What are you looking at?
Scrolling but without the diet cultured content
Social media is well known as a space that can exacerbate disordered thoughts around food, bodies, and exercise. It can be difficult to navigate the diet culture messaging that shows up on various accounts. Some expected and some not. I’ve heard diet culture described as the “water” we’re all swimming in - whether you’ve pulled yourself onto a boat that is rowing away from this mess, or are still feeling like you’re on a surfboard getting slammed by big waves of diet culture, or happily swimming around and splashing passerby with crappy diet messaging, we’re all in it. But being in it doesn’t mean we have to seek it out or dive on in.
Following accounts that align with your values and the way you’d like to be viewing your body and food makes a world of difference - and the algorithm will pick up on the fact that this messaging is what you typically spend more time on and will click the follow/like/share button for. Filling your feed with more positive content will also help to displace the normalcy of diet culture. To go even further, it helps to unfollow triggering accounts and to report or block content that is advertised to you that encourages unhelpful dieting, over-exercising, or body shaming. If you’re a paid subscriber, you can go back to access an older newsletter of mine on the topic here.
When our life outside of social media is already full of diet culture messaging, a spot where we can create our own body inclusive bubble is on our feed. Here are some of my favorite accounts to follow - specific to Instagram because that’s my media of choice, although many of them are also on other platforms - that meet a variety of different needs. Following a dietitian or therapist might help with specific skills or fact checks to use when diet-y or eating disordered thoughts come up. Following body positive accounts or just following humans who share their day to day lives who have bodies that look like yours can help to shift your idea of what a “normal” or “good” body looks like. Making your feed look like real life, meaning the people on your feed are doing and looking like the people you typically see in public, means that your brain is able to normalize normal bodies. I’m going to keep this post free ongoing so that you can come back to it in the future as I add or change accounts to recommend. I’d love it if you commented with some of your own favorite accounts to follow and I will add them if they feel in line with nutrition/body/exercise messaging that I support!
My favorite accounts (in no particular order):
Dietitians:
Therapists:
Body Positive Humans:
Exercise Experts:
How about adding to your inbox, as well:
These are a couple newsletters I enjoy receiving each week that also offer a lot of anti-diet culture content.
Thanks for being here and I hope this helps! I am on Instagram, too, but content creation for social media does not *spark joy*, so I can’t say I’m going to be the most active account on your feed. If you’d still like to follow along you can find me here.
Thank you for the mention!