Diary of a Gen Z Student: Life is too short to buy into this ridiculous diet culture 

Jane Cowan. Picture: Moya Nolan

Perhaps the greatest myth sold to women by our society is that the greatest thing they can achieve is beauty. 

Whatever 'beauty' means. We’re indoctrinated into this belief system at a painfully early age. 

Speaking personally, I know I understood that thinness was something our society revered before I could tie my shoes. These ideas permeate everything we consume: films, magazines, and social media. The pressure is immense. 

You’re told that you should be in constant pursuit of your own shrinkage. And unfortunately, many of us will buy into these lies, spending our lives being overly concerned with arbitrary numbers on our clothes.

Now that it’s the end of May, summer getaways are fast approaching. And that means that getting 'bikini ready' is everywhere. We're being told that now is the time to launch into crash diets, juice cleanses, workout plans or whatever fad marketeers want to throw at us. 

That’s an important detail in this: marketing. We have to be told that whatever state our current body is in, isn’t good enough and should be improved. What will improve it? Of course! 

The diet plan available at the link below. Or the tummy blasting exercise regime behind this pay wall. Or the supplement that costs eighty euros per bottle. 

A small price to pay for happiness. Because if we believe what we're told: thin equals valuable, and valuable equals happy. How could we not want to radically change our bodies?

For a few years, we may have thought that ideas like heroin chic and toxic diet culture were left in the nineties and noughties. But now, influencers are selling us miracle cures for problems that we didn’t even realise we had. 

In 2015, ‘Skinny Teas’ promoted by influencers promised to detox our bodies and cause miraculous weight loss ‘naturally’. But now that trend is gone out of fashion, influencers sell us miracle ‘debloat drinks’ instead, claiming to give us all flat stomachs. Because God forbid a woman’s uterus gets in the way of a flat stomach.

Social media a perfect breeding ground in which diet culture is able to thrive. One of the most insidious iterations of this is so so-called ‘Skinny Tok’. It is the name given to content that promotes and glamorises extreme thinness and disordered eating habits through videos posted by influencers. 

This content is pervasive. One of the most problematic videos that these influencers post is a diary of what they ate on a particular day. These videos will show women eating enough calories for a toddler, thinly veiled by their insistence that this is what health looks like. These videos often share ‘tips’ on kerbing hunger cues, telling girls to drink water or brush their teeth when they feel hungry, so that they can avoid actually eating. 

A horrifying thing to encourage among girls and young women, the chief consumers of this content. I’m describing that because I think it’s important for people to know what content we are being fed when we go online. 

It’s ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’, with a whole new dimension of accessibility. It’s almost impossible to avoid.

And as a young woman, it’s exhausting. I’m 21 . So, probably the healthiest I’ll ever be. But I hate that from every angle, I’m being told to waste my life obsessing over my body. Yearning for an elusive beauty standard. 

Mostly, I hate the fact that I and countless others have believed those harmful ideas. That the way my body looks should be something of concern. 

That it says something inherent about my value in this world. I know so many women and girls dread wearing a bikini at the beach because they think there’s something wrong with the cellulite on their thighs or the rolls on their stomach. What a pity. 

What a waste of our lives, too. Worrying about the appearance of your legs in shorts, instead of being excited by what you can do with the sunny day in front of you.

It can feel silly to talk about these things. Because it seems so obvious to say that hating your body will never lead you to enjoying your life. But it can be hard to remember that in a society that attempts to tell us that an aesthetic ideal is the greatest thing we have to offer. 

We’re being sold the unattainable, a body that will never be small enough. And maybe the most courageous thing we can do in the face of that is reject the pressure to do as we’re told. 

To enjoy the life we’ve got now, instead of putting it off until your jeans have dropped a size. Life is too bloody short.