It’s official: Diet as a marketing buzzword has gone the way of atomic, that catch-all adjective from the ’50s that signified something was bright and shiny and of the future – until we started worrying about the small but nagging possibility of accidentally blowing the planet up.

Bye bye, diet!

The South Beach Diet will be repackaged as South Beach Living, and yesterday, I read on Elastic Waist that Weight Watchers is now explicitly stating in ads that it is NOT A DIET, but a lifestyle plan. (Their conversation about WW is one I’d like to get in on but since I have to catch a plane in an hour, I’ve got to leave it to rest.)

I’m going to be optimistic here, as superficial as the shift may seem. I’d argue that how these programs sell themselves is extremely important to the assumptions and the attitude with which people approach the plan. It also tells us that a cultural shift has occurred. Dieting is now literally a bankrupt value: You can’t use it to sell stuff.

What we buy is part of our ongoing conversation with ourself about who we are. In a consumer culture, it’s part of how we tailor our identities. Sure, buying a book doesn’t immediately make you a different person (no matter how much we hope), but the steady consumption of culture — and especially the written word — does influence identity in a deeper sense.

So if this brings on any kind of attitude shift toward dieting — or more likely, if it reflects one that has already begun to occur — I think it’s a good thing. I do believe marketers are chasing trends, not creating them. (They wish!) It can’t be bad if people all over the country are thinking, “I’m going to buy this book to learn how to feed myself with healthy, sane foods for the rest of my life,” rather than, “I am going to buy this diet and deny myself whatever foods I can for as long as I can to diminish my person.” If dieting has become uncool in the marketplace, I say rah, rah.