Victory Over Ourselves
How fat became dangerous and deplorable.
Anti-Diet: Reclaim Your Time, Money, Well-Being and Happiness through Intuitive Eating | By Christy Harrison | Little Brown Spark, 2019
Belly of the Beast: Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness | By Da’Shaun Harrison | North Atlantic Books, 2021
Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming It for the Better) | By Lindo Bacon | Ben Bella Books, 2020
The modern concept of race surfaced to distinguish colonial conquerors from the conquered. Race allowed Spaniards, and other Europeans who followed them, to define themselves by what they were not, using physical characteristics as shorthand for a host of negative attributes. If indigenous peoples were savage heathens, the colonizers were civilized Christians. This racial perspective efficiently packaged that dichotomy into appearance.
Spaniards began to believe food caused the visible differences between themselves and indigenous peoples, and therefore feared local fare—despite eating it frequently early on, because that was what was available. The 15th-century idea that certain bodies are superior, and that certain foods shape those superior bodies, sounds remarkably contemporary. This is because it forms the backbone of 21st century diet culture.
By the 1800s, pseudosciences like phrenology offered seemingly rational justifications for racial hierarchy. Anthropologists deemed fatness a characteristic of Blackness and devoted themselves to documenting body sizes among different groups. These scientists, writes Christy Harrison in Anti-Diet, also believed women were at greater “risk” of fatness, a claim construed as “evidence of their supposed evolutionary inferiority.” Meanwhile, angst about immigrants and the end of slavery mounted among privileged, established Americans. Like the conquistadors, Anglo-Saxon Americans sought to define themselves by contrast, this time invoking thinness as a sign of superiority to the “stout” or “sturdy” bodies of African and Irish people, particularly women. Thinness had gained cachet, and even if weight loss was considered medically unwise, to be slender was socially desirable.
In 1899 insurance companies adopted the methodologically dubious Quetelet Index, or QI— a precursor to the Body Mass Index. A Belgian astronomer created the QI from a dataset of white Europeans for population-level calculations, not individual health outcomes predictions. The QI divided people into three categories—underweight, normal weight, and overweight—and seemed to show that “overweight” people were likely to die younger.
As Harrison writes, more representative, recent data samples have since shown that commonplace assumptions about the health implications of these categories are inaccurate. For example, a Center for Disease Control analysis found that, while people with especially high BMIs have a higher mortality risk than people with “normal weight,” this dynamic does not hold for a broad subset of people classified as “obese.” The study also found that people in the “overweight” category—one BMI tier down from obese— have a significantly lower mortality risk than people with “normal weight.”
That this may come as a surprise to many reflects more than a century of cultural conditioning. At the turn of the 20th century, in tandem with a growing social conviction that fat was physical evidence of immoral behavior, insurance companies used the QI to convince doctors that higher weights were riskier, and patients started asking doctors for help with weight loss. Doctors lamented the vanity of this desire, which they saw as a cosmetic distraction from health, but eventually they succumbed to the pressure to worry about weight.
By the 1930s, cigarettes were popular for weight suppression, amphetamine diet pills had come to market, the FDA had encouraged WWI food conservation with the slogan “Victory over Ourselves,” and the concept of “willpower” took a special hold on the American psyche.
And diet culture has been with us ever since.
When the physiologist Ancel Keys resurrected the Quetelet Index as the Body Mass Index in 1972, adding the “obese” category, he set the stage for a profound escalation of diet culture: the invention of the “obesity epidemic.” The International Obesity Task Force, funded by two weight-loss companies to generate research benefitting the pharmaceutical industry, wrote a report that the National Institutes of Health in 1998 used to justify lowering the weight cut-offs for the “overweight” and “obese” BMI categories. Millions of American bodies became “higher-risk” overnight.
That same year, William Dietz, director of the CDC’s Division for Nutrition and Physical Activity, disseminated a slideshow with a graphic of the United States where darkening, growing patches of navy and red appeared to show a dramatic rise in state-level “obesity” from 1985 to 1998, mostly because the BMI had changed.
The slides, which resembled a diagram of contagion, were misleadingly urgent. Average American weight had increased only slightly over this time period. But the images, accompanied by the word “epidemic,” spread, well, like an epidemic, circulating in media and government reports until the phrase and its attendant moral panic were commonplace. Being fat and gaining weight had become both dangerous and deplorable.
The “obesity epidemic”—not the supposed event, but the rhetorical construct—has had disastrous consequences, increasing discrimination and, it could be argued, directly contributing to worse public health. When insurers began using the Quetelet Index, they mistook a pattern for a reason, a correlation for a causation.
Most population-level studies show that fat people have worse cardiovascular health. But as Michael Hobbes writes in his landmark article “Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong,” “individuals are not averages.” Anywhere from a third to three-quarters of people in the “obese” BMI category have normal blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood glucose levels. Insofar as we have individual control over our health, “habits, no matter your size, are what really matter,” writes Hobbes. So many other factors—vegetable intake, hip flexibility, gum health, consistent exercise, etc.—are better gauges of health than weight.
One factor that could explain the association between higher body weight and poorer health outcomes is anti-fat bias. Fat people experience higher levels of discrimination, a form of persistent stress that adds to their allostatic load, which increases the incidence of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, asthma, and depression, according to The Nelson Textbook of Pediatrics.
These effects of long-term stigma are nearly identical to health outcomes typically attributed to fat itself. And they are often compounded by additional circumstances that further increase allostatic load: fat people are more likely to be poor, lack health insurance, or live in rural areas, where medical care can be more difficult to access. And they are more likely to be people of color.
Though some forms of social bias have declined measurably in recent years, weight stigma is on the rise. A review of the Harvard Implicit Association Test, which measures implicit (unconscious) and explicit (overt, acknowledged) bias, found that from 2007 to 2016, body weight explicit bias decreased more slowly than explicit bias about sexual orientation, race, age, disability, or skin tone. As for implicit bias, body weight was the only kind that got worse, increasing by 40 percent from 2004 to 2010. After that, the pace of increase decelerated, but the direction remained unchanged; through 2016 implicit weight bias continued to climb.
Anti-fat sentiment has serious medical consequences. Going to the doctor is often an unhelpful if not hostile experience for fat people, who overall receive less preventative care than thin people. Doctors spend less time with fat patients than with thin ones, are more likely to write negative comments about their personal character, and prescribe weight loss when it is unrelated to the situation at hand. A gruesome example of this phenomenon was the case of Rebecca Hiles, whose doctors attributed her shortness of breath and cough to her weight for six years instead of running tests that would have diagnosed lung cancer. By the time the cancer was discovered, her left lung had rotted and had to be removed.
People who diet may limit calories, skip meals, eliminate food groups, aim for ketosis, or count macros. They embrace juicing, intermittent fasting, or “detox” protocols. They might lift weights compulsively, exercise to exhaustion, or attend movement classes they dislike. Dieting does not include religious fasts, indigenous cleansing, ethical abstention from specific foods, or avoiding what you’re allergic to, though many of these practices have been co-opted into diet culture, obscuring the pursuit of weight loss as a moral endeavor.
While diet behaviors can produce short-term weight-loss, 90 percent of dieters regain the lost weight within two years. Two-thirds gain additional weight besides. This weight gain happens because our bodies have “weight set ranges,” or general size blueprints. Similar to height, genes mostly determine set range. “So strong is the power of set range,” writes Harrison, that if your weight dips below it, the brain triggers a cascade of (unconscious) changes such as increased hunger hormone (ghrelin), decreased fullness hormones (leptin, peptide YY, and cholecystokinin), and more preoccupation with food. Multiple attempts to suppress your weight below its set range can eventually increase set range to shield you from future famines, which, to your body, are indistinguishable from diets.
This biological reaction helps explain the restriction/binge cycle that dieters experience. Deprivation, even in mild forms, registers as starvation, causing the hormonal changes that motivate people to eat a lot, quickly. This is not a failure of willpower; it’s a body trying to defend itself. For the majority of people then, dieting leads to both weight gain and a see-saw relationship to food that may seem like addictive behavior but is actually a survival response to scarcity.
Trying to ignore hunger also makes people more susceptible to environmental cues such as food advertising or larger portion sizes. In response to both, studies show, dieters eat more. By contrast, Harrison writes, non-dieters “tend to eat similar amounts when they’re exposed to these things as they do otherwise, because they’re driven by internal rather than external cues.” While American commercial and restaurant portion sizes did increase between the ‘70s and early 2000s (media coverage often mentioned how bagels had doubled in diameter), a single food-marketing researcher named Brian Wansink was largely responsible for the misconception that bigger portion sizes alone cause people to eat more.
Before Cornell University fired him for extensive academic misconduct, Wansink and his lab churned out more than 200 peer-reviewed papers. He reached a level of celebrity rarely afforded to academics, was quoted in upwards of 60 New York Times articles and became known for headline-inducing studies where diners used different-sized plates or ate soup from automatically refilling bowls. The general thrust of his work was identifying environments where people eat more, such as movie theaters that serve popcorn in bigger buckets, and then claiming those environments caused weight gain. While many of his studies examined food behaviors in different situations (such as how 8-11 year-olds, given a choice between apples with or without Elmo stickers, took the Elmo-sticker fruit more often), virtually none of them tracked whether or how those behaviors correlated with body size. Anti-fat sentiment buoyed his work and limited the scrutiny it received.
In 2015 Wansink’s career unraveled. Outside reviewers found his publications were rife with mathematical errors and p-hacking, an unethical approach where a scientist takes a dataset, finds any statistically significant associations, and retroactively draws conclusions from them, regardless of what hypothesis the study was supposed to investigate. There was also some outright lying. The apple-study children who chose the Elmo stickers were not, in fact, elder elementary schoolers. They were toddlers.
Culturally, we think of fat as basic math—too much food plus not enough exercise. But the science is not so clearcut. Certain medications (some anti-depressants, beta blockers, and steroids), diseases such as PCOS, hypothyroidism, and Cushing Syndrome, and, again, dieting can all cause weight gain. And there are myriad genes that contribute to body size. Cambridge University researchers Sadaf Farooqi and Stephen O’Rahilly write that variation in BMI is largely influenced by genetic factors. If you’re “overweight,” there’s a significant chance your biological parents were too.
Endeavoring to lose weight generally does not yield sustained weight loss, though it does dramatically increase the likelihood of developing an eating disorder. Exercise can improve flexibility, strength, circulation, mental wellbeing, and, importantly, cardiac health. But it is rarely, if ever, an effective weight-loss method over time. And even when someone does manage to lose weight, weight loss does not for most people improve health biomarkers such as blood pressure, fasting glucose, or triglyceride levels.
In fact, much like weight stigma, weight cycling is correlated with outcomes that are usually blamed on body size: increased risk of heart failure and coronary disease. In a 10-year study of more than 6.7 million South Koreans, Harrison notes, weight cyclers had a far higher risk of death from all causes, not to mention a greater risk of heart attack and stroke, than those whose weight remained stable. This dynamic held regardless of baseline body size.
In Radical Belonging, Lindo Bacon claims that dieting may encourage diabetes, because dieting mimics the historical famine experience. As an example, Bacon cites the relatively isolated Pima Indian tribe in what is now Arizona. This farming civilization did not experience diabetes until Europeans diverted water from the rivers they used for irrigation, upending their way of life. Famine ensued and diabetes took off. Today the Pima tribe has the highest incidence of diabetes of any ethnic group in the world, Bacon writes. Though genetics contributed to this outcome, the lack of diabetes beforehand and the low incidence of diabetes in less burdened Pima tribes in Mexico shows that genes cannot entirely account for the surge. Type II diabetes, Bacon writes, “can best be described as a disease of oppression,” the prevalence of which can be reduced through social policy such as housing vouchers, universal healthcare, or higher minimum wage, not dieting.
The social determinants of health—economic status, race, gender, and geographic location, all of which significantly influence food/housing insecurity, pollution exposure, and structural racism—account for 70 to 90 percent of health outcomes. Individual behaviors only account for 10 to 30 percent. Bacon writes that we get sick “not predominantly because we do or eat the wrong things, but because our lives are hard, our environments toxic, and the resources that would empower us are beyond our reach.” If you need to participate in some morbid betting pool and guess how long someone will live or whether they’ll develop diabetes, ask where they were born, to whom, and with how much money.
Despite reams of evidence that diets do not lead to long-term weight loss, that thinness is not a proxy for health, that weight cycling contributes to earlier death, and that circumstances influence our health more than individual choices, diet culture persists. Its terminology, however, has morphed, possibly because of rising eating disorder awareness in the ‘90s and early 2000s that yielded some outcry about the most glaring consequences of our obsession with thinness. Though people became more knowledgeable about anorexia and bulimia during this time, news stories and movies about these topics focused on emaciated young white women, contributing dangerously to the mistaken belief that people of color and fat people do not develop eating disorders—that you can tell who is starving themselves by how they look.
Rather than seeing eating disorders as categorically distinct from diets, it is useful to understand disordered eating as a spectrum of behaviors. We are not culturally ready to admit that dieting—tracking, limiting, and obsessing over food—is disordered eating. I’m not qualified to identify when disordered eating tips into an official eating disorder. But I see great conceptual power in making overt the links between avoiding sugar and anorexia, between trying to eat “clean” and the impulse to purge, or between doing sit-ups to atone for “junk” food and working out compulsively. Actions over time determine disordered eating, not aesthetics.
Partially due to this minor backlash to the thin beauty ideal, most diets stopped being called diets and started pretending to be about health, not body size. In 2018 Weight Watchers changed its name to WW and slogan to Wellness that Works. WW is still a weight-loss program, but the company responded to changing vocabulary: “dieting” is vulgar, the stuff of “one weird trick to lose 5 lbs.” clickbait, whereas “lifestyle changes” communicate enlightenment and, ultimately, wealth. Supplements, organic ingredients, personal trainers, and elite smoothies aren’t cheap. Neither is refusing to eat staples like bread, pasta, and rice. Contemporary, cosmopolitan dieting may be expensive and rarely referred to as dieting, but dieting it is.
Unfortunately, the main result of the last two decades of food activism (a movement comprised primarily of college-educated white people) has been to popularize individual “clean” or vegetarian/vegan eating. Rather than interrogating the outsize role played by pharmaceutical and weight-loss companies in the creation of the obesity epidemic, many food activists adopted anti-obesity wholesale. In her article “How the Eco-Food Movement Mass Markets Eating Disorders,” Virginia Sole-Smith writes that eating local or vegan gained favor in the aughts because it seemed like a way to stay thin and save the environment in one fell swoop. Food obsession could be justified with a nobler purpose than weight loss, which was still desirable except that it had become passé to openly want to be slender. “Food,” Sole-Smith writes, “became something to categorize—whole or processed, real or fake, clean or dirty—and to fear.” This zealous black-and-white thinking, along with misplaced faith in personal consumption as social change, bred rampant orthorexia, a form of anorexia characterized by intensifying preoccupation with “healthy” eating and exercise.
One treatment for disordered eating is intuitive eating, a concept created by registered dietician nutritionists Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. Intuitive eating sounds simple. It means learning to eat what you want. In real life this involves compromises, given that most people do not have personal chefs. But ideally, intuitive eaters honor their hunger, eat for reasons besides energy, such as pleasure, and do not try to change their body composition with nutrition. When granted this total permission, many people at first eat in a way that looks uncontrolled. But as previously forbidden foods become normal through a process called habituation, most intuitive eaters tend to balance out. Given enough time, they no longer feel “addicted” to eating. Intuitive eating is criticized as financially exclusive, but it remains radical at its core: everyone deserves to eat what sounds good.
Intuitive eating emerged from the fat acceptance movement, which coalesced in the 1960s with a Central Park “fat-in” initiated by a counterculture radio host. About 500 people attended. They brought food and burned diet books and at least one photo of the model Twiggy. Inspired by the fat-in and frustrated with how their wives, both fat, were treated, William Fabrey and Fat Power author Lew Louderback founded what would become the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. In 1973 a radical west-coast contingent of the group split to form the Fat Underground. Led by Judy Freespirit and Sara Golda Bracha Fishman, their true innovation, writes Sirius Bonner of the Center for Body Trust, was using scientific research to bolster their arguments. When the singer Cass Elliott died at age 33 of heart failure that was widely misattributed to her size, the Fat Underground took to the stage at the subsequent Los Angeles Women’s Equality Day to memorialize Elliott, whom they believed was a casualty of crash dieting, and to decry the medical establishment for pushing weight loss despite its perils.
The Fat Underground dissolved in 1983, but the momentum stoked by its members and their contemporaries was undeniable. The ‘80s and ‘90s saw cross-pollination between queer and fat politics, particularly through zines, and tentative coalitions between disability and fat rights activists. American anti-diet literature sprouted with publications such as Healthy Weight Journal, one of the first to question whether diets were dangerous.
The Association for Size Diversity and Health convened in 2003. In 2010, it filed to trademark the “Health at Every Size” name so that companies could not co-opt it. This decision was contentious, but it did work: there is no diet called “Health at Every Size.” However, a few months before the trademark, Bacon had published a book called Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight. This title and Bacon’s prominence have caused people to conflate the writer with the movement.
With Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming It for the Better), Bacon shifted their focus from weight bias and intuitive eating to a wider justice lens. As the long sub-title suggests, Radical Belonging is ambitious. It’s self-help that incorporates systemic critique, interspersed with memoir from Bacon’s life, particularly their experiences as a trans person.
First, Bacon maps our threefold “crisis of belonging.” Oppression keeps us from belonging in our bodies, in the world, and among each other, they argue. When society orbits what Audre Lorde calls a “mythical norm,” defined as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure,” most people feel alienated in some way. Bacon recounts how they were gendered as a child, first by the aspirational name “Linda,” the feminine word for “pretty” in Spanish.
In their youth Bacon did not know anyone who was trans or understand it was possible to change genders, so they endured years of confusion, chronicled here in poignant stories of their bat mitzvah as a coercive rite rather than a celebration or a teenage modeling school showcase where Bacon, having skipped as much practice walking in high heels as possible, tripped on the runway, caught a string of lights, toppled the set, and sent a classmate to the hospital. Bacon initially dealt with this personal crisis of belonging by dieting, hoping to eliminate their body’s feminine curves, and by doing cocaine.
Bacon is at their best when they write about their own gender; their success is scattershot when they write about experiences they haven’t had. The text is riddled with sloppy language. Paragraphs often end with rushed examples from groups of which Bacon is not a part, which has the tokenizing effect of making them sound like afterthoughts.
These discrepancies between the book’s aims and its execution are frustrating; they also anticipate growing tension, in real life, regarding Bacon’s role in the anti-diet movement. In 2022 the writer Marquisele Mercedes published a transcript from a Zoom meeting with Bacon along with an essay about their interactions called “I Will Never Work With You.” Bacon had contacted Mercedes about co-authoring a revised edition of Health at Every Size. In their video conversation, however, Bacon admitted to wanting to maintain creative control over the project. Mercedes, who is fat and Black, expressed qualms about not being equal partners and about whether Bacon, who is thin and white, ought to write the new edition. “I don’t exactly see how it is justified for me to follow your lead on the next chapter of HAES,” Mercedes told Bacon, “when really my views are the ones that should be accommodated in the new version.”
At this point Bacon backtracked to offer Mercedes ghostwriting work instead. She declined and tried to explain why and how Bacon could let other people step into the spotlight. Bacon disagreed. By the end, the writers decided to part ways…except that afterward, Bacon emailed Mercedes repeatedly about exploring their differences publicly in an article or at a conference.
When Mercedes posted about her experience, numerous people of color and fat people came forward with similar stories of off-putting ghostwriting requests from Lindo Bacon. Bacon responded first by writing a paranoid essay about oppression in social justice groups, implying that other activists had a secret list of people to surveil and take down at an opportune time. After a minor internet maelstrom, Bacon apologized without really saying sorry, and the Association for Size Diversity and Health terminated their membership.
A generous take here would be that Bacon reacted poorly to criticism. A harsher version would be that Bacon uses people of color and size to bolster their image and has a pattern of being demanding and unrepentant. Bacon seemed to think there was some sort of plot to engineer their downfall, but the truth is much simpler: Radical Belonging, with its well-intentioned but erratic quality, reveals an author struggling with the changing of the guard.
For all their achievements, the Fat Underground and early fat acceptance were predominantly white movements comprised mostly of single-issue activists, many of whom did not recognize the compounding effects of racism and diet culture on fat people of color or mistakenly believed that fatphobia was not a problem for non-white people.
In Belly of the Beast, Da’Shaun Harrison links anti-fatness to its racist roots. Under slavery, white people treated Black people as expendable resources. Harrison argues that because of this objectification, the theoretical figure of “the Black, which is to name the Slave…was and has always been removed from wellness and safety.” That is, for as long as the United States has existed, there has always been a group of people who were structurally exempt from health, whose lack of health was then attributed to their physical characteristics rather than their situation.
In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins Of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings, summarized here by Sirius Bonner, claims that
as color became more complicated because of rape and miscegenation in early America, body size became another way of understanding who was enslaved and who was not, and, by extension, who was Black and who was white. This product of white supremacy became intertwined with the deeply patriarchal project of keeping women literally and figuratively small. This put white women in the position of having to remain slender in order to recoup the benefits of correctly performing their gender and race.
In this way thinness became enmeshed with whiteness—and therefore a source of power. Just as early conquistadors sought to differentiate themselves from indigenous peoples to justify their imperialist project, white people, via the proxy of thinness, sought to distinguish themselves from Black people.
Belly of the Beast is more beautifully written than Anti-Diet and Radical Belonging—and also more rigorous, not to mention revolutionary, in its politics. Harrison theorizes fatness as inextricable from Blackness, not literally, but conceptually. If fatness is inherent to Blackness, then anti-Blackness is why fat is considered undesirable. The subjugation of Black people is not just an effect of diet culture, but a condition for its existence.
In the last decade, various often white police officers have justified shooting unarmed Black men on the basis of their victim’s size—not just his height, but his weight. It is a logic of abuse—you made me do this to you—and it forms a rhetorical construct that Harrison calls the Beast. The Beast, like the Slave, is antithetical to whiteness. When a white police officer describes a Black man as huge and monstrous, that police officer yokes size to race, fat to Black, and casts the object of their violence as the Beast—an animal to be subdued.
Diet culture has proven itself remarkably adaptable—as I write this, a new fleet of under-studied diet drugs with significant side effects has flooded the market. Bacon and Christy Harrison both argue that learning to eat intuitively or cultivating self-love are not enough to dismantle diet culture. Da’Shaun Harrison is the most fervent on this point, arguing that self-love does not equal fat liberation, that it can even be distracting if we focus so much on self-love that we forget to ask why we feel bad about our bodies in the first place. This question of why is paramount, because the answer is not simply that we misconstrue and overvalue thinness. Rather, we pursue thinness because we connect it to whiteness, we demonize fat because we connect it to Blackness, and we wildly misunderstand health because of race. Until we relinquish racism, diet culture will persist. ▩