Today is the day most people will give up their New Year’s resolutions. For many who set themselves the goal of losing weight (46 percent of women, 40 percent of men), breaking the proverbial fast comes with a sense of defeat. Interestingly, YouGov statistics reveal most people think the key to losing weight is to go on a diet — even though it’s now well-known this isn’t a good solution long-term. But against all the evidence comes an all-consuming diet culture — back these past few years thanks to TikTok fads and the rise of Ozempic — perpetuating the idea that the only way to lose weight is through extreme measures that are wholly unsustainable.
A pop-up exhibition outside the main entrance at King’s Cross, sponsored by nutritional app MyFitnessPal and open to the public from 16 January, takes stock of this rise in diet culture and looks at some of the maddest fads of the type throughout history. There’s the Arsenic diet which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was said to speed up people’s metabolism. In the twentieth century there was a similar vogue for amphetamines. Many of the diets included in the pop-up are from the past few years: baby food, for instance (where you only eat compotes and purees designed for toothless babies); Oatzempic (an oat and lime juice concoction touted as an all-natural version of the weight-loss drug by Novo Nordisk); or even dog food (which started out as a challenge on TikTok before becoming the latest deranged high-protein fad popular with the manosphere).
