OPINION: 'Don't listen to what Rebel Wilson is telling you about food. Please.'

This article includes descriptions of disordered eating that may be distressing to some readers.

UPDATE: Rebel Wilson has denied making these comments.

So, Rebel Wilson has apparently declared that people only need to eat 600 calories a day and I have… thoughts. 

Feelings. 

Most of them along the lines of, ‘What the actual f**k?’

During the launch party for her new dating app, Rebel told The Daily Mail that she’d recently attended a week-long detox at VIVAMAYR Medical Health Resort in Austria and, while there, had garnered some… interesting lessons about food intake.

Listen: Why women aren't taken seriously if they don't conform to a certain look. Story continues below.

“I was just actually in a program where I learned about food and they taught us that you don’t really need as many calories as you think,” the publication reports the 43-year-old as saying. 

“I learned that you really only need about 600 calories a day, you don’t need 1,500 or 2,000."

“Everyone thinks that you need to eat so much [and] your body needs it but the truth is your body doesn’t need a lot of calories, and I know that might sound crazy to some people, but if you eat right and you eat small portions, you’ll be just fine.”

She continued that many people eat due to stress, or habit, and said (and here’s the kicker), “The truth is you just don’t need all those calories”.

Except, according to science, you definitely do.

The actor has since denied making these comments, sharing “This reporting is UNTRUE and utterly ridiculous and harmful to women!” over a screenshot of an article from The Mirror in a now-deleted Instagram Story.

But if you’re feeling triggered right about now regardless, yeah – me too.

Especially on the back of a conversation I had just last night with my personal trainer, who’s working with me to eat more. 

No, that’s not a typo. 

See, I’ve spent so long so deeply entrenched in diet culture, that I struggle to eat as much as my body needs each day. 

Not just physically, but mentally. I actually start to feel panicked if I eat what the critical (wrong) little voice in my head tells me is “too much”.

It’s disordered eating at its finest, folks, and I know I’m not the only one who thinks and feels this way.

And statements like these from celebrities with huge public platforms? They’re not helping.

Watch: Mia Freedman opens up about her relationship with food over the years. Story continues below.

Now look, this isn’t an attack on Rebel herself. She’s not the first (and certainly won’t be the last) celebrity to talk nutrition advice that is, in fact, not only not backed by science but also widely refuted. (Ahem, Gwyneth Paltrow, I’m looking at you).

Heck, Rebel’s living in the same society we all are, burdened by immense pressure to look a certain way – times a billion, I’m guessing, thanks to her place in the spotlight.

But something doesn’t sit right with celebrities making these sweeping statements, styling themselves as wellness experts after they’ve undergone weight loss and doling out harmful ‘tips’ to the masses.

Could her comments have been taken out of context? Sure. I wasn’t there. I don’t know. And given her denial after the story hit headlines, maybe they were. It's also important to note that Rebel didn’t actually specify whether or not she followed this 600-a-day calorie plan, and said that this particular approach was for “detox purposes”, not a daily routine. According to the Daily Mail, she “would also not advocate to anyone to eat as few as 600 calories a day, she said”.

I’m not placing blame with the actor alone, because it’s a much wider issue.

Let's get an expert's take, shall we? 

In some ways, I suppose it’s almost refreshing to see the rich and famous admitting to employing what we know to be ill-advised methods to look the way they do; when they finally ’fess up and stop trying to insist they eat pizza and burgers all day and do nothing but the occasional yoga class, and finally reveal they are essentially starving themselves for the spotlight.

But when people who aren’t medical professionals casually reference these sorts of methods as if they’re scientifically sound, and make wildly inaccurate comments as if they’re fact, it has the potential to be extremely harmful.

And the thing is, Rebel isn’t an expert in this field. Neither am I, for that matter. I’m just a gal who’s aware of the pervasive diet culture we’re living in and struggling to break free of it myself.

But you know who is an expert? Dietitian and author of Your Weight is Not the Problem, Lyndi Cohen (aka The Nude Nutritionist). 

So I went ahead and asked for her take on Rebel’s alleged comments.

“The idea that a human can live with only 600 calories a day is plain wrong, and it’s an irresponsible and harmful thing to say,” explains Cohen.

“What is scary is that celebrities who have gone through a weight loss journey like Rebel Wilson are particularly influential when it comes to diet advice. We tend to trust people who have successfully lost weight, sometimes more than qualified health professionals.”

“Most weight-loss advice is eating disorder advice in disguise, and [Rebel’s comments are] a perfect example of that,” says Cohen. “We’re often sold disordered eating under the guise of ‘health and wellness.’”

But, she adds, “There is nothing healthy about starving yourself.”

A message like this has the potential to be incredibly harmful, Cohen says.

“The reason it’s such a dangerous message to be sending is because people with a history of disordered eating (which according to research, is around 75 per cent of women) seek out information like this, further fueling their disorder,” Cohen tells Mamamia.

“I’m worried people would take this advice to the extreme and wrongfully think they only need a few hundred calories a day. 

"It’s impossible to get all your macro and micronutrient requirements fulfilled by so few calories, even if you are quite a small-framed person. It’s also completely unnecessary to detox your body as your kidneys, liver, lungs and skin are constantly detoxing your body. If they didn’t, you’d be dead.”

What's at stake.

As someone who’s worked in women’s media for 17 years, I’ve spent a lot of time immersed in diet culture because it was, frankly, a key part of what so many of us did ‘back in the day’. 

Telling people how to lose weight sold magazines, you see, and we weren’t aware of how incredibly insidious it was. After all, we all wanted to lose weight, too.

When I started my career, ideas around weight neutrality and Health At Any Size and body acceptance just weren’t a thing. Week in, week out, I would work alongside my teams to conceptualise, curate and compose stories with titles like:

How to lose 5kg fast!

Summer body special!

Celeb diet tips!

I know now, ofc, that I had a hand perpetuating a wildly problematic cycle that society just didn’t seem to realise was quite as problematic then. Sure, we’d moved past ridiculous comments like Kate Moss’ “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, but we were still promoting a particular body ideal, pitching calorie counts to aim for in order to lose weight and all that jazz.

It’s not something I’m proud of, years on, and I’d like to think I am doing better (I certainly try) – but I am definitely living with the consequences myself, as I now find it nearly impossible to break out of this cycle of disordered thinking and food obsession, despite knowing on an intellectual level that it’s not serving me.

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A post shared by LYNDI COHEN // Nutritionist (@nude_nutritionist)

“Subscribing to diet rules, whether it’s a calorie amount or carb limit, is a recipe for emotional eating and a turbulent relationship with food,” says Cohen, who notes that Rebel herself openly talked about the fact that she struggles with emotional eating in the interview.

So what’s the alternative?

“When every thought keeps coming back to food, your potential is limited,” says Cohen. “When your brain is occupied by how many calories you’ve eaten that day or how many reps you did at the gym, you can never be your best. 

“You can’t live your full life on an empty stomach and it’s not worth giving up 95 per cent of your life to weigh five per cent less.

Ultimately, she says, “Diet rules are the problem, not the solution.” 

So Rebel, thank you for your input – I’m going to go ahead and assume you didn’t mean any harm. But from one woman living in a society still struggling to get out from under the thumb of diet culture to another – please keep these dangerous and definitely unfounded ideas to yourself.

And help yourself to a few extra calories.

For help and support for eating disorders, contact the Butterfly Foundation’s National Support line and online service on 1800 ED HOPE (1800 33 4673).

Alix Nicholson is Mamamia's Managing Editor. Want to catch more of her adventures in travel, beauty, lifestyle and #dogmum life? Head on over to her Instagram.

Feature Image: Getty, Canva.

This article was originally published on June 20, 2023, and has since been updated with new information.

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