Is diet culture dead? What Jenny Craig's demise means for society's weight obsession

Does the downfall of Jenny Craig signal the end of diet culture?

Woman standing on weighing scales

Weight loss is a multi-billion dollar industry. Source: Getty / ilarialuciani

It's counted a Spice Girl, an Australian Idol winner, and a former AFL player among its celebrity ambassadors.

But after 40 years, weight-loss giant Jenny Craig appears to have lost its appeal.

The Melbourne-founded company filed for bankruptcy in the US earlier this month, before announcing last Tuesday that its Australian and New Zealand operations had gone into voluntary administration.

Its collapse has been touted by some as a sign that diet culture and the multi-billion dollar that profits off people's insecurities are on their way out. But are they?

Is diet culture over?

Dietitian and author Lyndi Cohen said Jenny Craig going out of business was "a win" for those pushing back against .

"It feels like a turning of the tide," she told SBS News.

"For decades, we've been told that we need to stick to meal plans and follow diet rules that only lead us to feel more obsessed over the things we're not allowed to eat … so I feel buoyed and optimistic about the fact that this is happening."
But although the rejection of more overt models of weight loss is part of what's driving businesses like Jenny Craig to become less profitable, it doesn't mean diet culture is dead. Rather, it may just be evolving.

"These companies have cottoned on to the fact that people don't want to buy diets anymore because they realised they didn't work, and so they have done very clever rebrands claiming that they stand for wellness, when they still very much use before and after photos and reward people based on how many kilograms they lose," Ms Cohen said.

"I find them almost more sinister because, in a way, they're harder to spot.

"They promise us wellbeing, but sell us a whole bunch of food rules."

The rise in the use of to lose weight is also a sign that society is yet to accept someone's overall health and wellbeing isn't determined by their body size, dietitian Fiona Willer said.

"What I'm hearing from people who are taking these drugs for weight loss is that the symptoms are so incredibly overwhelming that they're not eating anything at all," the lecturer in nutrition and dietetics at Queensland University of Technology told SBS News.

"That is, of course, not consistent with good health."
Ms Willer said it's especially concerning that the long-term safety outcomes of these drugs are unknown.

"Ideally all of us need to reject weight centrism in all its forms," she said.

"The scales can't measure fitness, the scales can't measure nourishment, and the scales can't measure health status."

What impact can dieting have on our health and wellbeing?

Ms Willer has studied the relationship between and their dietary quality.

"I found really clearly that those who appreciated their body and didn't diet — whether they were in a smaller body or a larger body — had much higher dietary quality scores, so much more likely to achieve those kinds of health outcomes that weight loss sells us as the way to achieve them," she said.

"Whenever somebody started to diet or had sort of , their dietary quality was much narrower.

"The implication is that we need to reject diet culture in order to have a population that eats well and enjoys as optimised health as possible."
The Butterfly Foundation's head of prevention Danni Rowlands said on top of making us less physically healthy, restrictive dieting can also disorder our relationships with food and exercise.

"People often blame themselves because they haven't been able to stick to a diet, but just the very sheer nature of the way many restrictive diets work is that that just doesn't provide enough nutrition and fuel for the body to do what it needs to do," she told SBS News.

"If people become fixated and really focused on food and eating, and it distracts them from things that they do in their life, that can affect their relationships, that can affect the way that they can concentrate and study.

"And we know that when someone is experiencing disordered eating, they are at greater risk of experiencing … so it can introduce a pathway that really takes someone well away from achieving any kind of health benefit."

Can diet culture be dismantled?

Ms Rowlands said given how "entrenched" diet culture is in society, it will take a lot of work to eradicate it.

"We're up against multi-billion dollar industries," she said.

But that doesn't mean it can't be done.

"We do need to see more people standing up for this, but we also need to see a greater level of education and also more research done to actually make sure that we truly are understanding the impact of dieting, and that that information is spread far and wide," Ms Rowlands said.

"We need greater standards, we need , we need more work to be done in those social media platforms, just to make it more challenging for people to be spruiking information or selling products or promoting behaviours, particularly with a focus of weight loss, that actually do harm," she said.

Readers seeking support for body image concerns and eating disorders can contact Butterfly Foundation on 1800 33 4673. More information is available at

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5 min read
Published 15 May 2023 6:43am
By Amy Hall
Source: SBS News



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