We live in a culture that is obsessed with thinness, weight loss, health, and wellness. There’s constant noise on what we should eat, how we should move, what our bodies should look like, and which new health trend is supposedly going to fix everything.

And somewhere along the way, we’ve completely lost the plot.

Because underneath all of this obsession with becoming thinner, healthier, younger, or more “optimized,” there are real people struggling.

People who are spending years battling food, are terrified of gaining weight, can’t trust themselves around food. People whose lives are getting smaller and smaller in pursuit of the “right” body. And people who are developing eating disorders.

That’s why I was so excited to have Morgan DiPrimo join me on the podcast for this incredibly important conversation.

Morgan is a filmmaker, speaker, and eating disorder advocate who has conducted more than 400 interviews across six continents with clinicians, researchers, policymakers, educators, nonprofit leaders, families, and people with lived experience. Through her work, she’s exploring the intersection of eating disorders, mental health, media, technology, healthcare, and culture.

And after all of those conversations, she has a perspective that I think all of us need to hear.

Because you don’t have to personally have an eating disorder for this conversation to matter to you. Diet culture affects all of us.

Eating Disorders Don’t Have a Certain “Look”

You cannot tell by looking at someone whether they have an eating disorder. That’s something I wanted to emphasize at the beginning of this episode because eating disorders are often portrayed in a very specific way in the media.

We imagine someone who looks extremely thin and obviously sick, but that’s not what eating disorders necessarily look like.

People with eating disorders can look like anyone. They can be in larger or smaller bodies. They can look “healthy.” They can be functioning at work, raising children, going to school, exercising, socializing, and appearing completely fine on the outside while they’re suffering tremendously on the inside.

And because we don’t understand that, people can go without recognition or appropriate care.

As Morgan’s work highlights, eating disorders exist across a continuum, including various levels of disordered eating and eating disorders.

So even if you’ve never received an eating disorder diagnosis, that doesn’t mean this conversation has nothing to do with you.

You might have a complicated relationship with food, spend an enormous amount of mental energy thinking about your weight, constantly be trying to “eat healthier,” feel guilty when you eat certain foods, or be terrified of gaining weight. Those experiences matter, too.

Diet Culture Can Be a Gateway to Disordered Eating

This is where I think we need to have a much bigger cultural conversation because we can’t talk about eating disorders without talking about diet culture.

Diet culture is constantly teaching us that weight loss is good and weight gain is bad. That having a smaller body is more desirable, that certain foods are “clean” while others are “junk,” that we should always be trying to improve, fix, or control our bodies.

And for some people, those messages can become a gateway to an eating disorder.

The tricky part is that many of these behaviors are socially rewarded.

You go on a diet and people congratulate you. You lose weight and someone tells you how great you look. You announce that you’re cutting out sugar and everyone has an opinion about how disciplined you are. You start exercising more and people assume you’re taking great care of yourself.

So how are we supposed to recognize when “healthy habits” have crossed into something harmful?

That’s part of the problem. Our culture often rewards behaviors that can become incredibly rigid and destructive.

When “Wellness” Doesn’t Actually Feel Well

Diet culture has also evolved. Maybe you’re no longer calling it a diet; instead, you’re “eating clean,” balancing your hormones, avoiding inflammation, or detoxing. You’re following an influencer’s morning routine that supposedly promises perfect health. 

And because it’s packaged as wellness, it can be much harder to recognize when you’re slipping into restriction or obsession.

Morgan and I explored some wellness practices that can look helpful on the surface while actually becoming dangerous in the conversation. 

The language may have changed, but the underlying message can remain exactly the same:

Your body isn’t good enough yet. You need to fix it, to control it, to optimize it. You need to become thinner, healthier, cleaner, younger, or more disciplined.

And there’s always another thing to buy, another rule to follow, and another problem to solve.

At some point, we have to ask when did taking care of our health become another way to be at war with ourselves?

Why Are We So Vulnerable to Nutrition Misinformation?

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation was our discussion about social media and the way nutrition information spreads online.

Morgan pointed out something I think is incredibly important: People crave certainty.

We live in uncertain times, and there’s something incredibly comforting about having someone confidently tell you exactly what to eat.

The problem is that the people delivering these answers aren’t necessarily qualified to give them.

As Morgan and I joked about during the interview, you wouldn’t necessarily get accounting advice from some random person online who happens to feel very confident about how they manage their money.

But when it comes to nutrition? Suddenly everyone is an expert. And sometimes the less qualified someone is, the more certain they sound.

Meanwhile, qualified professionals are more likely to acknowledge nuance, saying things like, “it depends,” or “There isn’t one answer for everyone.”

That isn’t nearly as exciting for social media, but it’s often much closer to reality.

Social Media Isn’t Entirely the Problem

It’s easy to blame social media for everything. And yes, there are very real problems with the way social media can affect body image, food, and mental health. 

But Morgan offered a much more nuanced perspective: Social media can also provide access to information and stories that people might never have encountered otherwise.

You can find people with lived experience, find resources, and hear from people who understand what you’re going through. Basically? You can feel less alone.

The problem is what happens when we’re consuming a constant highlight reel and comparing our entire lives and bodies to everyone else’s carefully curated version of theirs. For kids, this can be particularly concerning. Morgan talked about how, when she was growing up, bullying largely stopped when you left school. Now, technology can make it feel like there’s no escape.

The social comparison doesn’t stop when you walk through your front door and that’s a very different environment for young people to navigate.

What About AI and Eating Disorders?

We also talked about another issue that is becoming increasingly relevant: AI.

Morgan sees potential benefits in technology when it comes to reducing barriers to care and increasing access to information. But there’s a major caveat: Quality matters.

Just because technology can give you an answer doesn’t mean the answer is a good one.

And when we’re talking about eating disorders, mental health, nutrition, and body image, inaccurate information can have serious consequences.

AI and other technologies are developing rapidly, and Morgan pointed out that regulation and quality are important parts of this conversation. So once again, we come back to the importance of being discerning about where we’re getting our information. You don’t need to believe everything you see online.

We Need More Stories About How People Got Better

Morgan has interviewed people who have lived through eating disorders, and one thing that has struck her is how much attention we give to how people got sick.

We want to know the story. What happened? Why did it start? How bad did it get? What were the symptoms?

But Morgan believes we need far more conversations about something else:

• How did you get better?
• What helped?
• What made recovery possible?
• What role did treatment play?
• What role did community play?
• What did resilience look like?

Those are the stories we need more of because people who are struggling need hope. They need to know that recovery is possible.

Morgan and I both talked about how important it is to hear from people who have gotten better, not just people describing how sick they became.

There is power in a story that says, “This was my life. And then something changed. And this is how I found my way back.”

Eating Disorder Stories Need to Be Told Responsibly

We absolutely need people to share their stories (lived experience matters!) but how we tell those stories matters, too.

Morgan and I discussed the importance of moving away from storytelling that focuses heavily on the most extreme details of an eating disorder.

You don’t need to prove how sick you were. Your experience is significant and valid without those details. Instead, we need stories that also talk about:

• What helped you recover?
• Who supported you?
• What did you learn?
• What gave you hope?
• How did you rebuild your life?

Morgan’s documentary work is intentionally focused on bringing these conversations together and creating resources that are oriented toward hope, healing, and meaningful change.

That’s exactly the kind of storytelling I want more of.

The Eating Disorder Field Needs More Collaboration

After conducting more than 400 interviews, one of the things that surprised Morgan most was how siloed the field is.

Researchers aren’t always talking to clinicians.Clinicians aren’t always talking to policymakers. People with lived experience aren’t always centered in the conversations that affect them. Organizations may be working toward similar goals without necessarily working together.

And Morgan sees collaboration as an opportunity to create community, conversation, and ultimately better answers.

I think this is such a powerful reminder that we don’t solve huge problems by working alone.

We need researchers and clinicians, people with lived experience and families, educators and policymakers…and we need all those groups talking to each other. 

And we need all of these groups talking to each other.

Because eating disorders aren’t simply a food problem. They’re a mental health issue that’s influenced by culture, media, and technology. They’re affected by healthcare systems and access to treatment.

And they’re experienced by real human beings.

Parents Need More Knowledge and Less Judgment

If you are a parent, I especially want you to hear Morgan’s answer to one of the rapid-fire questions at the end of the episode.

I asked, “Parents need less blank and more blank.”

Her answer? “Parents need more knowledge and less judgment.”

YES.

Because when someone is struggling with food or their body, judgment doesn’t make the problem disappear. Shame doesn’t create recovery. And telling someone to “just eat” or “just stop worrying about your weight” isn’t enough.

We need education, understanding, early recognition…and to create environments where people feel safe enough to ask for help.

This Conversation Is Bigger Than Eating Disorders

You may be thinking, “I don’t have an eating disorder, so why does this matter to me?”

You don’t have to have a diagnosis to be affected by the culture that surrounds eating disorders.

If you’ve ever felt pressure to lose weight, believed that your body would be more valuable if it were smaller, or felt guilty for eating, this conversation is for you. 

And if you love someone who struggles with food or body image, it’s for you, too.

The culture we’re living in doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The messages we consume influence how we see ourselves and how we talk to the people around us. That’s why changing the conversation matters.

What We Can Do Differently

We can’t single-handedly dismantle diet culture tomorrow, but we can start making different choices.

We can question the nutrition advice that shows up in our feeds instead of automatically believing it. 

We can stop treating thinness as proof of health or worth, and stop commenting on other people’s weight.

We can become more thoughtful about the language we use around food and bodies.

We can learn that eating disorders don’t have a certain look, and can seek qualified help rather than taking nutrition advice from whoever happens to sound the most confident online.

And perhaps most importantly, we can start talking more about recovery. Not just what went wrong, but what helped.

Because as Morgan said in our rapid-fire conversation, diet culture is toxic. But recovery is possible. And I couldn’t agree more.

In case nobody has told you today, you are enough, exactly as you are.

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