The ‘Do-Diet’

Feed your future. Feed your energy. Feed your health. Feed your dreams.

If this was the Instagram account @dissapointingaffirmations then the next line would be ‘Feed your dog, he’s hungry you asshole’.

But alas, this is not Disappointing Affirmations. This is a diet ad.

Specifically it’s a diet ad for a diet that pretends it’s not a diet: ZOE. Its founder and spokesperson, Tim Spector, effusively talks about how calorie counting doesn’t work and the ZOE website claims it’s a ‘new way’ of eating – while Tim himself famously doesn’t eat bananas.

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ZOE is about health. It’s about shifting your mindset. It’s about making positive changes.

It’s a *little bit* about losing weight. But it’s not a diet. It’s a personalised nutrition programme. It’s not about restriction. It’s about SATISFACTION! But mostly it’s about empowering you to live your Best Life™.

ZOE is hardly unique in adopting the language of choice, empowerment, and ‘health gains’ in its branding. WW, Noom, diets low in ultra-processed food, Deliciously Ella, Veganuary1 and many more frame their version of restriction as a set of positive choices made in the name of health, that need not sacrifice pleasure. 

Millennial and Gen-Z women are savvy to the pitfalls of dieting and overt restriction (and if you’re not, read this). We saw the fall of ‘clean eating’, and ‘diet culture’ is part of our vernacular in a way it wasn’t for our mothers and grandmothers. So while ‘diet’ is now a four-letter word and carries a stigma if you talk about it openly, diet companies have had to find new ways of appealing to consumers. Slimming shakes are out. Psychology-powered, sustainable lifestyle changes are in. ‘Healthy’ is the new skinny. Weight loss has been replaced with wellness. Instead of obsessing over how many calories we’ve eaten, we worry about the diversity of our gut microbiome.

There is a name for this not-a-diet diet. It’s called ‘The Do-Diet’ and it was first described by sociologists Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston in their paper Choosing health: embodied neoliberalism, postfeminism, and the ‘do-diet’. Their research combines interviews with over 100 women, with textual analysis of women’s magazines and healthy eating blogs.