Tra regimi dietetici e regimi di senso. Il ruolo del linguaggio iconico nelle diete degli health and fitness magazines

Coming from the Greek dìaita, which means “life, lifestyle”, the word diet is generally defined as a set of rules regulating not only the assumption of food, but also physical exercise. Not surprisingly, one of the synonyms of this term is the word regime, deriving from the Latin verb règere, “to manage, to rule”. Diet can be therefore understood as a system of signs, namely as a language composed by particular signs, texts, discourses, and practices. Form of life in which identity emerges in the intersection of the body and the textual and discursive dimensions, diet is based on particular dynamics related to the cognitive–epistemic (belief ), pragmatic (praxis), and emotional (passion) point of view. The main aim of this paper is to think over the agency of the images used by the so–called health and fitness magazines, analysing how the iconic language is able to orient, encourage, or even trigger the action of the observer in a field that can be considered not only as a dietetic regime, but also as a sense regime.