My Journey Toward Radical Body Positivity
By: Matt Mcgorry
Tags: Fat Acceptance, Diet Culture, Matt Mcgorry, Body Positivity, Activism

What is diet culture? Dr. Kate Browne defines it as “a system of knowledge, values, and meanings that supports interpretations of personal health choices as moral character.” You might think your eating habits exempt you from this system, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. I never called my eating habits “dieting,” either; we’d created plenty of euphemisms for it by then. Perhaps you’ve also restricted your intake in the name of “clean eating,” “moderation,” “healthy eating,” “a lifestyle change,” or a “nutrition program.” Even Intuitive Eating, an inherently anti-diet movement, is now being co-opted and packaged as a way to lose or “manage” weight. If you’re still tempted to dismiss the influence this system has over you, remember the “culture” in “diet culture” — the impulse to restrict or otherwise “manage” our diets is ingrained in the collective; it’s not something we can opt out of without consciously choosing to do so.

And until we do, we won’t think twice about the messages we receive from commercials or at the grocery store, where foods are described as “good” or “bad” — labels that easily translate to how we feel about ourselves when we eat them. How about the vast number of foods marketed as “guilt-free,” and how most of us rarely stop to question the harmful implication that we deserve to feel guilty when we make “sinful” food choices? We feel we’ve earned “being bad” or a “cheat day” when we’ve “been good” long enough, or once we’ve paid penance with a workout that “killed” us. Meanwhile, a fat person could do serious damage to their health through dieting, overexercising, or having an eating disorder — in fact, many do — and they would still never measure up to cultural assumptions of how they “should” look. (They’d still receive constant reminders that they’re “just not trying hard enough,” though.) This is diet culture. And, together with fatphobia, it leads to many horrific situations. By the age of 10, 80% of girls have been on a diet and, in a large study of 14 and 15 year olds, dieting was the greatest predictor of developing an eating disorder. Those who dieted moderately were five times more likely to develop an eating disorder, and those who practiced extreme restriction were 18 times more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who did not.

You may be familiar with those stats — no doubt young, thin, white, middle-to-upper class women are often thought of as the “face” of disordered eating and body issues. But this short-sighted vision of diet culture is inaccurate, and it masks very real problems for everyone else. Trans people, for example, experience eating disorders at much higher rates than cisgender women and men. People in larger bodies exhibit disordered eating at higher rates than straight size populations, too, yet they’re half as likely to receive a clinical diagnosis. And low income communities face unique challenges at the intersection of food scarcity and diet culture, which we overlook in favor of the narratives our culture is accustomed to. In Anti-Diet, Christy Harrison writes:

A 2017 study of [a] low-income population in urban San Antonio, for instance, found that food insecurity is associated with significant levels of rebound eating, with more than 56 percent of participants reporting binge eating, overeating, or night eating. The risk of these issues increases with rising levels of deprivation, and 17 percent of people with the most severe food insecurity were found to meet the clinical criteria for an eating disorder — far higher than the single-digit rates of clinically diagnosed eating disorders in the general population. This shows that the stereotypical view of eating disorders as a disease of wealthy white folks is sorely mistaken; most of the participants in this study were Latinx and black people living far below the poverty line. Food insecurity and diet culture don’t exist in separate silos, either: the same study found that those with the greatest degree of food insecurity also had the highest levels of internalized weight stigma, as well as the highest levels of bulimic behaviors and overexercising as a way to compensate for eating. (Those last two findings surprised even the researchers, who had expected not to find compensatory behaviors in this highly food-insecure population). So even if binge eating begins in response to food insecurity rather than concerns about weight and shape, it’s clear that diet-culture beliefs about body size also come into play for those who lack reliable access to food.

Oppressive systems and societal beliefs always have a negative impact on the collective, regardless of their intended target. For example, patriarchy privileges men over women and non-binary people, while simultaneously dehumanizing men. You can see this in the way our culture conflates masculinity with an inability to feel or express emotions, or in the way we treat male teachers or nurses — any male in a caretaking role, really — as suspect. You may know, logically, that you are not a direct target of fatphobia — yet that does not protect you from absorbing unconscious beliefs and standards that affect how you value yourself and others. Only when I began to do the deep and uncomfortable work of learning how all aspects of my life had been impacted by patriarchy could I see how my relationships with other people, of all genders, were harmed by the beliefs I’d internalized. And only when we understand the origins of our ingrained beliefs around weight and food, and how they’re perpetuated daily, can we make a conscious choice to free ourselves of them.

Understanding the impact internalized and societal fatphobia has had on my own health and psyche has required me to simultaneously hold two ideas in my head. The first: I am among the most privileged in our society. I’m a white, non-disabled, cisgender straight man who has financial privilege and fame. I have a body type that more closely aligns with what’s considered “good looking” and traditionally masculine. These attributes give me privilege and access. The second: That I must learn to recognize the privileges I have, even as I allow myself to feel my pain and create room for my healing. That, despite my privilege, the pressure to conform to an ideal was, and still is, enormous.

This is why the work I do — as a man committed to feminism or as a white person committed to anti-racism — is not a charitable act, or a favor for women and/or people of color. I do it because I understand my stake in dismantling any system of oppression that degrades my humanity or otherwise keeps me silent and complicit. I understand how the pressure to conform to traditional notions of masculinity has lulled me into upholding the oppression of women and gender non-conforming people, while also stealing my happiness and wholeness. Just consider such joy-stealing slogans as “pain is weakness leaving the body” — ideas like this cause men to deprive themselves, self-administering pain and courting disconnection just to get high on the noxious fumes of power. We are all negatively impacted by such oppressive systems. And yet, those with the most privilege — the foremost benefactors of these systems — are still in the best position to dismantle them.

It’s not enough to change the way we feel about ourselves as individuals; we have to change the way we feel about fatness as a whole.

That’s why, however difficult it may be, those of us with great privilege cannot afford to limit this conversation to our individual struggles. My lifelong battle with body image has been painful, even at a more culturally acceptable size, yet it is still different than experiencing fatphobia in bodies that are larger than mine. We mustn’t equate the experience of body image issues (which can occur among people of all sizes) with the marginalization experienced by those in larger bodies. When we in smaller bodies do not name or acknowledge our privilege in these conversations, we often erase these differences, lumping everything under the more palatable banner of “everyone struggles with body image.” This elevates the experience of those who already live in more privileged bodies, and distracts from the more severe consequences that anti-fat oppression has on those most marginalized by fatphobia: people in larger bodies.

It’s not enough to change the way we feel about ourselves as individuals; we have to change the way we feel about fatness as a whole. And in order to do that, we need to understand the ways we’ve been conditioned to see fat as a moral failure, which has roots — like so many issues do — in the oppressive system of racism. In her seminal text, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings writes:

It is not surprising that the French and British were at the helm of the eighteenth century racial scientific discourse marking black people as ‘gluttonous.’ The growing codification of black people as greedy eaters developed against the backdrop of the accelerating slave trade among these two colonial powers of the eighteenth century. This, together with the exigencies of reasoned self-management in the context of High Enlightenment, transformed the act of eating from personal to political. Indulging in food, once deemed by philosophers to be a lowbrow predilection of slow-witted persons, became evidence of actual low-brow breeding. It bespoke an inborn, race-specific propensity for laziness and ease, an unbridled desire to meet the demands of the flesh at the expense of cultivating higher pursuits. Such behavior was deemed wholly uncharacteristic of the rational thinkers sitting atop the new racial hierarchy.

Fatphobia is why, in large part, we see stereotypes about fat people mirroring those of Black people, and why those who share both identities experience exponential levels of oppression. Stereotypes suggesting laziness, gluttony, overindulgence, lack of control, unintelligence, etc. are all used against fat people and people of color, particularly Black people. And like fat people, Black people suffer the consequences of these stereotypes when seeking medical help or guidance. In a 2006 study, clinicians were presented with identical case studies of patients with disordered eating symptoms. When the patient was identified as white, 44% of the clinicians identified the behavior as problematic. When the patient was identified as Black, only 17% of the clinicians found that same behavior problematic. The clinicians were also less likely to recommend that Black women seek professional help.

Anonymous writer Your Fat Friend illustrates how this medical bias plays out in the daily lives of fat people. In an essay for Self magazine, she describes her many dehumanizing experiences with doctors, which kept her out of their offices for a decade. She describes one doctor recoiling at the sight of her, telling her to lose weight before she came back again — all without examining her, or even touching her. During another appointment, a nurse took her blood pressure four times because she couldn’t believe it was in the normal range. She writes, “Every doctor I saw looked past me. They did not ask about my diet or exercise. Instead, my body spoke on my behalf, proof positive of my assumed irresponsibility and neglect.” She cites a number of studies that show how medical professionals internalize weight stigma, and how it affects fat patients and the care they receive. These studies show that doctors build less emotional rapport with fat patients, hold negative views about them, and see them as “awkward, unattractive, ugly, and noncompliant.” As a result of this stigma, many fat people delay or skip doctor’s visits to avoid such encounters. In both gyms and doctors’ offices, fatphobic beliefs become a barrier to entry, diminishing the chances fat people have to access the very tools that could actually support better health, like medical care or a place to exercise.

These are just some of the harmful effects of “healthism.” In Body Respect, co-authors Dr. Lindo Bacon and Lucy Aphramor eloquently state:

The nonmaterial or social effects of living with deprivation and discrimination account for a huge portion of the social gradient in health — much more than attributed to health behaviors… maintaining the primacy of the individual-lifestyle focus — without being transparent about larger influences — is an affront to people living in disadvantage, as it reduces ill health to poor ‘choices’ and blames them, all the while contributing to the stigma and judgmental thinking that fuels oppression, worsens their health, and expands the health divide between the advantaged and the disadvantaged.

The hypocrisy of claiming to care about health and wellness, while creating barriers to entry and ignoring how marginalization and oppressive systems are more detrimental to our well-being than individual “choices,” reveals the true motivation of the health, fitness, and wellness industries. Rather than facilitating good health, these industries profit off of people’s fear and hatred of fatness. To be clear, I’m not against people pursuing ways to improve their own well-being. I support people finding joyful ways to move their bodies, or eating in ways that allow them to feel their best. But separating what is really best for our health from the deeply entrenched fatphobia permeating most of our beliefs about exercise and eating is work. And it’s work that must be undertaken by all of us, especially by those supposed gatekeepers of “health and wellness.”

Because what those gatekeepers know and won’t say is that fitness, as we often use the term, tells us virtually nothing about how fit we are to complete certain tasks. When we say someone is “fit,” it’s almost never because we saw them demonstrate said fitness, but because they have a certain body type that leads us to assume what they can or can’t do. These industries aren’t selling fitness, but the promise of a socially acceptable body. I mean, why else would almost every “fitness” plan feature models with six packs, if they weren’t also selling aspirational leanness? I still remember how chubby trainers or nutritionists in the industry would be judged by others — myself included, even if in silence — when we had no way of knowing anything about their fitness or well-being from looking at them, and when neither of those factors have any bearing on how adept they are at their job. Rather than the “fitness industry,” we should call it the “thinness/leanness industry.” An accurate name for the goals we’re pursuing would at least force us to be honest about what we value: thinness and leanness, not health and wellness. If the reverse were true, we would focus on the fact that we undermine people who are trying to move their bodies and eat intuitively for their well-being when we make intentional weight loss a goal.

Those in health, wellness, and medical professions may feel it’s not their responsibility to undo these oppressive systems, but that’s exactly the kind of apathy that got us here. If we don’t address these issues head-on, we will continue to be complicit. And again: the responsibility ultimately belongs to all of us, because the system impacts all of us. Fatphobia is so entrenched in American institutions as to be unavoidable, regardless of who you are. In Body of Truth, Harriet Brown writes:

It is rare to find an obesity researcher who hasn’t taken money from industry, whether it’s pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, bariatric surgery practices, or weight-loss programs. The practice isn’t limited to lesser-known luminaries, either. In 1997, a panel of nine medical experts tapped by the National Institutes of Health voted to lower the BMI cutoff for overweight from 27 (28 for men) to 25. So, overnight, millions of Americans became overweight thanks to the NIH. The panel argued that the change brought BMI cutoffs into line with World Health Organization Criteria and that a ‘round’ number like 25 would be easier for people to remember. What they didn’t say, because they didn’t have to, is that lowering BMI cutoffs put more people into the overweight and obese categories, which in turn made more people eligible for treatment. More patients to treat means new markets and more money to be made from doctors and hospitals to pharmaceutical companies and yes, researchers.

It’s for this reason that many fat activists — and myself, as a result — refuse to use the terms “overweight” or “obese.” I am not interested in legitimizing arbitrary designations that have more to do with politics than with true equity, health, and wellness. I do not identify as “overweight” or “obese” because I am not interested in validating the Body Mass Index, a system that was never originally intended to measure individual health and which has extremely racist origins. Weight loss is a $59 billion a year industry. And 95% of people who lose weight will gain it all back within five years. So either 95% of people are flawed, or perhaps the game is rigged.

For most of us, the concepts of weight and health are so tightly linked that we have a hard time even imagining what it would be like to improve our health without losing weight or falling back on the lies diet culture has sold us. But we absolutely must do the work of untangling these beliefs, because we know that the norm is not sustainable, and that losing and regaining weight is detrimental to our health. On an individual level, a Health at Every Size (#HAES) and Intuitive Eating approach offers a true alternative. When we refuse to do that work, we will continue to offer people false solutions that result in internalized shame and hopelessness, especially for those in larger bodies who will never meet society’s standards and will always be judged as “unhealthy,” no matter their actual health.

Most of all, we must recognize that health does not have a moral value. No matter a person’s health, they are worthy of respect and dignity. And they will never receive those things unless we are actively dismantling fatphobia and diet culture. No one should have to “earn” their way out of oppression. Just like the person who emphasizes “personal responsibility” in conversations about systemic racism, the person who defends diet culture by making it about health is not helping those they claim to be concerned for; rather, they’re merely revealing their own bias and misunderstanding of the issues. If justice has to be earned, then we need a better definition of justice.