The Elimination Diet as Identity Project

When nutrition becomes your personality, you’ve forgotten nutrition.

What strikes me about food culture now is how diet has become identity. You’re not someone who makes food choices anymore. You’re vegan. Or keto. Or paleo. Or gluten-free. This is not something you do. This is who you are.

This is strange and somehow deflating. Because diet should be practical. What you eat because you want to be healthy, because you feel your body responds well. But what I see is diet has become performative. It’s something you share. It’s something that distinguishes you. It’s important because others see you do it.

This leads to odd situations. People who eliminate grain entirely because they read it’s bad, without ever testing whether their body actually responds to it. People who feel guilty eating something outside their diet category. People who feel friendships shift because they approach eating differently.

This is not nutrition. This is dogma. This is religion. This is something you use against yourself instead of for yourself.

What disappears is the real work. Listening to your body. Testing food and seeing how you feel. Understanding what you actually need instead of what a diet trend says you need. This is much less sexy. This doesn’t translate to Instagram content. It can’t be summarized in a hashtag.

My father was skeptical of dogma in nutrition. He said: everyone is different. What works for you doesn’t have to work for me. Someone who digests grain poorly should avoid grain. Someone for whom grain works fine doesn’t need to eliminate it. This is epigenetic. This is individual.

But nuance doesn’t scale as a brand. You can’t build followers on: everyone eats what works for them. You can build followers on: this diet is true, everything else is wrong.

The worst part is that it’s distracting. It feels active, feels like you’re improving your health. But if your underlying food choices are poor, elimination does nothing. You can be vegan and still eat ultraprocessed junk. You can be paleo and still be undernourished.

The question is not what you exclude. The question is what you include. Which real food comes inside you? Which calories are actual nutrition and which are empty energy? You can understand this without labels. It just takes attention, not identity.

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Sources: Psychology of diet culture, nutritional medicine