Why I'll Never Buy Protein Popcorn

Or Anything Else the Kardashian Clan is Selling

Why do we never learn from history?

Why do we so quickly forget how harmful the past was?

When I was 10 years old, I was already counting calories. I was convinced that even at an age when my body was not even fully developed — when I was growing into an adolescent body — that there was already something wrong with it. I hadn't even reached adulthood, and already, I was convinced that I somehow needed to shrink myself.

I recently found a journal from my childhood. In one of the journal entries, I had written out my diet and exercise plan. I had to exercise at 7 a.m. every day, seven days a week—even when I didn’t feel like it. By thirteen, I was keeping a food journal and allowed myself a breakfast of fewer than three hundred calories and three grams of fat. According to another journal entry, I wasn’t allowed to eat pizza, chips, or sweets. I also required myself to hop on the scale every day to check my weight. My lunch suggestions included things like a salad with no dressing, a piece of fruit, carrots, twenty-three pretzels (which I assume was a serving size) or one cup of yogurt. For each of the items listed, I included the total number of calories and the amount of fat. Lastly, for dinner, I wrote that I should “try to eat light” and “try to resist dessert.”

In my teens and early twenties, I went through too many diets to even count. Keto. Intermittent fasting. Macro Counting. Weight Watchers. Atkins. Juice fasting. If you can name it, I probably did it.

I survived off of Lean Cuisines and Special K cereal and 100 calorie snack packs and Halo Top ice cream, which I convinced myself actually tasted like ice cream instead of frozen flavored ice.

I spent way too much money eating those Quest protein chips, which I also convinced myself I liked when I literally could have just eaten real chips. They would have been way more satisfying and enjoyable. Instead I ingested flavored cardboard in the name of 'health'.

Also, if you genuinely enjoy Quest chips, my bad, but I think they taste like ass.

I watched tv programming like America’s Next Top Model, where size 8 women were called plus sized and their bodies scrutinized.

Even fun-loving, family shows weren’t free of diet culture, cue the clip below from Full House where Aunt Becky explains to a teenage DJ how she can lose a couple of pounds by just eating some boiled fish or lean chicken without the skin.

So I, like many, grew up with body image issues and disordered eating patterns, which I masked under the guise of ‘health’, but was really just orthorexia, an obsession with eating healthy food.

I was obsessed with protein. Everything I consumed needed to have protein, more protein, and more protein. Now don't get me wrong, protein has an important function in our bodies, but so do you carbs and fat and fiber and water.

As my friends Shana and Clara often discuss, the people need fiber and water just as much as they need protein, perhaps even more so because an estimated 95% of American adults and children do not consume the recommended amount of fiber.

So really, the obsession with protein has gone far enough but one thing diet culture is going to do is diet culture.

So I was less than thrilled when I saw an ad pop up on my newsfeed last week in which Khloe Kardashian is introducing her protein popcorn to the market.

For the love of God, can we please stop adding protein to every single thing we eat?!

And listen, I'm not a nutritionist so I don't give nutrition advice, but there is lots of reputable research that shows we don't, in fact, need to eat our body weight in protein, especially if we're not high performing professional athletes, which the vast majority of us are not.

The very function of diet and wellness culture is to profit from our insecurities. If we can be convinced that we need to change something about ourselves, especially under the insidious guise of ‘health’ and ‘wellness’, we will spend our money in large sums in order to achieve that goal.

So for the low price of $4.99, you can be the proud owner of protein popcorn, a ‘healthier’ and ‘guilt-free’ alternative to regular popcorn.

It pains me beyond measure to see this intense reemergence of diet culture because eating popcorn is basically eating air as it is. I promised it doesn’t need to be healthified.

And beyond that, we never, I repeat never, need to feel guilty for eating any food.

When I was deep in diet culture, one of my favorite phrases was ‘food is fuel.’ It made me feel superior. Like I was better because I treated eating only as a means of survival. And that was quite literally one of the saddest periods of my life. I was not a better person because of my food choices. Eating and food choices are not tied to morality. I was not a better or more disciplined because I was depriving myself. I was just a miserable person.

Diet culture has in many ways robbed us of the experience of food. It’s led a lot of us to forget that eating can and should be a pleasurable experience, not one riddled by fear of gaining weight. While it’s true that food fuels our bodies, it’s also so much more just that. When we think of food only as fuel, it discounts so much of the essence of food. Food is an experience. Food is culture. Food is memories. Food is pleasure. Food is a way to share love with one another. When we make food an issue of morality, labeling food as “good” or “bad,” or “healthy” or “unhealthy,” not only do we rob ourselves of the pleasure of eating, but it also leads us into a cycle of guilt and shame about eating, an act required to live.

It leads us to believe that protein popcorn is something we actually need. When in fact, we could just eat popcorn if we are in the mood for popcorn. It doesn’t require being healthified.

And let us not forget, our ideas of what foods are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are deeply embedded in racism, white supremacy, and fatphobia.

And listen, I would expect nothing different from any of the Kardashian clan. Their family has single handedly been destroying people's body images and mental health for their own profit since Keeping Up With the Kardashians first hit the scene in 2007. One of my proudest brags is that I have never watched a single episode of their show, and it will remain that way until the day I die. If the Kardashians have no haters, then just know I'm no longer earthside.

It’s entirely unsurprising that the person who also brought us the show Revenge Body, a 2017 reality show which paired individuals in larger bodies with celebrity trainers, nutritionists, and stylists aimed at helping people build their revenge bodies (by intense and unsustainable weight loss – think Biggest Loser) is now hawking protein popcorn. Meanwhile her sister Kourtney is selling Lemme, a daily supplement which she claims mimics the effects of GLP-1s. And nearly all of them have promoted Flat Tummy Tea over the years. The Kardashians have collectively amassed over a half a billion followers and become mega rich by profiting off of the insecurities of girls and women worldwide, oftentimes under the guise of “wellness.”

Wellness, a $1.5 trillion industry, and diet culture, a $75 billion industry are centered on convincing you that you need to be fixed, optimized, and upgraded. That your health issues — real and imagined — are due to your own individual failing, completely disregarding the social determinants of health — things such as lack of access to affordable healthcare, chronic stress, racism and white supremacy, and food insecurity — and that if you just keep spending your money on whatever they’re selling you, you can be the best and healthiest version of yourself. Everything you desire is on the other side of spending more money. The entirety of both industries survive and thrive off of our discontent — the discontent they sell us.

In theory, ‘wellness culture’ should make us feel ‘well’. However, in my personal experience, plus the experience of so many of the clients I previously worked with back in my coaching days, ‘wellness’ culture has left so many of us feeling exactly the opposite.

It’s left us with more body image issues than we started with. It’s left us with complicated relationships with food and exercise. It’s left us with less ability to trust our intuition when it comes to listening to our bodies.

Many of us came to fitness and wellness looking to get ‘healthy’ and unfortunately, along the way, the messages we received were so confusing we no longer know what ‘health’ even looks like or means. We started correlating ‘health’ with the size of our bodies, how much body fat we carry, how much weight we can lift, the number on the scale, how many calories we consumed, how thin we could get and on and on and on. And of course, an obsession with healthy eating.

Those things become the focus instead of things like:

Do I feel nourished, energized, and whole?

Am I enjoying my relationship with movement and nutrition?

Can I eat food guilt free?

How am I sleeping?

Did I drink water today?

Can I engage in fitness and wellness culture without feeling bad about my body?

Can I show myself love and compassion?

Am I finding moments of joy in my daily life?

I want body liberation for all of us. I want us all to have the ability to shift that inner critic (the one that’s been influenced by diet culture, white supremacy, and fatphobia) towards a voice of love, kindness, and compassion and find freedom from the constant obsession and pressure we put on ourselves to look or be a certain way in the world.

That persuades us that we need protein packed popcorn.

When we spend all of our energy and time obsessed with our bodies and what we look like, we have less energy to create our unique magic in the world and to work towards dismantling the systems that are wreaking havoc in all of our lives.

When we are underfed and fixated on our appearances, we don’t have the energy to fight back, fuck shit up, or dismantle anything.

Dieting and diet culture are distractions, and when all else is failing, white supremacy will always pull these tricks out of its bag again and again — because it keeps working.

Life is short my love, do you really want to spend the rest of it falling for the lies of ‘wellness’ culture?

All that to say, for me and my household, not a dollar will be spent buying Khloe’s protein popcorn, and although I’ll never tell you what to do, I hope I’ve persuaded you just a little bit. One of the best ways to protest toxic wellness culture is with our wallets. We can refuse to feed the beast, especially when that money is going to a family that is hell bent on becoming billionaires at the expense of our insecurities.

And finally, if any of this is resonating with you, you’ll love my book.

Thank you so much for reading The Liberation Collective. I’m eternally grateful to have you here. You can also follow along on Instagram and TikTok. And if you want to partner with me, you can email me at info@chrissyking.com

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