. A biscuit isn't a "cheat", it's a biscuit. Try swapping "I shouldn't" for "I don't want to right now" or "I do want to", because the former implies a rule being broken and the latter reflects an actual choice.
Around bodies, the shift is similar. Rather than commenting on someone's appearance, weight, or what they're eating, even with good intentions, try asking how they are, what they've been up to, what they're excited about. Compliments about bodies, even flattering ones, reinforce the idea that bodies are the most interesting thing about a person and that their value is up for public discussion.
This isn't about pretending health doesn't matter, or refusing ever to discuss food and health. It's about recognising that the words we choose either build shame or dismantle it. Most of us didn't choose this language; we inherited it from families, from magazines, from decades of diet culture disguised as wellness advice. But we can choose to put it down.
The way we talk to ourselves about food and bodies becomes the way our children learn to talk about theirs. That, if nothing else, is reason enough to choose our words with care.
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Elle Mace is a body image expert, positive psychology coach & author of Food Freedom
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