How to Reject the Toxic “Summer Body” Culture
Let’s be real, we are so over summer body culture. We have better things to do with our time than worry about how we might look on the beach this season. That being said, the memories of trying on your first swimsuit with your mom in the Old Navy changing room live rent-free in many of our brains. Losing weight at the start of the summer, buying new summer fashion and swimsuits, and spending money on anything that will “help” us achieve this unrealistic ideal are deliberately fed to us by targeted marketing campaigns, igniting an unsustainable cycle of overconsumption. This summer, we’re encouraging baddies to have a hot, sexy, and silly summer without the typical overbearing body goals, unnecessary purchases, and excess waste. Let’s break down the toxicity of summer bod culture, explore how it promotes unsustainable consumer behavior, and talk about how to reject the bikini body.
Bye-bye summer diet culture & hello to a sustainable baddie summer!
What is diet culture in the summer?
Diet culture is the social normalization and the capitalization of dieting, weight loss, and body/image alteration to promote thinness. It primarily targets female-identifying or femme-presenting folks, people of color, and the queer community, but it affects everyone. Corporate marketing, which relies on creating insecurity and discomfort with our bodies in order to sell us their products, constantly influences us to follow diet culture. When summer rolls around, many of these corporations are ready to pounce.
Summer diet culture can be as obvious as phrases like, “getting summer body ready,” or as subtle as simply seeing advertisements featuring models of one singular body type. Clothing brands push new styles meant to shape us differently, show off new angles of our bodies, or hide the ones that they deem unworthy. Even sunscreen brands, beauty product brands, and summer skincare brands sell us stories rooted in colorism, provoking a fear of getting too dark or a desire to turn our skin darker. Many of us can’t afford to buy all-new swimsuits every summer, to stock up on tanning oils, or the 150 SPF sunscreen (30+ is all you need!). We are all influenced to buy in a capitalist world, but as sustainable baddies, we have the ability to break down this unhealthy and unhelpful cycle, not only to repair relationships with our bodies (which are ever-changing and never in need of altering or hiding!) but also to break unnecessary consumer habits that lead to more waste and increase our carbon footprint.
What’s so bad about it?
It might seem pretty obvious why we are so anti-summer diet culture. It promotes toxic messaging and is totally unaligned with imperfect, joyful, and optimistic living. From a sustainability lens, this type of consumerist messaging leads to excessive purchasing and more waste. The health and wellness industry is a 4.2 trillion dollar industry, and the beauty industry is a 571.10 billion dollar industry. It’s pretty clear: these industries are making money with a capital M, and at what expense? Our hot and joyful summers? Not on our watch. 62.5% of our unwanted clothing ends up in landfills and plastic packaging accounts for 70% of waste from the beauty industry All those swimsuits we are persuaded to buy each year, plus bottles of tanning oil, glow creams, etc… turn into waste by the end of the summer. These landfills are pumping methane and carbon dioxide into our air and the more we add to them, the worse climate change gets.
How do we push back?
It’s been, at this point, decades of living and breathing this toxic summer body culture, so how do we fight it? How do we reject the messaging and turn against consumerism? Fortunately, baddies everywhere are fighting this fight as we speak, and, like most things, the more the merrier.
We break it down into three essential steps:
1. Reject!
First, we must intentionally reject and respond to this messaging. When we see an advertisement with toxic messaging, we have to remind ourselves that bodies are not meant to be palatable. Doing what you can to accept and honor your body and all that it does is a precious step in rejecting diet culture messaging. You can help yourself in this endeavor by staying aware of the media you consume. It’s okay to set limits and boundaries on what brands, influencers, and platforms you follow and only stick to the ones that you feel represent you and your values.
Rejecting diet culture cycles creates ripples that can change this experience for a younger generation. Here are some of our favorite folks and our favorite resources for starting or supporting a body acceptance journey:
Follow/shop from brands that have diverse models and advertising. Brands Kitty and Vibe, youswim, and TOMBOYx are some of our fav susty brands with diverse representation and little to no touch-ups.
Consume body-neutral or body-inclusive influencer content. Diversify that feed babe! You don’t need to spend your summer seeing only one type of body having fun at the beach or on vacation. Take a scroll through; how varied is your feed when it comes to body size, skin color, gender expression, and sexuality? Add some new folks to the timeline. Check out some influencers from this Glamour Article who have responded to summer body culture.
Educate on Body Neutrality & Diet Culture. For some of us, reading about and engaging in content surrounding body neutrality and diet culture can be triggering. However, if these concepts are new to you, educating yourself on what is harmful about these narratives is essential to rejecting them. Some of our favorite resources include The Body is Not an Apology (book), blackandembodied (Instagram), Maintenance Phase (podcast), The Unpublishable (substack), and Diet Culture 101 (podcast).
2. Support & Uplift!
Rejecting a widespread and mainstream social norm doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In fact, in order to reject it in its entirety, we need our entire community of baddies to join us in the effort. This is why celebrating, uplifting, and empowering our friends is absolutely essential to this effort. We can also share resources in our communities (baddies don’t gatekeep!), remind our friends why this messaging is toxic to our bodies and to our planet, and come up with creative solutions together.
3. Be Resourceful!
SB will always encourage you to use what you have before buying new. Of course, that means check your cabinets for last year's sunblock before you purchase a new bottle or dig under your bed for your favorite swimsuit cover-up, sun hat, towel, etc. That being said, it is a reality that some years we will need to go swimsuit shopping or re-stock our summer skincare shelf, and that’s okay! When buying new, try to make purchases that are as eco-friendly as possible:
Buy things that will last. Instead of purchasing a swimsuit or summer ’fit that you are hoping to fit into one day, or that you like but don’t love on your body, buy things that make you feel GOOD! There’s no point in putting your money into something that doesn’t make you feel like the baddie you are.
Look For low waste. When it comes to summer beauty essentials, there are great low-waste and plastic-free products that will protect your skin and give you that au-naturel look without pumping more plastic into our landfills.
Ultimately, if a hot girl summer is our destiny, then saying “see ya later” to diet culture is at the top of the list. No more excessive consumption, because as cringe as it may sound, every body is a summer body.