Teen Mental Health: Nutrition and Diet Culture

Writing by Lydia Bach, Art by Cloe Moreno

I stand with a group of my friends in a circle, waiting for chorus rehearsal to pick back up again. A couple people start up a conversation about how bloated they look today. After a few minutes, I ask them, a little bit provocatively, how they know when they look bloated. Feeling bloated, sure, but how could they tell if they looked different? No one gives me a solid answer, not until my friend Laila says in a joking way, ‘oh, well, you have to know exactly what your stomach looked like beforehand’.

I cannot name one teenage girl that loves her body unconditionally. I cannot name one teenage girl with a healthy relationship to food. This isn’t to say that we all have obvious eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia, but simply that the girls I know do not think about food in a healthy way.

There is hesitation. ‘Should I get a snack after school? I’m hungry but do I really need it?’, ‘Have I eaten too much?’, ‘Do you know how many calories are in that?!’ ‘I don’t need any dessert.’ or, ‘God, I’m so bloated today’. Right now, the phrase ‘that’s so fat’ is used a lot by teenagers. You eat a second helping? That's fat. You say you’re hungry? God, you’re so fat. Ask for a snack? Oh, yes, that’s fat. It’s also become something to describe non-body related things, and always in the negative.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the encouragement of self hatred in young women. It’s not just young women, older women are not exempt from this self loathing, they have simply lived with those feelings for a longer time. I started talking about this with other people, wondering whether or not I know anyone with a kind inner voice.

I polled the women around me: do you think your inner voice is nice to you? One of my friends said no, but that she hated herself so it might be different for other people. My grandma told me that her inner voice was dedicated to making her feel guilty. This question then turned into one about food at a school lunch table when I mentioned to a group of friends (all female) that I didn’t know any teenage girls with normal relationships to food. I didn’t expect them to say much, but instead they enthusiastically agreed with me. Someone said “yeah, they either eat too much, like me, or nothing at all”. She then turned to look at one of my friends, who never eats lunch.

Children mimic their elders in order to learn how to survive. Girls model women in order to survive, and so the hatred persists. It might look different than the 1950s diet culture my grandmother was raised around, or the heroine-chic 90s’ and Kate Moss my mother saw, but the same fundamental ideas persist. Thinner is better. Low carb, low fat, lots of salad. If you are fat, or simply more than a size 0, you’ve failed. You’ve not tried hard enough.

When I was little, I used to always need affirmation before eating anything sweet. I’d ask my mom over and over, ‘are you sure it’s okay? Are you sure?’ and she would say yes, and that I didn’t have to ask her. Eventually I stopped. But my point is that these ideas are present from a very young age, whether or not we know where these insecurities around food come from.

I try very hard to avoid looking at ingredients. For a long time, and still to some degree, I was very against working out. I felt like if I got started on that path of hard core exercise, it would become a way to try and lose weight.

I’m also vegan, something I decided to do for environmental reasons, but a lot of vegan people I know become vegan because it automatically cuts out a huge chunk of what one usually eats in a day. It’s an easy excuse to decline food that is offered.

There isn’t a way to avoid this narrative of thinness being what is the most healthy (a false narrative, because in fact, conditions like anorexia increase risk of a memory loss, heart and kidney problems, and osteoporosis). No, you can’t avoid the diet culture ideas, but there are certainly ways that people resist it. Like all hateful ways of thinking that have been fed to us (racism, sexism, etc.), fighting against these harmful ideas and habits has to be conscious. Something one has to work on everyday, even if it’s just in the back of one’s mind. We have to constantly be challenging that voice that says that fat is ugly, that you should feel guilty for eating, that the thinner you are the healthier you are, and so on. It doesn’t mean you won’t judge your body or what you eat, but you’re slowly chipping away at a system, and that takes a long time.

The hope is, bit by bit, you’re creating an environment in which your children feel less pressure or shame than you do or did when you were growing up.

I honestly can’t tell you how to shift this perspective. It’s still something I’m thinking about. But, in a recent episode of This Teenage Life, we were very lucky to interview a registered dietitian and the program manager of ASU Health Literacy, Natasha Burrell, about the issues surrounding diet culture. We didn’t figure it all out in that meeting, but we did get a chance to continue this conversation.

I would say that, while I don’t entirely know how to change this narrative, I do believe that having more mothers and grandmothers who are working on developing healthy relationships with food is incredibly important. Even if it’s just being open with their children about what they struggle with.

If you have any positive stories about things that have worked for you, feel free to share them in the comments.

*As always, we would really appreciate it if you would share the Substack and subscribe to This Teenage Life wherever podcasts are found. To hear more of our thoughts/feelings on this subject, please listen to this week’s episode on Moving Past Diet Culture and Towards Real Nutrition.*

***Lydia Bach is a 15 year old writer and student living in New York City. When she’s not writing you can find her lying in bed worrying about the state of the world.***