Detoxing feels good: Dieting and affect in 22Days Nutrition and goop detoxes

In this paper, I examine the online platforms that present and facilitate two highly profiled diets: the vegan meal service 22Days Nutrition and goop.com’s detoxes. 22Days Nutrition and the goop detoxes are noteworthy case studies because they showcase a shift in the way dieting is approached in the contemporary moment. Rather than being concerned exclusively with weight loss, these diets stress the emotional value and reward that their highly restrictive approach to eating offers. The diets rarely equate restrictive eating with attaining thinness or weight loss, but rather with an abstract sense of “feeling good” and overall emotional wellbeing. However, this articulation of dieting as an opportunity to enable a “positive” affective experience has larger social and political implications. The article unpacks these implications, finding that the diets’ promises of wellbeing depend on not only individual, continual self-transformation but also the formation of collectives from which some bodies must necessarily be excluded.