I have either been on a diet, or falling off one, since I was 11. I’ve done Keto, Weight Watchers, meal-replacement shakes, Dukan and the 5:2. I’ve attempted to only eat eggs and vegetables, and I’ve grappled with the 10 key principles of ‘intuitive eating’, where you eat what your body tells you to eat (in my case, mostly toast). And yet the only successful, long-term change I have made to my diet is that I now pretend not to be on one. If I lose weight and someone comments on it (in the last decade, I’ve varied between a size 12 and a 16), I act surprised. I claim that I’ve been busy or that I’ve been walking more. Basically, I lie. I keep schtum about the green juices, the skipped meals and the time I cried during The Great British Bake Off’s bread week because I so badly wanted focaccia. I am far more likely to spill the beans about my sex life or my bank balance than I am about my calorie intake. Why? Because in the decade that I’ve been wrestling with my body, messaging around dieting has swung from one extreme to the other. Where once we were told to be ‘beach-body ready’ and were bombarded with adverts featuring size-zero models, women are now told to embrace body positivity, to love ourselves without exception, and that it is society that is wrong – not our bodies. In other words, I should be happy with my body, rather than trying to change it, despite having grown up in a world that taught me to fear fat.

Writer Rebecca Reid feels stuck between diet culture and body positivity Credit : Silvana Trevale

The body-positivity wave has its roots in the US fat-acceptance movement of the ’60s. But with the advent of the internet, it became a beloved part of pop (aka mainstream) feminism, often represented by pretty young women with hourglass figures, leaning over to show off their ‘stomach rolls’ – a tactic a cynic might suggest is aimed at follower engagement rather than radical social change. Brands, from Asos to Marks & Spencer, seeing the delight with which people responded to ‘real women’, started slapping the hashtag ‘body positive’ in front of marketing campaigns in order to tick the diversity box and cast ‘real’ bodies in their shoots. The crazy diets of old and the message that you could ‘drop a dress size in a week’ were almost overnight replaced by a demand that you ‘love yourself’. Women who had been told to hate their fat for their entire adult lives were suddenly being told to embrace it, commodify it and celebrate it. In line with this edict, influencers stopped using words such as ‘skinny’ or ‘weight loss’, and replaced them with ‘lean’, ‘toned’ and ‘eating clean’. Talking about weight loss became less socially acceptable. Women in the spotlight began claiming their weight loss was ‘not a diet but a lifestyle’, and that they shed post-baby pounds by ‘running around after the kids’.

Are you beach body ready? Advert from Protein World Credit : Planet photos

Those few who still indulged in diet chat, such as the rapper Cardi B, were subject to widespread scrutiny. Actress and activist Jameela Jamil practically has a full-time job publicly critiquing celebrities who admit to wanting to be thin and claim to use diet products in order to achieve it. A long-time critic of the Kardashian sisters, she once accused them of being ‘double agents for the patriarchy’. When singer Adele lost a rumoured seven stone, fans expressed concern that she looked ‘too thin’, discussing her body in molecular detail. Her weight loss spawned think pieces galore. Was she letting down her body-positive fans? Had she caved in to the pressures of the music industry? Is it even OK to notice weight loss any more? ‘These days, if you post on social media that you’re on a diet because you want to lose weight, you’ll upset people,’ nutrition therapist and health writer Ian Marber tells me, ‘but if you attach a name to it – “eating clean”, “eating Paleo” or “going raw”, then, for some reason, that’s acceptable.’

Adele pictured in 2013 (left) and earlier this year (right) Credit : Getty Images

Body positivity is big news. In September 2018, Weight Watchers, one of the world’s most famous diet companies, rebranded to just ‘WW’, taking the word ‘weight’ out of its name and refocusing its brand proposition to incorporate wellness. Board member Oprah Winfrey somewhat ambiguously explained the change: ‘…As Weight Watchers becomes WW, I believe we will continue to inspire people not only to eat well, but to move more, connect with others and continue to experience the joys of a healthy life’. The company also claimed that ‘WW’ was a ‘marque’, which did not stand for Weight Watchers (or anything else). There are plenty of good reasons to stop talking about weight. Not least because hearing about what other people put in their mouths (or don’t) is incredibly boring. But beyond being dull, diet talk can also be dangerous. A 2005 report in the US journal Health Psychology found that mothers who were preoccupied with their weight and food intake were more likely to have daughters who struggled with disordered eating. As a child, I listened to babysitters, teachers, parents and family friends talking about diets from the moment I could process language. When I was 14, Jennifer Aniston told the world that she was on something called the Atkins diet, and my life changed overnight. A genuine fear of carbohydrates spread through my peers like a virus, and has remained with us ever since. Having been comprehensively screwed up by it, there is no question in my mind that diet culture needed to move away from the bad old days. But is there really no way that I can admit to being on a diet – something about which I already feel ashamed – without perpetuating a toxic culture? I already feel bad about my body half the time, I could do without an extra helping of guilt. Anthony Warner, voice behind the influential science-based blog The Angry Chef and author of The Truth About Fat, believes the cloak-and-dagger attitude to dieting can be dangerous. ‘If you’re on a diet and you’re being secretive about it, especially if you are actually eating in secret in order to hide that you’re dieting, that could easily be a path to disordered eating,’ he says. ‘It could also see you excluding yourself from social situations. We must not forget how important social connectivity is to our general well-being, and that food is one of the major ways in which we connect. If you’re refusing to go out for dinner with friends because of how you are eating, that’s a real problem.’ As is so often the case, when something becomes taboo it goes underground, rather than disappearing. Warner tells me, ‘Far more people than you realise are quietly heading off to a weight-loss group at a leisure centre on a Saturday morning.’ And the numbers certainly confirm that. According to the Dove Global Beauty and Confidence Report of 2016, only 20 per cent of UK women are ‘happy’ with their bodies. The diet industry is booming. The global wellness industry grew by 12.8 per cent between 2015 and 2017. According to the Global Wellness Institute, the international health and wellness industry is now worth $4.2 trillion (£3.2 trillion). Pinch of Nom, a Slimming World-inspired cookbook, was the best-selling book of 2019. And WW International’s membership went up by 27 per cent in 2018. Marisa Meltzer, author of This Is Big: How the Founder of Weight Watchers Changed the World (and Me), explains why dieting clubs like WW are still so important: ‘While the culture around dieting has changed for the better since the body-positivity movement became mainstream, some things have remained the same. Needing to talk about weight loss in order to achieve it is as important – if not more important – than it ever was. We all need some form of support in order to accomplish any difficult goal, and weight loss is no exception.’

Oprah Winfrey continues to be a Weight Watchers ambassador - pictured on the magazine in 2017

That’s not to say that the job of a weight-loss company is easy in 2020. Meltzer says they are, in fact, having to work extremely hard in order to avoid becoming obsolete – or offensive. ‘Historically, weight-loss companies have always tried to move with the times. In the 1980s, the big trend was aerobics, so they incorporated that into their campaigns and they combined food plans with exercise plans. With the rise of smartphones, they made apps so you could track your food. Nowadays, these companies suggest making fewer changes, aiming for smaller and more sustainable weight losses and have updated their language to avoid phrases such as “goal weight”.’ The jury is still out on whether losing weight does actually make people happier long-term, but data shows that life is harder if you are significantly overweight. A study by the University of Exeter found that overweight women were less likely to be hired for a job and, on average, earned less than thin colleagues once they were hired. It might technically be an adjective like ‘tall’ or ‘blonde’, but the word ‘fat’ has twisted into an insult and is often used as a synonym for lazy and unworthy of love. It’s no wonder even the most woke among us will occasionally transgress and ask, ‘Does this dress make me look fat?’, using fat in a pejorative sense. Beauty journalist and influencer Madeleine Spencer, who has 13,500 followers and is a size 10, has always bucked the ‘no talking about weight’ rule. ‘I’m forever horrifying people by saying that I would prefer to be thinner,’ she tells me. ‘But I personally prefer my body when it’s lean and my limbs are on the lithe side. It makes me feel lighter, more energetic, dressing takes less time and, yes, I like the way that it looks. It’s not an admission that goes down well, with many telling me that I’m failing as a feminist, and that I should accept my body as it is.’ Georgina Horne is a plus-size fashion and lingerie blogger with 281,000 followers on Instagram. When she got married in 2015, she (like 70 per cent of brides, according to Cornell University) lost weight – something that her followers found difficult. She told me, ‘I lost weight before my wedding because I was having photos taken from every single angle and I wanted to be able to enjoy those photos. There was definitely a sense from some people that it was a betrayal – people asked in the comments why I was doing it. But it is my body, and when I lose weight, that doesn’t mean that I’m telling other people that they need to do the same thing.’

Model Ashley Graham currently has 10.5 million followers on Instagram Credit : Courtesy of Ashley Graham's Instagram

The intention of taking diet talk off the table was to free women from worrying about their weight. But in doing so, it has only served to deepen the divisions. For the most part, we as a society still revere thinness. Fatness is vilified by people who are somewhat obsessed with other people’s bodies, shouting ‘fat’ as an insult and screaming about how plus-size models Tess Holliday and Ashley Graham (two million and 10.5 million Instagram followers respectively) are going to die of cancer (though are oddly silent about the health of people who drink, smoke or take recreational drugs). On the other side, there are those who refuse point blank to accept that weight can ever have anything to do with health. While it is true that you cannot diagnose someone’s health by their dress size, it’s also true that the UK had the third highest levels of obesity in Western Europe in 2018, and that carrying a lot of fat around your organs isn’t good for them (or you). Obesity has been associated with cancer, and weight-related hospital admissions topped one million for the first time last year. As in so many aspects of modern life, we seem to have lost any kind of middle ground. Both eating disorders and disordered eating are on the increase – 2020 data revealed hospital admissions had risen by a third in the past two years. Rhiannon Lambert is a nutritionist who specialises in supporting people with these conditions. ‘Unfortunately, the messaging we see in society still seems to place a value on thinness through television, advertising, social media and shop-window displays to name just a few,’ she says. ‘I am still spending the majority of my time working with clients in my clinic who have a poor relationship with food.’

Model and blogger Tess Holliday turned magazine cover star in 2018