Success Sundays - Say ‘no’ to ‘diet porn’

If you look at any diet book, magazine or website you’ll see pictures like the one above. No doubt many people find these inspirational and kudos to those people appearing in them if they really have lost all that weight. I call these pictures ‘diet porn’ and have spent a long time myself studying these pictures and imagining my own before and after pictures. I call them diet porn because I believe that they can be as damaging to our self-esteem as conventional porn.

It is a well-known fact that the proliferation and free availability of conventional porn on the Internet is having a serious detrimental effect on young people in society. They scroll through pages of images each more extreme than the last and the end result is that they have an unhealthy mental image of what a normal body looks like and what sex should be. I worry that diet porn is having a similar effect. We’re no longer impressed when we see before and after pictures of someone who has lost 10 pounds. But if we see someone who has gone from being morbidly obese to having a model figure then our interest is piqued, even better if they are tanned, are sporting tiny trunks or bikini and are covered in muscles. But this is not reality. For most people a diet is going to help them lose maybe 10% of their body weight and it’s not going to magically cover them in muscles or a tan. So it’s easy to become disheartened with our progress if after six months of faithful keto eating we’re still looking overweight (and pale!) - Even if we have lost some weight. We may feel we’ll never live up to those inspirational images we see when we scroll through diet forums or flick through a healthy eating magazine.

It’s worth remembering that not everything we see on the Internet is accurate. Pictures are touched up and reality is distorted and the people are often models (just like characters in pornography).

So move away from the diet porn. Close your browser or your magazine and instead look in the mirror and congratulate yourself for the 3 pounds you’ve lost or even just the fact that you said no to a biscuit you were offered.

You’re human, you’re normal and you’re doing great.