The Unrepentant Return of Christian Diet Culture

New York Times

02-07-2025

'Less Prozac, more protein.' That quote, uttered by the wellness influencer Alex Clark, jumped out at me from coverage of the Young Women's Leadership Summit, a gathering of around 3,000 hosted by Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit organization focused on the next generation.
Clark went on to discuss the melding of diet, exercise, religion and politics that, as she sees it, defines the conservative brand for 20- and 30-something women. 'The girls who lift weights, eat clean, have their hormones balanced, have their lives together' are right wing, the 'cool kids' and 'mainstream.' By contrast, liberals are 'TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks and a ring light.'
My first reaction: Enough about protein (that macronutrient needs a rest) and grass-fed beef from Whole Foods is neither Republican nor Democrat. I lift weights, married and got pregnant in my 20s; yet by Turning Point standards, I am basically a Marxist career harpy.
But my second reaction is that our ever-present diet culture once again has a conservative, Christian bent to it. I had recently seen some social media postings about sinfulness, gluttony and 'SkinnyTok,' and since Trump's re-election there have been magazine articles tying thinness to conservative values and the idea that women should take up less physical space in the public sphere. But it was the explicit pushing of diet and exercise at the Young Women's Leadership Summit that tied it all together for me: religiosity, conservatism, the Make America Healthy Again movement and diet culture.
Despite rumblings about 'body positivity' that peaked about 10 years ago, for decades the white American beauty standard has been thin. As part of the focus on body positivity in the 2010s, it became unfashionable to talk about skinniness as a goal, so it just got rebranded as wellness, health or self-care, though the pressures to conform remained the same.
In the '90s and '00s, thinness had a debauched, libertine air to it; if anything, I guess it was default coded as liberal, but it wasn't really tied to electoral politics or health. The image that comes to me is of the model Kate Moss at the famously muddy Glastonbury Music Festival in 2005, where her uniform was tiny shorts, Wellington boots, a troubled rock star boyfriend on her arm and a cigarette dangling from her mouth. The subtext was always that the skinniness came from cocaine and dancing all night, or simply not eating. Many women of my vintage can quote a relevant line from 'The Devil Wears Prada' (2006): 'I'm just one stomach flu away from my goal weight.'
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