If You Didn’t Eat It Off the Floor, Your Food Is Clean: A Take on Diet Culture and Notions of Clean Eating
- Ummo
- Nov 24, 2025
- 4 min read
These days, eating feels like a full-time job; the never-ending counting, checking, and wondering if our food is “clean” enough. In this piece, Ummo gets real about her vulnerable journey with food and the diet culture that won’t stop buzzing in our ears.
When I was in recovery from Anorexia Nervosa in 2018, trying to improve my relationship with food and my body, it looked like I had gotten better because I had stopped starving myself.
But my obsession with food hadn’t left; it had only changed shape. Instead of fixating on how little I could eat, I became obsessed with eating "right".
I would spend hours on MyFitnessPal, counting and recounting the calories of what I had eaten. Yes, I was eating more, but I was only eating what felt “safe”: low-fat yogurt, cucumbers, red kidney beans….
Fast forward to today, and 20 kilograms heavier, I woke up, got dressed, went out for brunch with my friend, ordered salted egg pasta and fried squid because I wanted to. Next, we went to a café where I got an almond latte. Without thinking about the sugar in it. I did my work, wrote a poem, called my dad.
I lived my life.
That’s why I hate the idea of “clean eating.”
I HATE THE IDEA OF CLEAN EATING.
I hate labeling food as good or bad, clean or unclean. It puts a morality on food that shouldn’t exist. Yes, some foods are more nutritious than others, but that’s all it is. As long as it’s not something that fell on the floor, as long as you’re not eating dirt, I’m telling you: your food is clean.
When you think about clean eating, what comes to mind? Is it that it’s supposed to be "healthier"?
Under “clean eating,” I can no longer enjoy my mom’s chicken karahi with rice, because a bowl of rice is “bad.” A salad with olive oil is “clean.” This is food stripped of culture and care. We think we are controlling our diets, but our diets are controlling us (and our wallets!)
In my attempt to fight anorexia, a decision I made after my hair started falling out, I developed orthorexia. Orthorexia is a disorder not officially recognized in the DSM-5, because it’s not about eating less, it’s about eating right. Eating “right” to the point that you become consumed by it.
Clean eating culture feeds into these orthorexic tendencies. It thrives on wellness TikTok, gym culture, and What I Eat in a Day videos. It’s linked to perfectionism, anxiety, and a low sense of control over life. (Carriedo et al, 2020) At the end of the day, this kind of lifestyle is still a diet, and like all diets, it’s built on restriction. It’s just marketed in a different way.
The rules are constantly shifting. Low-fat, low-carb, no-sugar, no-oil. The questions are endless: Should you fast intermittently, or should you eat four small meals a day? Should you buy that green powder? How much fiber and protein should you eat?
What is diet culture and why is it back?
It’s shocking that after so much progress in body positivity, we’ve returned to micromanaging our diets – this time in the name of wellness.
Diet culture is the cultural norm that has long equated being thin with being healthy. It focuses on moralising food, restricting food, and establishing control around food and weight (Erhardt, 2021). And although we’ve learned to challenge some of these beliefs, the world around us makes it easy to fall right back into them.
Look at the moment we’re living in: the political instability, the financial insecurity, the constant unease especially as a woman watching your rights being taken away, realising day by day that you are being exploited. Therefore, seeking control wherever you can becomes almost instinctive.
Food is one of the easiest places to try to regain that control. That’s how we fall into clean eating, calorie counting, macro tracking, and all these black-and-white mindsets around food. Not just vanity, but to cope with the day to day stress of living in the world right now.
And we do this within a system that cultivates insecurity, then profits off of it. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum! We are constantly told to be productive, beautiful, and in control. So, food becomes another metric of performance. We’re sold all these drinks, supplements, pills, and powders but all we need are more balanced meals. We’re convinced we need to be thin to be beautiful, but restriction only leaves us weak, tired, unable to resist against the system.
What if we taught young people to eat with balance and joy, not fear and guilt?
Here are a few questions that we should be asking ourselves daily:
What if we poured the same energy we spend micromanaging our meals into learning to cook, sharing food, celebrating our cultural dishes and connecting with others? What if we taught young people to eat with balance and joy, not fear and guilt? What if food, and our bodies were simply neutral?
What if, instead of asking, “How can I control myself better? How can I starve myself more?” we ask, “How can I show up for myself better — and others — more?”
To be healthy is not to restrict, but to nourish.
To eat in ways that give us energy to live, to be strong, to resist, to build community.
To feed ourselves so that we can feed others.
That is what health really means.
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