El discurso de las dietas: regímenes de adelgazamiento en competencia

Abstract

What does it mean to be on a diet? How is the relationship between gastronomy and dieting articulated? Dieting is by de"nition posterior and contrastive: it almost always comes after something, which it usually opposes. Diets encompass entire ways of living and regulating, choosing and organizing foods and times, ways of cooking and spaces of conviviality, raw materials and cooking implements, daily menus and family relationships, lists of permitted foods and body models. Slimming protocols are not just lists of foods and quantities, but imply ways of articulating the relationship between the ‘exceptional’ condition of diet time and ‘ordinary’ nutrition, ideas of body, beauty, health. Studying the way in which diet protocols, which have become brands, communicate and promote their dietary propositions in advertising allows us to reconstruct, on the one hand, marketing phenomena and, on the other, deeper semiotic phenomena of real proposals of meaning to consumers.