You can complain to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about various forms of advertising via their website. You can complain about the method and/or about the content of advertisement material.

You could stick a notice to your letterbox or front door (if you have one) indicating you don't want to receive information about dieting services or products. You can be as polite or as expressive as you like!

You could talk about this campaign or use social media to spread the word - the more people who take part, the more likely we will see positive results. You could also write to influential others to request support, e.g. local mental health charities, businesses, or your local MP.

You could complain directly to the dieting company who have posted unwanted advertising through your letterbox. There is a template below - please feel free to use it as it is, edit it, use it for ideas to get you started... or  ignore it altogether! 

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"Not On My Doormat!

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I am contacting you to voice my objection to receiving unsolicited dieting advertisements through my letterbox.

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I believe that this indiscriminate method of advertising dieting services or products is unethical and causes significant harm to many people.

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For example, people vulnerable to, experiencing, or working to overcome disordered eating, eating disorders, and body image difficulties may likely be triggered by having a call to dieting posted into their home.

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Additionally, the act of posting weight-stigmatising material into people’s living environments is discriminatory against people in larger bodies – it is a manifestation of, and it perpetuates, anti-fat bias.

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Further, it can be considered to be racist (given the historical roots of weight stigma) and as discriminatory against various other groups of people given their increased likelihood of being at higher weights (e.g. those with less financial wealth, many neuro-divergent individuals, and people with certain health conditions, disabilities and genetic profiles).

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For the above reasons, I believe your marketing strategy is more than likely actively contributing to poor mental and physical health outcomes amongst many of those who receive your unrequested advertising materials.

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Given the sharp increase in mental health difficulties - including eating disorders - over recent years, and the increasingly insufficient availability of appropriate services - it seems important that companies such as yours enact social responsibility to minimise the harm they can cause. I hope you may consider this perspective.

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In addition to standing against your marketing method, I also believe that your promotional material contains misinformation and false advertising regarding the likelihood of me, or anyone, being able to achieve/maintain significant weight loss, and the supposed benefits even if this were possible.

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Worse, nothing in your material informs the reader of the significant harm that dieting can cause, for example by commonly triggering eating disorders, and/or by precipitating weight-cycling, which is known to be detrimental to health and a likely cause of many physical health difficulties that are so often, and far too simplistically, attributed to levels of body fat per se.

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If you wish to understand more about the harm that dieting can (and so often does) cause, please refer to the significant body of research and literature on this topic that has been developing now over a number of decades. For example, academic paper "Weight science: evaluating the evidence for a paradigm shift" (Bacon and Aphramor, 2011).

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Thank you for your time and attention."

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