America Can’t Stop Dieting

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America is a nation of food cultures so wide-ranging that it’s hard to pin down what it means to eat like an American. Is it consuming hot dogs? Burgers? Pizza? Cheese? But maybe nothing is more uniquely American than our relationship with food: We simultaneously obsess over it and strive to eat less.

By 1907, one of the first times diet culture was alluded to in The Atlantic, this paradox was already ripe for satire. In an essay titled “On Growing Fat,” an unnamed writer recalls the dreariness of dieting, reveling in her rejection of it:

I collapse on to the couch this time; there is a box of chocolates near by, and as I nibble I ponder on the dietary rigors I used to undergo, the bran biscuits I munched and the puddings I refused, the entrées I denounced, and the cabbage I consumed, the gallons of cold water I drank and the cocoa that was to me an accursed thing. I cast a look at myself in the mirror opposite; I intend it to be withering and reproachful; but I cannot help seeing that the flesh puckers good-humoredly around the eyes, and that the mouth retains a contented curve.

Yet one of the most pernicious characteristics of diet culture is its cyclical nature. Diets start and stop and start anew. Even this writer’s triumphant attitude can’t break the pattern: “There is an hour before dinner, when we are to have sweetbread patties and marmalade pudding; I shall eat both, for I do not begin to diet until day after tomorrow.”

Escaping diet culture was impossible; it was a part of American life. By the 1920s, being trim had become widely associated with health and wealth, fatness with illness and laziness. As a result, the pressure to lose weight was unavoidable, even in your own home. In 1951, the writer Alfred Toombs lamented in The Atlantic that his wife kept urging him to shed some pounds: “I am willing to shrug this matter off, but she is not. ‘There’s a diet starting in the paper today,’ she says. ‘You should try it. You’d lose that ten pounds in a couple of weeks.’”

One reason diets generally don’t result in lasting weight loss is that they are usually based on a fundamental misunderstanding about nutrition. Apparent in past references to diet culture is the inaccurate belief that delicious foods, such as chocolate and pudding, should be avoided outright, and that joyless foods, such as bran and cabbage, should be eaten exclusively. Had Toombs known that all foods could be enjoyed in moderation, he might not have complained that his wife seemed to cook rich, fattening food every time he went on a new diet. “Instead of the lowcalorie roast chicken which normally appears on Sunday, we have fried chicken or chicken and dumplings,” he wrote. Certainly, some foods are richer than others. But cutting any food out entirely, or eating huge quantities of another, has never been an effective long-term weight-loss approach.

Before Atkins and keto, carnivore and paleo, there was the “banana diet” (low protein), the “boiled eggs and grapefruit diet” (high protein, low calorie), and the Pennington diet (high protein, high fat). These are just a few of the fad diets that were around in 1955, when the eminent Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer let out an exasperated sigh in The Atlantic: “The very multiplicity of diets, while proving that hope is eternal, is all too clear a proof of the eventual failure of dietary treatment. Yet each of them is presented as a ‘good’ reducing diet presumably for all forms of obesity.”

As Mayer wrote, nutritionists by then already had a solid sense of what constitutes a healthy approach to eating: Crash diets were dangerous. Exercise helped keep excess weight off. Fruits and vegetables were healthy, as were reasonable amounts of grain and protein. People, especially children, should not be blamed for obesity. Weight was a medical concern. Fad diets were just ridiculous.

Mayer was particularly appalled by the extreme diets pushed onto student athletes. “The coach may … put his boys on some whimsical diet which he has earnestly devised, or which has been confided to him by some garrulous warlock,” he wrote in The Atlantic in 1961. Some of these diets involved avoiding all fluids, eating a lot of royal jelly, or consuming foods high in saturated fat. The idea that excessively large quantities of protein and meat were necessary for athletes was another erroneously popular instruction that had been “refuted again and again throughout the last hundred years,” Mayer wrote. Still, he noted, some coaches called for “unneeded protein for their charges as vigorously as did their Greek predecessors almost two and a half millenniums ago.”

One notable standout from Mayer’s list of diet myths is the section on diet pills and drugs. “Most nutritionists agree that [diet pills] represent a gigantic fraud on the American public. Not that appropriate drugs … cannot eventually be found, but merely that they have not yet been found,” he wrote. With the advent of Ozempic and related obesity drugs, some might say the search is finally over. These medications have made it easier than ever for Americans to lose weight, and eventually may even make dieting obsolete. But as long as thinness is idealized, diet culture will remain.