Tabloids yell from the checkout aisle to stop eating carbs and join the keto diet. Social media tells us to drink chlorophyll water and bell peppers 24 hours a day. Diet culture is the root cause of body dysmorphia in our society. Teenagers should not be exposed to this extremely toxic culture.

Social media and public places need to limit the amount of content they share about diets so people can decrease the rise of diet culture.

Social Media has become the number-one way to influence people into going on a diet. Whether it’s from seeing TikTok videos to Instagram posts numerous people are pushing the diet culture. When young teens try to explore a site made for fun they are drowned by posts telling them tricks and hacks to shed a few pounds and get clearer skin. The websites that try to do good often do bad. With a few seconds on an app teenage girls think they are expected to look like Kendall Jenner and teenage boys are expected to look like The Rock. These pressures are especially profound when kids see their peers obtaining the unrealistic goals they have for themselves. This makes them fall into diet culture when some of those kids are born like that and it’s in their genes.

In addition, grocery stores and billboard signs rave about how a diet can change one’s life. Walking through the grocery store or even the street people see magazines, books, and advertisements telling them to join a diet or get a book to follow a diet. The diet culture has been shoved down people’s throats everywhere they look. Some people feel confident in themselves, but when they start to look around and see something repeatedly like diet culture they could think that they need to change their way of life. This type of advertising works wonders for all groups of people who are feeling insecure about their bodies and face. Subjects like violence and inappropriate images are not allowed in public places, so the extreme push and diet culture shouldn’t be either.

From ignorance, diets are believed to be necessary. Websites, publishers, and influencers all think by ingesting the right amount of calories and losing the right amount of pounds will make people happier, but it ends up being additional stress. They think that diets just make people healthier, but diet culture is more than that. In most cases, diets weigh on people. When standing in lines, people are counting calories seeing whether or not they can get a milkshake or if they have to stick to water. When they don’t get the results from skipping out on the 100 calories they didn’t eat, some can fall into depression or even gain body dysmorphia. This fixation can become the main trigger for mental illnesses.

Diet culture is extremely toxic and therefore should be censored online and more people should be informed on the topic. Almost half of the American population have tried a diet of some sort, and less than half saw any difference in their weight. Teenagers and adults should be taught the right way to maintain a healthy body and mind.