Unlearning Diet Culture: What Nourishment Means to Me Now

 As an African living in the West, I’ve found myself in the slow, intentional process of unlearning diet culture. This unlearning hasn’t been simple, because diet culture here in North America doesn’t just tell us how to eat — it tells us whose food is worthy, healthy, and legitimate.

In Western wellness spaces, “healthy eating” is often framed through a narrow cultural lens. Certain foods are celebrated, researched, marketed, and elevated as superior, while others — especially foods from non-Western cultures — are dismissed as unhealthy, heavy, or indulgent. This framing is not neutral. It reflects power, history, and whose knowledge is considered credible.

Growing up, the foods of my culture were never designed to fit Western food pyramids or wellness trends — yet they sustained generations. They were built on balance, seasonality, community, and survival. These foods nourished bodies long before they were filtered through calorie counts, macro ratios, or Instagram aesthetics. And yet, once placed in a Western context, they are often judged as “too starchy,” “too oily,” or “not clean enough.”

What’s particularly troubling is how often this same system then turns around and co-opts those very foods. Ingredients and dishes that have existed for centuries are suddenly rebranded as “superfoods” or “discoveries” once they are renamed, repackaged, or validated through Western science and marketing. Only then are they deemed healthy — not because they are newly nutritious, but because they have been approved through a Western lens.

This process strips food of its cultural meaning while extracting its value. It suggests that nourishment only becomes legitimate when translated into Western language, measured by Western standards, and consumed by Western bodies. In doing so, it quietly reinforces the idea that non-Western cultures cannot be trusted to know what has sustained them.

Unlearning diet culture, for me, means questioning these assumptions. It means recognizing that health is not culturally neutral and that food does not need Western permission to be nourishing. It means honoring indigenous knowledge, ancestral eating patterns, and the lived wisdom of communities who have fed themselves long before diet culture existed.

It requires separating my body from the shame imposed on it by systems that were never built with me in mind. It means understanding that food is not just fuel or morality — it is memory and identity.

I am learning to trust the foods that raised me and foods of other indigenous groups. I am learning to question narratives that flatten complex cultures into “unhealthy choices.” And I am learning that true wellness cannot exist without cultural respect.

To unlearn diet culture is not just to change how we eat — it is to challenge who gets to define health in the first place.