Diet Culture Isn't Dead. But I'm Writing the Eulogy Anyway.
Diet culture didn’t disappear. It got quieter, smarter and much better at sounding like health.
Let me save us both some time, because I have done all of it.
The meal-replacement shakes for lunch. The fat-free biscuits eaten by the sleeve because fat-free meant they didn’t count, right? Noom. MyFitnessPal. Weighing every single thing I ate. Tracking calories burned as if my life depended on it.
And when none of it worked in the long run, which it never did, I did the only thing any of us were trained to do.
I assumed I was the problem.
I clearly just didn’t want it badly enough.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out the truth, so I’ll hand it to you for free: the problem was not that I was uniquely weak. And if you grew up in this too, I doubt it was you either.
It was the game. The whole rigged, expensive, unwinnable game, and the people quietly getting rich off you believing you were the broken part.
I honestly thought the game was over now.
Surely body positivity won, we all did the work, we’re terribly evolved, right?!
It didn’t end.
It rebranded.
It got a glucose monitor, a protein target and a longevity podcast, and it started calling itself wellness.
The diet culture I grew up with had exactly 1 virtue: it was rude enough to be honest about what it wanted.
Heroin chic was the trend, and “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” was printed on actual posters, for actual sale.
Whole magazines built pages around circling a stranger’s cellulite. It was cruel and it was loud, and the only mercy of loud is that at least you could hear it coming.
The 2026 version is sneakier, because it doesn’t say “lose weight”.
It talks about gut health. Hormones. Longevity. Cortisol, which is suddenly everyone’s emergency. It says, “I’m not dieting, I’m just being really intentional about my protein,” over a lunch that is identical to the sad desk salad of 2004, except now there’s a ring light on it.
And the genuinely annoying part is that some of it is real.
Vegetables are good. Lifting is great. Protein matters. Sleep matters. Health matters.
That is what makes it so fucked up.
The same plate of food can come from looking after yourself or from quietly policing yourself, and from the outside nobody can tell which. Sometimes the only difference is the weather inside your own head.
The wellness industry stopped telling you to be smaller and started telling you to be better, which is a much harder thing to say no to.
Nobody wants to be the one standing against “better”.
You want proof of how hard-wired this is? After pressure from regulators, TikTok blocked searches for #SkinnyTok, a hashtag linked to unhealthy weight-loss content and extreme thinness, especially among young adults.
Within days, people were using slightly different spellings.
You can block a hashtag. You cannot block the wiring underneath it.
Then the weight-loss injectables arrived, and everyone lost the plot in both directions at once.
So, carefully.
GLP-1 drugs are not a 14-day cleanse. They are real medicine that genuinely helps a lot of people, including people with diabetes and serious health risk. If one of them has helped you, that is your business and I am honestly happy for you.
Nobody is cheating.
Wanting to feel better in your body has never once been a moral failing, and I’ll fight anyone who says it is.
This is not an “Ozempic bad” newsletter.
It’s that a genuinely useful medical tool landed inside a culture that still reads thin as proof of character, and the culture did exactly what it always does.
It ate it.
Thin came quietly back into fashion. Runway size diversity went backwards. Some retailers scaled back plus-size ranges again. We invented the phrase “Ozempic face,” then a whole second industry to fix the thing the first industry supposedly caused, which is honestly the most 2026 sentence I have written this year.
And the “right” body has always cost money, but it used to be a cheaper con: a diet book, a gym membership, a cupboard of sad cereal.
Now it can be a prescription, a subscription, a stack of supplements, a glucose monitor on someone who has never been near diabetes. The acceptable body comes with a monthly bill. If you’ve got the money, you buy your way in. If you haven’t, you get judged from the cheap seats, same as ever.
And before the blokes reading this get comfortable: it came for you too.
Looksmaxxing. Jawline tutorials. Testosterone clinics. 75 Hard. The Oura ring scoring your sleep like a quarterly review you can fail while unconscious. Lean, hard, tracked, optimised, never soft in any direction.
Same assignment, translated into a different language.
Everyone is tired, and not just of dieting. Of optimising the entire experience of being alive.
Food is data. Sleep is a score. A walk is “zone 2.” Rest got rebranded as “recovery,” so even lying on the sofa is now a performance metric.
At some point, ordinary life starts arriving with homework attached.
And when the self-improvement to-do list is infinite, people don’t get motivated. They go flat. They scroll somebody else’s protein at 11pm, feel worse, and quietly think: fuck it.
That is not laziness, and I will not have it called laziness.
That is what happens to a normal person who has been told since roughly age 9 that their body is a problem to be managed, and that the managing never, ever ends.
Eventually the road just runs out.
The nihilism isn’t a flaw in you. It is a completely sane reaction to a game you were never going to win.
So let me say the thing this whole newsletter is built on, because I think some of you need it tonight.
You are not weak.
You did not fail at wellness.
You are tired because you were handed a rigged game as a child and told that losing was a personality defect, and you’ve been paying the entry fee ever since.
The exhaustion is not the problem with you.
It might be the most reasonable thing about you.
So here is what I’m actually burying.
Not health. Not strength, or good food, or medicine, or wanting to feel good in your skin, or wanting help, or changing your life.
Keep all of it. It’s yours.
I’m burying the old contract underneath it.
The one nobody signed but everybody absorbed.
That your body is public evidence.
That your appetite needs a chaperone.
That what you eat is a readout of your character.
That you have to get the body sorted before you’re allowed to rest, relax, or take up room.
That’s the part I want in the ground.
You can care about your health without spending your one life apologising for the shape of it.
And because I’m not going to leave you with a feeling and no door handle, here is the one small thing.
This summer, don’t add a rule.
Take one away.
Pick a single food you’ve quietly filed under “bad” and stop filing it there. Eat it at a normal table like a normal person, and notice that your life does not, in fact, fall apart.
No good foods, no bad foods. More variety, less purity. Less “what will make me acceptable,” more “what actually makes me feel good, in the body I’ve got, in the real summer I’m actually in.”
Two to sit with this week, men included:
What’s one “healthy” rule you’re carrying that, if you’re honest, is just diet culture in a better outfit?
If you fully trusted yourself with food, what’s one thing you’d stop doing tomorrow?
Reply and tell me the first one.
I read every single one, and saying the thing out loud is most of the work.
You don’t owe anyone a smaller plate this summer.
Noemie X
P.S. If this hit a nerve and you want help turning it into an actual system, I have x2 Summer-Proof 1:1 Coaching spots left before I close enrolment tomorrow. Over 4 weeks, we build a personalised wellbeing system around your real life: food, movement, rest, stress, travel, busy weeks and the moments that usually knock you off track.
No meal plans, restriction or optimisation theatre, just 4 private coaching sessions with support between them, and a practical blueprint you can keep using.
I’m closing because I’ll be travelling through Peru, Bolivia and Chile next month, and I only coach when I can give clients my full attention.
First step: book a free 20-minute discovery call to see if we’re a fit ➡️ Book a discovery call.
Noemie Mooney is an ACE Certified Health Coach, ICF-trained Behaviour Change Specialist, certified yoga instructor, and creator of the MAKE SPACE Method™. Trained in design thinking at the Stanford d.school, she writes Unwritten Potential, a newsletter about evidence-based wellbeing, sustainable habits, mental wellbeing, and health behaviour change for smart, health-curious people who want to feel their best without making it a full-time job.