Many people have heard about the diet mentality. What is the diet mentality? It is the constant mindfulness on the kind of food a person eats. While many people are mindful of what they eat, they are still able to focus on other activities in life. A person with a constant mindfulness on food are not able to stop thinking about they eat. They are completely consumed by it.
Most individuals with this mentality divide food into "good" and "bad." This type of mindset leads people to feel that any food eaten from the "bad" category will make the person "bad" in some way. Then they feel guilty about what they did and beat themselves up for not being "strong enough" to resist the food. Conversely, if a person eats anything in the "good" category then they are a "good" person and they feel happy and good about themselves. Allowing food have such power over their emotional well-being is highly detrimental to a person's self esteem and view of themselves. How does a person feel about themselves if they are eating "bad" foods all the time? They feel like they are horrible losers that are out of control. These types of feeling and behaviors can snowball. The person will probably develop an eating disorder if they have not already developed one. They will try to only eat "good" foods, but when they find that they are tempted and eat "bad" foods they will binge -- eat a very large amount very quickly -- and purge (bulimia nervosa) or starve themselves (anorexia nervosa). Most eating disorders at their base are the sufferer's need to be perfect in every way and the way they eat is one of the few things they feel they can control.
Is there a diet mentality in the United States as a country? There seems to be since the mass media and diet industry plays on these feelings to get American's to buy their products. There are celebrity diet gurus with no training in nutrition or weight management telling people what to eat and what foods are "good" and "bad." This industry has essentially created the diet mentality as a way for people to buy more books and listen to their crooked advice. Almost the entire industry of popular diet books are made to play on people's need to feel good about themselves and their desire to lose weight. The United States has one of the highest rates of obesity in the world and these popular weight loss celebrities are not helping the situation. In fact, it could be argued that they are actually making it worse. It is obvious that their programs for weight loss don't work, because if they did Americans would not have a weight problem.
In addition, it is getting harder to separate real science and real weight management professionals from the quacks. Most real professionals choose to call foods healthy or unhealthy and work with people using techniques for careful scientific study. People desperately want to be healthy but the way these celebrity diet gurus pass around misinformation the real science based health information has become drowned out. We must be very careful to not fall prey to the "good" food and "bad" food mentality. We must realize that all food can be part of a healthy diet and that we are not bad if we eat a "bad" food. Fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are the base to any healthy diet but eating this way does not make us "good" people. We are good people by are everyday actions toward each other. It has nothing to do with what we eat.
