White Woman Worries Diet Culture Is Only Culture She Has
CHARLOTTE, NC—A local white woman is in disarray about her cultural identity after finding out that diet culture is no longer in style. Reports say she has been eating protein powder raw while looking through weight loss before-and-after pictures to soothe herself.
Abigail Woods, 28, has spent her entire life trying to be skinny and has devoted countless hours to calorie tracking, food restriction, and diet research. She’s given her whole life to diet culture and doesn’t know who she’ll be without it.
When asked how she feels about the end of fatphobia, she responded: “What will I do with all that time not spent hating myself?” She currently has zero hobbies except for her daily binge-watch of YouTube videos titled “What I eat to lose 10lbs a day" and buying athleisure. She has even allowed diet culture to dictate her medical decisions.
“I didn’t get vaccinated against COVID because I was desperate for the two weeks without taste where I’d be uninterested in food," she said, weighing celery sticks. “That would've been a good milestone for me. If I’m not cooking bland diet food, what food will I make? I don’t even know how to use salt because I don’t want to retain the water weight.”
Her pantry is stocked with monk-fruit sweetener and uncanny valley low-calorie dupes of her favorite foods including rice cake hamburger buns and baby food shepherd’s pie.
“I met all of my friends at Weight Watchers’ meetings where we traded diet tips and took turns punching each others' stomachs as hard as we could," she reminisced. "What the hell are we going to do at the meetings now?"
When we reached out to her friends for comment, they were in even worse states than Woods. Aydan Walker, 30, was seen ransacking the grocery store for all of her favorite 0-calorie drinks that claim to “eliminate hunger entirely.”
Woods is unsure where to go from here.
“This is my entire history, my ethnicity even," she said, standing on the roof of her building, tip-toeing the ledge. "My mom was a dieter, my grandma was a dieter. My great-grandma dieted during The Great Depression and lost a ton of weight. It’s all I know… Now I have nothing, I am no one. I know not who I am. I am of not.”
