Protesters at the 2017 Women’s March in Los Angeles hold up signs demanding equality for women, which includes bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. The dual resurgences of conservatism and diet culture reveal the ways the dominant culture is politicizing the female body. (Photo courtesy of Audrey Wauchope)

Is diet culture intrinsically aligned with conservatism? It’s a question I’ve found myself asking more and more as our country falls deeper into the throes of the misogynistic MAGA movement, and our culture’s standard for the female body morphs at an alarmingly fast rate.

As a country, the 2024 presidential election revealed an undeniable resurgence of the far right.

Interestingly enough, this resurgence has arisen amidst a cultural recession of body diversity. I’ll let the data speak for itself — a piece published in early 2025 revealed that only 2% of models were midsize and 0.3% were plus-size on the runway out of 8,703 looks across 198 shows, compared to 4% midsize models and 0.8% plus-size models the previous spring season. This is starkly misrepresentative of the average American woman, who is considered plus-size. The mass advertising of GLP-1s as weight loss drugs and blockbuster films dominated by extremely thin women don’t help. Intentional fashion decisions, such as the jewels adorning Ariana Grande’s collarbone in “Wicked: For Good“ — as if attention were being purposefully drawn to her bones — reveal the underlying idealization of thinness in mainstream media, and I believe there’s a way to call out the beauty standards the “Wicked” films promote while respecting the talent and privacy of their stars.

But is this correlation between our sociopolitical and cultural moments significant?

Let’s start with asking the question: What about the ideology of conservatism itself associates it with diet culture? In ninth grade history, we were taught that conservatives, at their core, care about preserving individual liberties through maintaining small government.

However, current conservatism, led by Trump and the MAGA movement, is a foggy distortion of conservative ideology.

Take, for example, the government intervention and outreach programs — associated with a distinctly liberal platform — which exist to serve the underserved and promote the democratic ideal of equality. Well-known modern examples include Medicaid, SNAP and ObamaCare.

In opposing these programs, President Trump doesn’t oppose the way they aim to spread equity — he opposes the need for it in the first place. He opposes the reality of privilege and therefore rejects any narrative suggesting underprivileged communities — often ones that have been historically marginalized — deserve justice.

I believe this is a defining characteristic of MAGA conservatism. In refusing to recognize hierarchy, the Trump Administration perpetuates it in a political power grab built upon ideals of elitism and invisible privilege. And even excluding Trump’s controversial ties to Jeffrey Epstein, we have more than enough evidence to argue that our president objectifies women. Did we forget when he bragged about how his star status allowed him to flirt with a married woman, in an audio clip full of lewd comments about her body?

“Grab them by the p—-. You can do anything,” Trump said in the infamous audio.

It should come as no surprise, then, that MAGA’s relationship with diet culture is not as clearly linked to ideological conservatism as it is to what conservatism has become: bigotry dressed up in red. 

Trump’s conservatism is hierarchical: It reinforces the privilege of the dominant culture and upholds a status quo that is largely capitalist and male-dominated, and that, by extension, marginalizes women. Diet culture is a product of unrealistic beauty standards imposed on women to generate profit and promote narratives of subordination, so by creating an administration that believes social hierarchy is what makes America great, Trump endorses diet culture’s messaging as an offshoot of his broader intention to diminish female agency.

MAGA conservatism (much like other conservative movements, and our government at large) also has close ties to Christianity. This moment is far from the first time diet culture has aligned itself with Christianity; examples include students at a Christian university being graded on their adherence to a mandatory fitness-based weight-loss plan and an entire religious offshoot (arguably a cult) built off a dieting program.

These instances and the culture they cultivate rely on an emphasis on modesty in the Church, with food and body weight serving as measures of morality. These values may not be embedded in the actual religious texts the Church relies upon, but the power of religion lies in its interpretation, fueling the dual resurgence of diet culture and Trump’s Christian conservatism.

This sentiment rings true in how many conservative women are approaching their platforms. At the Young Women’s Leadership Summit (don’t be deceived by the name — the event was organized by Turning Point USA), Christian health and wellness influencer Alex Clark offered her remarks on the state of cultural conservatism.

“It’s never been hotter to be a conservative,” Clark said. “Less Prozac, more protein. Less burnout, more babies. Less feminism, more femininity.”

This context makes it clear that politics is weaponizing women’s bodies once more. By assigning the wellness culture (arguably just diet culture in disguise) that has infiltrated the mainstream a specific political stance, the female body becomes merely a vessel to manipulate public opinion. Connoting conservatism with the idealized female body is not only unfounded but dangerous.

Of course, conservative diet culture does not solely affect women. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement has attracted a large crowd of male supporters as well. But in my mind, Kennedy is the perfect example of wellness gone wrong. In his bizarre pursuit of muscle mass and emphasis on healthy eating (though the validity of his newly unveiled food pyramid is questionable), he completely disregards scientific reasoning — in this case having national consequences — as he actively dissuades Americans from trusting well-researched vaccines.

In a conversation about the political commodification of the female body, I’d be remiss not to address reproductive freedom. By attempting to restrict both abortion rights and access to contraceptives (among a variety of factors that empower women with knowledge and agency over their bodies) from women nationwide, President Trump proves that his rhetoric is working. I truly believe that the issues of body image and reproductive rights are intrinsically intertwined, as they represent the ways the biologically female body has been co-opted to serve movements. But the female body is so much more than a silhouette to pose or a political buzzword, and in objectifying it relentlessly, we subject it to tangible political consequences.

It’s not a clear-cut political correlation, though. Michelle Obama revealed in an interview on her Let’s Move! initiative to decrease childhood obesity during former president Barack Obama’s first term that she and Barack Obama put their daughters on a diet after becoming concerned they were getting “chubby.” I have immense respect for the Obamas, but I also can’t imagine my parents speaking about my body so publicly at a time when it was still growing and changing. This feels, to me, like an unlikely embrace of diet culture from the left.

But the state of conservatism has changed even since the Obama administration. Could it be, then, that the politicization of diet culture is a revealing indicator of conservatism’s conceptual evolution?

I am genuinely asking these questions because it’s in the nature of this conversation to ask more questions than we can answer.

We’ve covered everything from “Wicked” to Kennedy, but I still don’t know the answers. As a teenage girl, though, I do know and resent the weight our bodies hold in this conversation, and I hope that through writing this column, I have given our minds a voice, too.