Blogtraditional eating · Weston A. Price

Ancestral Eating and the End of Diet Culture: Eat Real Food Without Counting Calories

Counting calories, weighing yourself every day, cutting out fat. See how ancestral eating can free you from diet culture and bring back the pleasure of eating real food.

October 7, 2026 · 17 min read · Nu&Cru

A teenage girl takes a deep breath and steps onto the scale. The cold glass prickles her bare feet as she waits, anxious, for the numbers to appear. She lets out a sigh: almost 700 grams more than yesterday. As she steps down, her thoughts race. "I should have run another mile this morning. No carbs today. Just rice cakes and a protein bar, and that'll fix it. Maybe I shouldn't even go to the party tonight."

This is a portrait of the mind of someone trapped in diet culture. And the author of this text, Cora Jackson, knows that portrait from the inside: she was that teenager, consumed by the desire to be as thin and lean as possible. In this article, adapted from the magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, she argues that ancestral eating, inspired by Weston Price, can break the chains of diet culture, restore disrupted metabolisms and bring back the joy of nourishing yourself.

A Diet Is Not Diet Culture

The expression "diet culture" has become popular in recent years. But what does it really mean?

First of all, diet culture is not a synonym for diet. According to the American dictionary Merriam-Webster, a diet is "food and drink regularly provided or consumed," or "habitual nutrition." In the most basic sense, it is what a person eats, nourishing or not. Right below that, however, comes another definition: "a regimen of eating and drinking sparingly so as to reduce one's weight." This is the sense that comes to most Westerners' minds when they hear the word diet, and the same happens in Portuguese.

To show why ancestral eating is a better way to approach food and weight, the author begins by answering the question: what exactly is diet culture?

What Diet Culture Is

In 2023, researchers defined today's diet culture as "a social norm that ranks thin bodies as superior to other body types," noting that it "has been associated with negative outcomes, such as eating disorders" (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health). The health website Medical News Today defines it as a "set of myths and expectations about food and weight, which generally equate thinness with health and divide foods into 'good' and 'bad.'" The National Alliance for Eating Disorders, an American organization dedicated to eating disorders, agrees: diet culture is "the widespread belief that certain body types are better than others."

The definitions vary a little, but the main characteristics repeat themselves:

thin bodies are morally better, and thinness is the ultimate goal;
true health always means a lower number on the scale;
restricting food is the main way to lose weight.

People who get stuck in this mindset, especially women, become vulnerable to body image problems, disordered eating behaviors and mental health struggles.

Diet Culture in Everyday Life

It isn't hard to see this behavior woven into society. The author observes that Americans are obsessed with weight and appearance, and choose less nutritious foods in the name of cutting calories:

egg whites instead of whole eggs, or rice cakes instead of brown rice cooked in bone broth;
a scale in every home and every gym, with the power to shape identities and destroy self-confidence;
restaurants and packaged products that attract customers with phrases like "only X calories!";
workouts that, for many people, aren't about health and longevity, but about earning a free pass to eat more ice cream after dinner;
and how many people go hungry all day only to binge at night?

In short, a fixation on thinness, calories and weight has taken over society. But how did we get here?

Where Diet Culture Comes From: A Century of Fad Diets

Ever since diets were invented in the 19th century, the United States has been living a food "whiplash effect," jumping from one diet to the next. In an article in Smithsonian magazine titled The Seesawing History of Fad Diets, Lisa Kingsley gives a chronological overview of the country's diets. The author sums up that overview like this:

The Banting diet (1863). The Englishman William Banting followed a low-carb diet to lose weight, and it became known by his name.
Reducing salons (early 1900s). People packed the so-called "reducing salons," which offered machines with two rollers: a woman stood between them and was squeezed, with the help of electricity, up to 80 times a minute.
The grapefruit diet (1930s). The diet gained popularity by prescribing a grapefruit at every meal.
The cabbage soup diet (1950s). It promised that you could eat any treat you wanted, as long as you first had a certain amount of cabbage soup.
Weight Watchers (1963). Weight Watchers launched its "weight control" advertising.
The Atkins diet (1972). The Atkins diet encouraged people to focus on getting into ketosis.
The Beverly Hills diet (1980s). It brought the idea that certain foods should not be combined.
The Mediterranean diet (1990s). Still popular, it praises olive oil, grains, legumes and lean meats. The foundation analyzes this diet in an article translated into Portuguese.

As the list shows, dieting to control weight is nothing new. And it doesn't even include the most recent entries, such as paleo, keto and others. These fad diets set the stage for a culture obsessed with dieting.

The problem behind diets

In the author's view, the endless parade of diets is only a symptom of a deeper problem: we live in an extremely visual, body-centered society where appearance matters more than inner health. Who cares if you have insulin resistance, as long as you're thin? Who cares if you can't lift weights, as long as you're thin? Who cares if you're always hungry and never feel satisfied, as long as the dress fits well?

This leads to a fundamental question: if the real goal should be nourishing the body from the inside out, and diet culture fails at that, what do we do? This is where ancestral eating comes in.

Is ancestral eating a diet?

Why doesn't eating inspired by Weston Price, which the foundation calls the Wise Traditions diet, fit into diet culture?

To pass the diet culture test, a way of eating has to aim at weight loss, fixate on morally "good" and "bad" foods, and be obsessed with thin bodies and the numbers on the scale. The Wise Traditions diet doesn't pass the test, because the goal is not thinness or a particular weight. The goal is to buy and prepare food in ways that make it nutrient-dense and truly nourish the body.

Also, don't be fooled by the word "diet." Our culture has distorted its meaning so much that it may be more helpful to talk about a "way of eating" or a "lifestyle." Ancestral eating is not a rigid diet: it is a framework and a philosophy that guide food choices.

Quality, not quantity

What further sets the Wise Traditions way of eating apart from diet culture is the absence of obsession with calories and macronutrients. As the foundation's own website puts it, it "does not dictate specific ratios of macronutrients (protein, fat and carbohydrate), nor does it mean we have to eat strange foods like insects, seal oil or fermented fish."

This means that there is freedom within this framework. The foundation encourages proper preparation techniques, but it does not advocate eliminating entire food groups, as other diets do, such as paleo (no grains) or keto (no carbohydrates). The foundation focuses much more on the quality of what we eat, as opposed to diet culture's numerical obsession with quantity.

Counting calories and macros: is it worth it?

So is counting macronutrients ("macros") or calories always a "toxic" habit? The author believes it isn't, with one caveat: she doesn't think counting macros or calories is a prerequisite for eating well or maintaining a healthy weight.

That said, in a society with an abundance of food, and especially of processed food, it's very easy to go over your calorie needs without noticing. That's why paying attention to calories and macros can serve as a tool, if it's done the right way. If someone has no idea how much they eat in a day and is struggling with excess body fat, writing down what they eat for a week and keeping track of their protein intake can be useful. The goal is to develop a sense of calories that helps the person build a healthy plate.

If counting calories and macros is useful for a (short) period, use it as a learning tool, not as a way of life. But if the idea of counting calories makes you want to pull your hair out, just focus on cooking and eating nutrient-dense foods. And remember: our ancestors never heard of calories or macronutrients.

The Principles of Ancestral Eating

The foundation's website lays out eleven clear principles (summarized in Portuguese in the Timeless Principles of Healthy Traditional Diets) that can serve as a framework for everyday choices:

Avoid all refined and denatured foods.
Include animal foods.
Prioritize nutrient-dense foods: organ meats, animal fats, eggs, raw dairy, seafood, fish liver oil and fish eggs.
Eat some animal foods raw and cook most vegetables.
Enjoy lacto-fermented condiments and drinks.
Properly prepare seeds, grains and nuts, as in soaked oatmeal porridge, to reduce antinutrients and make them easier to digest.
Enjoy saturated fats and avoid industrial seed oils.
Eat animal foods from both land and sea, to balance omega-6 and omega-3.
Use unrefined sea salt freely.
Include gelatin-rich bone broths.
Prioritize nutrient-dense foods before and during pregnancy and for growing babies, as in the Ancestral Guide to Introducing Solid Foods.

What About Macronutrient Ratios?

In the book Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon Morell notes that the macronutrient ratios of traditional diets probably looked something like this: 40% of calories from carbohydrates, 20% from protein and 40% from fat. But she is careful to say that these ratios should "serve only as a guide, not as a rigid dogma that makes us turn our eating habits into a fetish."

For weight loss, she recommends about 20% carbohydrates and 60% fat. Her article Thoughts on Weight Loss proposes four basic steps for permanent weight loss, which rhyme in English: Purge, Splurge, Fast and Last. Morell also makes an excellent point: diets that fixate on macronutrient numbers usually do so at the expense of food quality.

That is the beauty of ancestral eating, the author sums up: nourishing food is a much gentler mistress than the tyranny of calorie-counting regimens. For those who want to learn more, she recommends the book Nourishing Traditions, the foundation's website and the Wise Traditions podcast. In Portuguese, the book 181 Receitas Ancestrais (181 Ancestral Recipes) brings these principles into the Brazilian kitchen.

Does Ancestral Eating Make You Gain Weight?

Plenty of people would love to delete the calorie-counting app, throw out the scale and never look at a rice cake again, but still hesitate to embrace ancestral eating. Why? Because it challenges the rules of diet culture! A grass-fed beef steak fried in beef tallow? Natural sourdough bread made from freshly ground flour, with butter? Whole raw milk? Because these foods, besides being nutrient-dense, have more calories than kale chips and nonfat yogurt, many people ask: "Will I gain weight with ancestral eating?"

The author's answer: unless you overeat and constantly ignore your hunger signals, it is unlikely that ancestral, real-food eating will make you gain weight. For many people, it not only helps maintain a healthy weight but also helps them lose those stubborn pounds. According to her, foods such as pasture-raised eggs, meat from grass-fed animals and natural sourdough bread help regulate satiety hormones and metabolism, which makes it easier not to overeat and to maintain your weight.

Weight in the United States

Weight is a major problem for many Americans. Although about 45 million Americans go on a diet every year, roughly three in four adults are overweight or obese. Of the roughly 43% of adults with obesity, nearly 10% have severe obesity. A study published in late 2025 suggested that if obesity is measured not only by body mass index (BMI) but also by other anthropometric measures, such as waist circumference, waist-to-height ratio or waist-to-hip ratio, the prevalence of obesity among adults rises to a staggering 69%.

Why Ultra-Processed Foods Make You Gain Weight

What is the missing piece? The obesity puzzle has many pieces, but processed foods may be one of the biggest culprits. According to the author, these denatured foods wreck the metabolism and, as a result, create the need to count calories. The cycle never ends, and diet culture stays alive.

How do processed foods damage the body? The author points to three reasons:

Frequency. Most Americans don't eat an industrial sweet treat just once a year, at Thanksgiving. Among 32 countries, the United States consumes the most ultra-processed foods, which make up about 58% of daily calories.
Oils. Industrial seed oils account for 80% or more of the calories from fat in the average American's diet.
Quantity. Researchers have found that people tend to eat more when their diet is processed. In a small 2019 study from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, healthy volunteers who ate an ultra-processed diet for two weeks took in about 500 more calories a day, ate faster and gained weight: on average 0.9 kg on the ultra-processed diet, and they lost the same amount on the diet without processed foods.

Although poor in nutrients, processed foods have calories to spare. The combination of industrial seed oils, modified starches, refined sugar and addictive flavor enhancers such as monosodium glutamate creates products that hook the consumer. Even after three industrial filled snack cakes, they barely feel satisfied, and the pounds start to pile up. To avoid these oils at restaurants too, Nu&Cru maintains the map De olho no óleo (Keep an Eye on the Oil).

Visceral Fat: The Danger of Being "Skinny Fat"

What many people don't realize is that a fast-food diet doesn't just add weight on the outside; it causes damage on the inside. Because people caught up in diet culture think only about being thin, they tend to overlook the importance of internal health.

In her 2024 book Dark Calories, physician Catherine "Cate" Shanahan explains that we can carry inflammatory body fat, usually called visceral fat, which builds up inside, around the liver, the pancreas and other organs. The problem is that this fat doesn't produce enough leptin to tell the brain we are already full, which leads to overeating.

The alarming part is that a person can have a "normal" weight and still have visceral fat. According to Shanahan, up to 45% of lean women and 60% of lean men have significant amounts of visceral fat, which she calls skinny fat. This type of fat can lead to a dysregulated metabolism, hormonal imbalances and, eventually, disease. About the modern metabolism, she writes:

"Just as the modern diet is profoundly harmful compared with the kind of diet humans have eaten throughout history, the modern metabolism is also profoundly sick. The modern diet is poor in nutrients and loaded with toxins. As a result, the modern metabolism is constantly forced to generate oxidative stress and then adapt to it."

Putting the puzzle together

Fortunately, the pieces fit. According to the author:

if we swap processed junk for real food, prepared the right way, we can regulate our hormones and lose inflammatory fat;
if we regulate our hormones and lose inflammatory fat, we can recover a healthy metabolism;
and if we recover a healthy metabolism, we can maintain a healthy weight without joining the ranks of diet culture.

Free from diet culture

Beyond the 45 million Americans who go on a diet every year, 33 billion dollars a year are spent on weight-loss products, given that three quarters of the adult population is overweight.

It doesn't have to be this way. What if, instead, we focused on truly nourishing the body, with foods raised and prepared the right way, quality minerals, clean water, sunshine and movement? What if we sought to regulate our metabolism by giving our starved bodies the nutrients they so badly need? A good place to start is getting to know who produces these foods, on the Nu&Cru producers map.

The author's story

Cora Jackson says she knows that ancestral eating can free someone from the chains of diet culture because she lived it. Diet culture was not kind to her. She achieved the skin-and-bones look she wanted so much, but at the price of her menstrual cycle, her hormonal vitality, her energy and her joy.

When she was already longing to be rid of calorie-counting apps and the yoke of counting macros, she found ancestral eating. It changed not only what she ate, but also her mindset about food. She focused on nutrient density, and with delicious food, she is quick to point out:

she swapped rice cakes for natural sourdough bread made with freshly milled flour, with plenty of butter;
she swapped extra-lean ground turkey for fatty ground beef from pasture-raised cattle;
she swapped egg-white sandwiches for delicious egg yolks.

To her amazement, her health came back. She stopped feeling like an empty shell and stopped living trapped in the "way I have to eat."

Let diet culture stay in the past, the author concludes, and let us embrace the wise food traditions of our ancestors.

References

"Diet". Merriam-Webster.com. Accessed November 1, 2025.
Fitterman-Harris, H. F.; Davis, G. G.; Bedard, S. P. et al. Digital mental health interventions: differences in diet culture intervention framing. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, December 23, 2023, 21(1):24.
Sissons, B. What to know about diet culture. Medical News Today, November 30, 2023.
The surprising history of diet culture. National Alliance for Eating Disorders, June 27, 2023.
Kingsley, L. The seesawing history of fad diets. Smithsonian Magazine, February 7, 2023.
Wise Traditions Dietary Principles: Introduction. Weston A. Price Foundation, n.d.
Fallon, S.; Enig, M. Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook That Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. New Trends Publishing, 2003, p. 58.
Morell, S. F. Thoughts on weight loss. Wise Traditions, Spring 2017, 18(1):30-33.
Medical weight management. Boston Medical Center, n.d.
Henry Ford Health Staff. American obesity rates are increasing. Here's how you can maintain a healthy weight. Henry Ford Health, February 20, 2025.
USAFacts Team. US obesity rates have tripled over the last 60 years. USAFacts, updated November 5, 2025.
Fourman, L. T.; Awwad, A.; Gutiérrez-Sacristán, A. et al. Implications of a new obesity definition among the All of Us cohort. JAMA Network Open, October 1, 2025, 8(10):e2537619.
Stearn, E. Revealed: Britain and US eat more ultra-processed foods than anywhere else in world. Daily Mail, February 29, 2024.
Persellin, K. Study: Consumption of ultra-processed foods may cause harmful "food addiction". EWG, October 31, 2023.
Shanahan, C. Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back. Hachette Books, 2024, pp. 58, 62, 63, 84.
Hall, K. D.; Ayuketah, A.; Brychta, R. et al. Ultra-processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gain: an inpatient randomized controlled trial of ad libitum food intake. Cell Metabolism, July 2, 2019, 30(1):67-77.e3.
First randomized, controlled study finds ultra-processed diet leads to weight gain. National Institutes of Health, Clinical Center News, July 1, 2019.
Teller, M. MSG: Three little letters that spell big fat trouble. Wise Traditions, Spring 2017, 18(1):42-46.
Visceral fat. Cleveland Clinic, updated August 22, 2025.

This article is an adaptation of "How Ancestral Eating Breaks the Bondage of Diet Culture" by Cora Jackson, published in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, in Spring 2026. Read the original in English.

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