Diet Culture and Counterculture: An Introduction

In this introductory chapter, I explore diet culture, including its sexual politics, the statistics underpinning its existence, and the notion of a ‘diet counterculture’. In doing so, I argue for the importance of understanding what unifies women in the fragmented and diverse ‘anti-diet movement’, and discuss the type of methodology I used in this project (e.g., feminist methodologies), my influences and how they have informed the development of this project, as well as the theoretical perspectives the monograph has been grounded in (e.g., Bourdieu’s theory of practice). I finish the introduction with a brief overview of the chapters to come.