Dieting Temporalities: Interaction, Agency and the Measure of Online Weight Watching

In the context of a concern with achieving a healthy and desirable weight, this article explores the temporalities that underpin dieting and that are produced through interaction with a dieting web site. In contrast to a linear progressive temporality that successful dieting is often understood through, I suggest that the dieting website at stake here attends to and creates new kinds of dieting temporalities, where time is understood as potontial rather than as something which can necessarily be planned. Acknowledging the multiple temporalities of dieting involves an understanding of agency that is not (only) repressed but enabled through interaction with the website’s interface. As such, it becomes important to trace the relationship between temporalities and the kinds of measure involved in online dieting.