Calories and Conservatism: Why Diet Culture is Returning to Our Feeds

TikTok, Instagram, YouTube… Wherever you choose to doomscroll, diet culture content just keeps rearing its head. What isn’t always as evident is how destructive diet content falls in line with the steady rise in conservatism we’ve observed in recent years. As food becomes increasingly weaponised online, it is ever-important that we stop and ask ourselves, why?

Under conservative logic, thinness is an indication of a person’s dominance over their body and self-discipline. Weight is not recorded as a complex outcome of environment, stress or class, but as a visible marker of determination. In this way, thinness signifies restraint and anything else is interpreted as indulgence or weakness.

Looking closer, such thinking fits neatly with the conservative agenda. Believing that the body can be mastered through sheer willpower reassures the ideology that social safety nets, structural explanations and collective responsibility are unnecessary. This narrative disguises the reality: standards of thinness are easier to meet for those with time, money, stable housing, low stress, and access to healthcare. By equating thinness with moral achievement, conservative logic normalises inequality and evades systemic critique.

Crucially, these expectations of thinness disproportionately affect women. The gendered expectation of thinness is inseparable from the conservative commitment to tradition. If thinness is a virtue, then the ‘disciplined’ female body reflects qualities historically associated with ideal womanhood: modesty, self-denial and deference. Social media has been a breeding-ground for conservative influencers who drive for a return to these ‘female’ values. 

By now, I’m sure we’ve all heard of the manosphere. If you haven’t, it’s the side of the internet that produces hyper-masculine, misogynistic, anti-feminist content. Now you’re familiar, meet its counterpart: the womanosphere. In essence, the womanosphere is an online environment for conservative women to assert essentialist gender roles on a large scale. Conservative creators such as Brett Cooper and Candace Owens infuse their conservative values into lifestyle content and popular culture, as well as openly fat shaming online.

However, body discourse is not always so overt. Social media is able to perpetuate conservative ideals of thinness with its influx of seemingly innocent trends: 

• The ‘clean girl’ aesthetic is an affluent lifestyle which involves eating unprocessed, organic, low-sugar meals; does this mean to imply that women eating anything else are ‘dirty’?
• ‘That girl’ routines also have a healthy-eating component – no harm done, right? Wrong. The name in itself is a comparison: ‘be like that girl’. The ‘that girl’ aesthetic pits women together, creating feelings of inadequacy if you aren’t eating to the point of perfection.
• ‘Girl dinner’ is a plate of snacks, often criticised for glorifying nutritional imbalance, small portions and restrictive eating.

Though these trends seem harmless enough, building community between women and promoting healthy eating, they discreetly reinforce toxic diet culture. Focusing on portion control, eating to achieve a flat stomach and telling other women what they should be, social media turns female bodies into a project that is never finished.

Additionally, these trends prompt a very important question: why are we gendering dinners? Besides targeting a demographic, these social media trends infantilise adult women into ‘girls’ who only need to eat dainty, light foods. The psychology behind these trends is so subtle that you can fall into the trap of participating in them without even realising you are promoting an ideology. 

Maybe the real ‘clean girl’ move is cleaning diet culture off our feeds.

Words by Raechel Duddle