00:00:00.520Today's episode of Diabolical Lies was brought to you by the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, Mark Zuckerberg sweating through his shirt about another scandal, the Body Mass Index Scale, My Fitness Pal, and the Limp Dick Editorial Standards of Evie Magazine.
00:00:15.340Dude, the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, I still can think of that black and white thing where it's like, and I see a true cut, and it's like a little freckled eight-year-old. That impacted me heavily.
00:00:28.440You're like, thank you, Unilever. My body image issues are solved.
00:00:32.400Corporate activism does make a difference in the world.
00:00:36.520Representation matters. That girl has freckles.1.00
00:00:39.800That girl looks like me, a white woman.0.54
00:00:44.320Caroline, what do you know about an influencer named Liv Schmidt?
00:00:48.440I know that New York Magazine recently outed what looks to me like a cult,
00:00:54.700and she has been on a warpath ever since.
00:00:57.380So I went onto her social media only following what happened to her, and I know that she's mad.
00:01:05.000That's basically what I know about her.
00:01:06.760So Liv Schmidt is someone who entered the broader public consciousness recently because of this profile in The Cut by a woman named E.J. Dixon.0.60
00:01:14.880And before this, before she reached mainstream consciousness, she was a figurehead of a relatively niche online subculture called Skinny Talk.0.99
00:01:26.180Now, part of the reason why she gained notoriety, beyond just being, like, extremely thin, was because she kept getting banned on TikTok.
00:01:34.860So, this fact alone meant that she got a bizarre amount of mainstream press.
00:01:41.160So, like, the Wall Street Journal was the first major newspaper to cover her in September 2024.
00:01:47.920Caro, I'm going to have you read the headline and subheadline of this piece for me.1.00
00:01:53.020Her skinny videos divided TikTok. She says they're what the viewers want.1.00
00:01:59.500Uh, subhead, Liv Schmidt grew a following with posts about staying thin in her daily diet.0.85
00:02:05.340Some users said her content promoted disordered eating.
00:02:08.720Okay. Now I'm going to have you read a few snippets from this coverage.
00:02:13.800Schmidt defends her work, saying it stems from her own struggles with feeling uncomfortable in her body
00:02:18.740and her desire to help others feel more confident.
00:02:21.080A lot of people want to know what people eat, she said.
00:02:27.560Akira Gilbert, the chief executive of Project Heal, a nonprofit that provides access to free mental health care for people with eating disorders, said, quote,
00:02:36.040A large number of the people that we see tell us that the initial trigger for their disordered eating behaviors was social media exposure.
00:02:42.900Schmidt said her videos are directed at women whose white-collar jobs keep them at a desk most of the day.
00:02:47.640That's a very funny way of describing the demographic of women who have expendable income.
00:02:54.100But anyways, for me, she said, it was way easier to cut out 300 calories of food than to burn 300 calories in exercise, especially if you're a career person with a limited amount of time, she said.0.74
00:05:55.320Yeah, now that we pulled you in with a hot chick again.1.00
00:05:57.700half of our episodes are like, let's talk about this hot white chick and why she makes us1.00
00:06:02.260uncomfortable. That could be a tagline for diabolical eyes. Why this hot white chick1.00
00:06:06.780makes Katie and Carol uncomfortable. Also, Palestine. Anyways, I'm going to start with1.00
00:06:14.220the header again because I feel like we really moved away. Okay. We lost the plot. That's fine.
00:06:18.200Start over. New York Times chat GPT headline. Who is the skinny influencer who was barred from
00:06:23.700tiktok subhead live schmidt has inspired debates with videos that some believe encourage disordered0.96
00:06:29.560eating one social media site tried to remove her then i'm gonna have you read just a couple
00:06:34.680excerpts from this one as well oh she's younger than i thought okay interesting dude in one video0.99
00:06:41.260she goes well my prom was canceled because of covid shut the fuck up and i was like1.00
00:06:48.180holy shit you are a child miss schmidt 22 lists her job on linkedin as a social event coordinator0.99
00:06:55.640for a private family office but she built her social media following in recent months by1.00
00:07:00.500posting blueprints for maintaining a slim figure while working a day job including detailing her
00:07:05.220daily food intake through what i eat in a day videos and sharing tips that evoke antiquated
00:07:10.580iterations of diet culture such as half the time you're not actually hungry you're just literally
00:07:16.380thirsty. Or you're just literally just thirsty? Did she say it? This is, once again, getting
00:07:22.660confused. That's a pull quote, babe. Okay, okay. Do what you want with that. You're just literally
00:07:28.480just thirsty. She has also spoken frankly about receiving better treatment from society after
00:07:33.440losing weight. Oh, you're on to something, Liv. All right, one more. Let's go. Miss Schmidt's fans
00:07:40.060have suggested that the criticism is overblown and that expressing a desire to be thin is not0.52
00:07:44.580inherently bad. Okay, I do have thoughts on that. While also emphasizing the importance
00:07:48.820of individual responsibility. Users rallied behind her in the comments of a recent video
00:07:53.780from her new account, welcoming her back, thanking her for sharing tips and asking
00:07:57.760why she would be barred for promoting a healthy lifestyle. Okay, I have a little bit of a
00:08:01.680hot take. Yeah, let's do it. Katie, you have built a business off of personal finance
00:08:06.520education. And you and I talk a lot about how there are inherent conflicts in that and
00:08:11.860that your journey, what is so interesting about your journey as a thinker and as like a thought
00:08:17.420leader is that you got into personal finance as a way to get yourself a level of stability. And
00:08:24.520then the more that you learned, the more interested you were in systemic conversations over individual
00:08:29.200fixes. And I do think there is an argument to be made that women who are trying to be thin are1.00
00:08:35.180basically doing the body equivalent of personal finance, where it's like, it is absolutely true.1.00
00:08:41.860She's right. Women do receive actual concrete benefits for having a body that fits in our perception of how bodies should look. And so it is kind of interesting that we allow certain kinds of educational hacks for how to survive under capitalism, but that we don't allow others. And I'm kind of struggling with that at this moment as we speak.1.00
00:11:08.660Be present while you're eating and avoid distraction and mindless eating.
00:11:12.440and eat the real dessert instead of the healthy, quote-unquote healthy alternative,
00:11:18.300but just eat less of it. So any thoughts on those ideas? I'm fine with them.
00:11:24.720So like occasionally you would have something that would feel a little bit dicier, like,
00:11:29.940oh, you should be going to bed a little bit hungry, or you should never really feel full,
00:11:36.320like uncomfortably full if you feel full that's a sign that you overate and I would say that aside
00:11:43.220from an obsession with walking they're like hyper fixated on how many steps you're getting
00:11:47.960aside from this obsession with walking there's actually very little in the way of real physical
00:11:52.620exertion because physical exertion causes you to be hungry so like I noticed that in these videos
00:12:00.360there's a lot of talking about how much it doesn't matter if you go to the gym or not
00:12:05.540There's a lot of the kind where it's like B-roll of her in like a bikini or something, and then there's just text over the screen, again, usually with some grammatical errors. I really think, this is my hot take on this, when you are in a constant state of calorie deficit, your brain starts shutting down because it's trying to preserve.
00:12:25.980Yeah. So I saw a few photos of her before we hopped onto this conversation, and I had read that Cut article about her, and I'm really struggling with the fact that she's 22. I thought she would be 15 years older than that, and she's younger than Jackie Eubanks.
00:12:43.440Yeah, I think there's also a part of that that's like, you're kind of, in a sense, taking dieting advice from a teenager.
00:12:50.840Yeah, from someone whose metabolism hasn't slowed down. Sure.
00:12:55.140Anyway, there's a big thing on, like, the body type that you have will depend way more on what you're eating than, like, what you're doing physically.
00:13:04.820So, again, some of it skews a little bit overtly problematic, but then a lot of it is kind of stuff I've heard my whole life about, like, portion control.
00:13:15.660I'm like, okay, that doesn't really seem all that controversial.
00:13:18.560So I would say superficially, a lot of it was actually relatively uncontroversial.
00:13:26.520I think her physical appearance as the visual that is paired with this advice1.00
00:13:30.800definitely makes it hit a little bit differently because she is so thin.0.99
00:14:44.560I already have thoughts. Like, I'm sorry. Liv Schmidt did not like make skinny a thing. Okay. That's a little bit ridiculous. Okay. Subhead. Before she was banned from TikTok six times. Before she launched a global skinny movement. Before she built a community of thousands. Liv Schmidt was just a corporate intern sitting at her desk, bloated, exhausted, and wondering why all the right wellness habits weren't working for her. Oh, let me guess. Was she like five pounds heavier?
00:15:12.080I was doing everything social media told me to do, Liv told me, and none of it made me feel good.
00:15:18.940I was miserable in my body, and faking that I felt empowered just wasn't cutting it anymore.
00:18:58.380When it was all said and done, her account was reported, flagged, and removed six times in total.
00:19:04.140You don't get banned that much unless what you're saying is powerful, she said.0.93
00:19:07.880They were okay with girls pretending to eat 10 cookies a day and stay skinny.
00:19:11.700But when I said the truth, walk more, eat less, I got erased.
00:19:15.920Her original account reached nearly 700,000 followers.
00:19:18.860When she rebuilt and hit 100K, it was removed the same day.
00:19:22.700Another account hit $215k, got flagged, reinstated with an apology, and then banned again three hours later alongside a smaller $30k account.
00:19:33.380I've had five accounts taken down, and every time, TikTok refuses to tell me exactly what I violated, she said.
00:19:39.880They say community guidelines but won't specify.
00:19:42.300And meanwhile, there are girls smoking cigarettes, promoting actual disordered behavior, or stitching my content to hate on it, and none of that gets flagged.
00:19:51.140Even her friends got censored for defending her.
00:19:54.000Girls posted videos just saying my name, Liv Schmidt, and those got taken down, she said.
00:19:59.620Meanwhile, TikTok was pushing content of girls smoking cigarettes to suppress appetite
00:20:03.580or eating baby food and calling it a skinny hack.
00:26:38.720We have so many different types of thin white women in this community.1.00
00:26:41.960They all want the same thing. Freedom from food addiction and confusion. It offers daily group chats, monthly challenges, like Tis the Season to be Skinny, or her upcoming three-month angel challenge. Okay, I'm starting to see where this is going. Exclusive recipes, workouts, wellness tips, what I eat in a day content, and Liv's signature food tracker, a printable journal that replaces calorie counting with mindful awareness. It's like the wealth tracker, Katie.1.00
00:31:23.640but when I do, it becomes controversial. Why? Because I'm blonde, thin, young, and unapologetic.
00:31:32.320So brave. Rock on, Liv. Her advice for anyone trying to cut through the noise. Oh my god. Oh
00:31:37.700my god, Evie, we heard this. Unfollow people who glamorize laziness. Stop chasing hacks. Start0.50
00:31:42.880with discipline. Build the body you want. But more importantly, build the life you want. Okay,
00:31:47.020Oprah. Whether you agree with her or not, Liv's doing something most influencers won't. Telling
00:31:51.300the truth even when it costs her and she knows what she's about more walks less noise less guilt
00:31:56.660and more clarity so here's to a 23 year old oh she's 23 who refused to be censored for saying
00:32:01.980what so many of us already knew deep down discipline is beautiful and feeling good
00:32:06.240matters all right yeah all right well do you want to tell me just some high level
00:32:13.780reflections that was an article that could have been a tweet so maybe they can think about that
00:32:20.600moving forward. I'm actually kind of struggling to find the right balance here because I actually
00:32:26.080think that there is a lot of what she's saying that's very correct. I won't speak for you,
00:32:29.840but I will say I have had a relatively healthy relationship with my body over the years,
00:32:34.180but I personally don't know a woman who hasn't in some way dabbled with disordered eating,
00:32:40.240dabbled with body dysmorphia, dabbled with incredible insecurity. And I have found it0.91
00:32:45.700very frustrating over the years, watching the extent to which people do lie about what it means
00:32:52.320to be thin in order to promote body positivity. Like Vogue, I think, currently has or has had
00:32:59.640videos of what I eat in a day. And you will see videos of very famous models like Bella Hadid
00:33:06.260and Kendall Jenner and the Kardashians and Haley Bieber. And you will see like videos of them
00:33:12.400eating a huge plate of spaghetti or almost glamorizing this consumption of food. And what
00:33:18.360is in the back of your head is they're not actually eating that. But I had a friend who had
00:33:23.320quote a perfect body and she had a thyroid problem and it actually drove her crazy. When she ate,1.00
00:33:29.760people would always comment on it. And so I also really thought about her a lot too, where it's
00:33:35.300Like, that does kind of suck that women are so policed for bodies and are so encouraged to police other people's bodies that, like, both sides of that argument are technically correct.
00:33:48.240And it kind of sucks that even when you do have, quote, the perfect body, you actually can't just enjoy being in it because you are still representing something for other people.0.74
00:34:00.540Something that you'll notice when you spend a few hours looking at this stuff, which I definitely would not recommend doing if you have any history with eating disorders, there is a lot of coded language.
00:34:14.840There's a lot of semantics. So for example, there will be B-roll of her looking very skeletal in a0.63
00:34:21.960teeny little bikini, and the text overlaid will say something like, it's not restriction. It's0.70
00:34:28.740just choosing not to overeat. Or stop when you feel satisfied, not full. So it's like,
00:34:37.320what's the meaningful difference between restricting what you're eating and choosing
00:34:40.980not to overeat? Or is there a difference between feeling full and satisfied? Not really, but the
00:34:47.780positioning and the framing of the ideas is so narrow and particular to walk that line that I
00:34:55.340think she knows she has to walk. And I know that I mentioned that I found a lot of the things that
00:35:00.620she was saying, again, as somebody who grew up reading American Cheerleader, a lot of this stuff
00:35:05.660I'm like, babe, I've been hearing this since fifth grade. You like in an oversized Reagan Bush shirt
00:35:10.820at age like 14, just like kicking your legs on the couch while you read how to eat ice cubes
00:35:15.820instead of fried rice or something. Welcome to America, everyone. Proud to be an American.
00:35:20.020I feel like I'm finally going to be the flyer this season. I'm going to be small enough.
00:35:25.020Yeah, but the picture becomes much more complicated when you go behind that paywall.
00:35:30.880So publicly, you will see something like don't count calories, something that might actually
00:35:35.840feel antithetical to diet culture. But behind the paywall, she says, write down every single
00:35:42.540thing you eat every single day. You need to be writing down everything that you put in your body.
00:35:48.480So you're getting one thing on the outside, but once you have committed and you're paying money
00:35:53.620for it and you're kind of in private, things take on a different tone. And this is what ultimately
00:35:59.420led to the demise of her private paywalled group. E.J. Dixon went beyond the work that the Wall
00:36:05.260Street Journal, The New York Times, and Evie did, she actually joined the group and spent time
00:36:10.520lurking behind that paywall to understand what was actually happening in those paid group chats,
00:36:16.080which are, by the way, $20 a month. So I would just say, diabolicalize, a steal.
00:36:21.820$20 a month. If you exploit the greatest insecurity that any woman has,1.00
00:36:27.300they will be willing to spend money to fix it. Who knew?1.00
00:36:29.640So here's an excerpt of Dixon's analysis about how Schmidt's approach creates an entire lifestyle brand around the state of being physically thin.
00:36:41.260In Schmidt's world, thinness isn't just a physical state, but the basis of an entire luxury lifestyle.
00:36:48.180Schmidt is capitalizing on a cultural moment when extreme thinness has become more acceptable.
00:36:52.760Though she has the largest following of the Skinny Talk influencers, there's also Amanda Dobler, a fat loss and mindset coach who makes videos enumerating, quote, things you're doing that are keeping you stuck and fat, and Mandana Zargami, a Miami-based influencer with almost 350,000 TikTok followers who lectures followers who are, quote, built like a buffalo big back.
00:37:14.240oh my god or quote a little linebacker these women exhort their followers in a blunt tell it
00:37:20.460like it is tone to ignore the impulse to eat and focus on self-discipline and control dobler told1.00
00:37:25.520me skinny talk isn't about promoting eating disorders but about showing women they're allowed
00:37:29.400to want more for themselves again the use of language in these conversations is so interesting
00:37:35.520that they describe deprivation with verbs and adjectives that are almost exclusively about
00:37:40.820expansion. It's a very interesting inversion that they're doing there. Quote, tracking your food
00:37:45.860doesn't mean you're obsessive, she said. It means you're informed. Still, Schmidt is careful. She
00:37:50.800uses language that frames choosing not to eat as empowering, even feminist. Eat like you're the0.71
00:37:56.060main character because you are, she writes in one post. Eat like your highest self is watching.
00:38:02.220Eat like your next weigh-in is tomorrow. She doesn't advocate for a specific diet or tell
00:38:07.320her followers to avoid specific foods, which differentiates her from most weight loss
00:38:11.240influencers. Her rule of thumb is simple. Eat whatever you want, just eat as little
00:38:16.280as possible. You're not restricting, you're regulating. It's chic, she says in another
00:38:21.700post, next to a photo of a woman in a scarf and sunglasses in front of the Eiffel Tower.
00:38:28.200This is a masterclass in commodification.
00:38:32.460Linking all these very glamorous images to really kind of like boilerplate toxic ideas about body image.
00:38:41.940There are certain subliminal messages and subliminal and direct messages that are so fucking obvious that any person by the time they're 22 years old knows how to consume them and then reeducate other people with them.
00:39:00.160I think that any young person, any person who identifies with this idea of femininity would be able to regurgitate these ideas by the time they turn 22 with similar success.
00:39:12.060I thought it was really notable when she brought up that a lot of women in Europe love what she's saying and don't find it controversial because I actually do find that to be true.
00:39:20.500French culture, I will just say, is much more blunt about like weight loss and weight gain.
00:39:25.300And they do not understand why Americans have so much trouble with weight.
00:39:28.380And they will say, yeah, we have croissants.
00:39:42.620But they just, they really believe like, yeah, you just, you don't eat so much.
00:39:46.840So I actually think that it is similar to that.
00:39:49.140Have you ever seen that Nick Kroll bit where he's like a, I don't know.
00:39:54.080I think he's like playing a French person.
00:39:55.900he's like, then we go outside, we take in city lights with cigarettes. He's like, I wake up for0.98
00:40:00.680breakfast, have cigarettes. We're generalizing about like an entire country, but I hear what
00:40:06.620you mean. Well, there is that classic how French women stay thin obsession, that diet book that0.94
00:40:13.040came out in America. They're also smoking cigarettes all day long. Cigarettes suppress1.00
00:40:17.580appetite. There is a degree to which that thing is happening where because you have been so
00:40:23.380culturally indoctrinated with an idea already, that when someone addresses it head-on, there's
00:40:29.460something about it that feels true. But it's only because you have already, like, your culture
00:40:35.080already has indoctrinated you with that thing. It feels kind of transgressive to state it explicitly,
00:40:41.800but, like, that doesn't actually indicate there's any inherent truth to it, just that, like, yeah,
00:40:46.660you already exist in a culture where this is very popular.
00:40:49.180Well, I would also say that what makes it so complicated to kind of dissect is number one, that all this is subconscious. So like you're engaging with all this kind of very quickly. But I think you're right that the philosophical arguments they're making about empowerment and instinct and all these things, I don't think those are true. But I think that they are intersecting them with things that are true.
00:41:11.180She said some stuff about society that is absolutely real. Like anyone who has lost anywhere from five pounds to hundreds of pounds knows how quickly other people clock your appearance shift and how unnerving it can be.
00:41:26.260So, Dixon made a very interesting stylistic choice in this piece by talking about how being exposed to the groupthink in these chats triggered a regression in their own history with disordered eating.
00:41:41.540They said, as someone who spent a lot of time on eating disorder Tumblr as a teenager, obsessively reblogging images of Calvin Klein era Kate Moss and Cassie from Skins, I understood Schmitt's appeal.
00:41:57.060This community aestheticized the brutal private experience of slowly starving myself, rendering it both visible and communal.
00:42:08.600I know. What they found when they joined the private groups was very dark. They found people who were under the age of 18, people posting meal plans that were less than 1,000 calories per day, a hyper-competitive environment where people were constantly upping the ante.
00:42:25.640and this is probably obvious why this is dangerous,
00:42:38.520It is a very deadly, miserable disease.0.64
00:42:43.000And part of what I think Dixon was raising in this piece
00:42:47.020is what level of responsibility does Schmidt personally bear
00:42:51.060for what people are talking about in these chats?
00:42:54.600This is where things become a little more complicated because Liv is creating this environment, but she's not very active in the chat. You get the impression from Dixon's reporting that the group chats take on a life of their own a little bit where Liv will drop in these copy-paste prompts, like, oh, how are you staying skinny this weekend?
00:43:16.280But she's not directly endorsing some of the most extreme behavior that people are talking about. And there are quote-unquote rules in the chats about you're not allowed to post a meal plan that's less than 1,200 calories. The rules just aren't enforced. There's no real level of moderation happening.
00:43:36.080So she's creating this environment where people feel really empowered and comfortable discussing it openly, but she's not the source of the most disordered material in the groups.
00:43:49.600Right. This is just bringing up an interesting parallel for me in my head where I'm imagining like a Department of Justice court filing 15 years from now where they're like, well, how responsible are the podcast co-hosts for that many people becoming socialists?
00:44:03.160They don't use that word constantly, like they don't always use the word Marxism, and they were not super involved in the chats, but we are very concerned about the communication. They did embolden people to believe that housing is a human right.
00:44:20.540It was interesting to me how this communal environment was the most toxic element of the story.
00:44:27.160Because we're so accustomed to thinking about communities as these inherently positive things.
00:44:33.280But this is an example of a time when the groupthink around normalizing these incredibly masochistic, self-destructive tendencies is actually what makes them so powerful.
00:44:43.960That's the contradiction that I think she is alluding to, which is everything that I'm saying and doing is culturally supported.0.96
00:44:52.600There are a thousand videos online about how to lose weight, and you also have a bunch of bullshit nutritionists and influencers who claim to be body positive who are saying the same exact shit, but in more cloaked therapy language.
00:45:05.860But I do think that the women who are paying for this chat with Liv Schmidt, I would guess, are college-educated women, like she said, corporate women, who are probably in environments where it is—0.95
00:45:19.500I guess I'm just maybe just presuming that, like, you're paying for this because you're getting something that you might not get elsewhere.
00:45:25.720So I guess Liv Schmidt had been signed as a model with Elite, which is a very prestigious modeling agency.
00:45:31.580It sounds like in the aftermath of this piece in the cut and the demonetization on Instagram,
00:45:38.160Elite dropped her, or at the very least, her model page on their site now 404s.
00:45:44.800So it's hard to say whether she was actually dropped or if they just removed the page to
00:45:49.300create some distance from her, but she may have lost her representation because of this.
00:45:55.100And I want to spend some time here because this effort to distance themselves from her
00:46:00.560really stuck out to me. If you think about the institutions that are lowering the hammer right
00:46:06.740now, meta platforms demonetizing her, her modeling agency either explicitly dropping her or just
00:46:14.000making it look that way publicly, their business models and the way that they make money rely on
00:46:22.300many of the exact ideas that she is now being punished for acknowledging.1.00
00:46:27.560Mark Zuckerberg would be homeless if not for women's insecurities.0.98
00:46:31.840The way in which the modeling industry profits from what Liv is preaching is pretty self-evident,0.96
00:46:36.780but even Meta, I think, is implicated in a very direct way here. Sarah Wynne Williams,
00:46:41.820the Facebook whistleblower who wrote the memoir Careless People, alleged that at one point in the
00:46:47.2402010s, Meta had developed a technology that was designed to target girls who were 13 to 17 years
00:46:54.680old who deleted selfies so that they could be served a beauty product ad in that moment.
00:47:00.260So my point is just that these institutional power centers in society, these platforms,
00:47:07.480these tastemakers, they can artificially distance themselves from and superficially disown these
00:47:13.880ideas by punishing this one person who has become an avatar for the idea, who is being
00:47:19.740dangerously forthcoming about how hard it is to be skinny and what the rewards are when
00:47:24.460you achieve it. But to be very fucking clear, they are in no way actually divesting from or0.64
00:47:30.900disowning these ideas because their business models literally rely on them. It is very funny0.93
00:47:37.080in the darkest possible way that if she were to say the same exact shit, but just replace0.98
00:47:42.840some of the words and cloak it in slightly more better helpy language, she could have like a New0.98
00:47:49.180York Times best-selling self-help book a la Mel Robbins. Like, it is really frustrating to think
00:47:55.500about the fact that she was, I think that you're dead on the money in saying that she was just
00:48:00.160dangerously close to highlighting how hard it is and how dangerous it is to do exactly what everyone
00:48:05.360is already telling you to do. Like, oh, actually, this is extremely restrictive, and you are going
00:48:10.600to have to become neurotic, and you are going to have to starve yourself. It's a really interesting
00:48:15.480quandary? Because I guess the alternate question is, well, do you keep her? Do you not demonetize?
00:48:21.840Well, so to TikTok's credit, they have now banned the hashtag skinny talk.
00:49:43.120that is so worth it i've dinner out tonight i've had dinner and drinks out all last weekend i have
00:49:48.760dinner and drinks out all this weekend shout out to my husband evan and his band who's performing
00:49:52.880at talk house in the hamptons on friday so if you go of course you should go um but like i know how
00:49:58.840to handle myself around food and drinks i didn't used to before but then i learned it and now i
00:50:02.900coach it and i've been doing this for a long time and if i learned it you can too okay i'm smart but
00:50:08.360like it's you're smart too you can figure it out okay stop being stubborn lose the weight i promise
00:50:13.880you you will be so much happier side note the only way that you'll be happier is that if you actually
00:50:18.180do it the right way the smart way the sustainable way okay if you're just trying to get to a certain
00:50:22.320weight and think that you're going to be happier because you're that size yet you haven't changed
00:50:25.560anything with your lifestyle your mindset your behaviors you probably won't i watched a lot of
00:50:31.380her videos too but that one really jumped out at me because again i think what you're seeing is that
00:50:35.460same rhetorical inversion where she's talking about how freeing it is, how you're not going
00:50:42.360to have to spend 50 hours getting ready to go out because you're not going to be fed.
00:50:48.420This is a world in which spending an untold amount of time and mental energy and just
00:50:55.920bandwidth to meet this arbitrary ideal is positioned as freeing.
00:51:01.220So it's like restriction as a means to a very limited view of liberation.
00:51:07.400Right. It's like you won't spend 50 hours getting ready.
00:51:10.580You'll just spend 60 hours a week for the rest of your fucking life thinking about this nonstop, planning your meals, changing the way that you communicate at parties.0.96
00:51:20.720I'm experiencing such internal conflict because I relate to an inherent truth to what she is0.99
00:51:28.900saying, which is like, you will be rewarded for this and it will feel good. And I will just like
00:51:34.340say outright, I have experienced that myself. I have experienced moments of extreme discomfort
00:51:40.520in my body. I've experienced moments of extreme comfort in my body. And they have sometimes
00:51:45.320correlated to weight loss. And ironically, they have sometimes not correlated to weight loss for
00:51:50.480me. And I have had a lot of moments, frankly, post-marriage, when I felt really good in my
00:51:56.880body and recognized in my head, like, oh, when I was in college, I wouldn't have felt good in
00:52:02.020this body right now. And was like, wow, how interesting. I think about the advertisements
00:52:06.900and all of the tricks women were doing in the 50s and 60s and 70s to be constantly performing0.98
00:52:13.600in this body. And it's just so exhausting. And it's so ironic that these women who have created
00:52:19.020entire ecosystems of branding and are doing it exclusively. And then on the side, when they turn0.97
00:52:26.660off their phones, are actually performing it for themselves. They actually have to still do
00:52:31.180the neuroses for themselves. They have to still plan their meals. They have to do all this stuff
00:52:34.940to maintain these bodies. The irony of these women telling you it's not going to become your1.00
00:52:38.920whole life, I'm like- It's so freeing. It's your whole fucking bag. It's not just your financial1.00
00:52:44.640model, you're clearly doing it 24-7. You're telling us that you do it 24-7. And that's the
00:52:50.880thing that Liv Schmidt seems to actually be a little bit more honest about it, where she doesn't
00:52:54.760seem to be saying that she doesn't do it anymore. She seems to be saying that discipline is a
00:52:59.440lifelong act. I think Jessica DeFino's coverage of the morning shed trend is really analogous here,
00:53:07.460where she talked about how a lot of these videos that show what women are doing before they go to
00:53:12.220bed so they can it's like go to bed ugly wake up beautiful so you can effortlessly look beautiful
00:53:17.900in the morning and she was like you're just reallocating the effort to a different part of
00:53:22.620the day yeah she's like there is no effort to be effortless there is only effort so this idea that
00:53:30.380it's never ending you are going to save time over here when you're getting dressed it's like well
00:53:36.800yeah because you're spending all the time somewhere else so it's this concept that it's easier to
00:53:42.140just meet the mold and to fit yourself into the mold than it is to learn how to not care so much
00:53:49.100about the mold. It's like, there's almost a resignation that like, we're never going to get
00:53:54.940past this as a society. So you might as well just face that and make your own life easier by making
00:54:02.140it harder. Make your life easier by making it harder. I also struggle so much with the value
00:54:07.600implications in this because my book is coming out next April. I know that there are going to
00:54:11.440be a certain number of media events that I need to be prepared for. And I have been spending a
00:54:15.820lot of time thinking about like how I put makeup on and what type of clothing I want to wear and
00:54:20.000how I do my hair. And on the one hand, the experience I have felt has been like almost
00:54:25.280like being 12 years old all over again, where I'm realizing how every time I feel like I've
00:54:29.820started to master something, I look at myself and I'm like, why doesn't this look like the way? And
00:54:34.400I'm like, oh, it's my hair. I haven't mastered my hair. And then it's like, oh, you figured out
00:54:38.420I've put foundation on but now you have to start paying for the laser treatments it is a trap door
00:54:43.180that keeps opening beneath you it is never ending the amount of time to put in but on the other hand0.95
00:54:48.020I also struggle and don't want to be the type of feminist who has a total negative value set
00:54:55.420assigned to that because on the other hand I have become to really appreciate sartorially clothing
00:55:00.960in a way that I kind of dismissed for a long time where I'm like fashion is incredible and it doesn't
00:55:05.840have to be a bad thing to buy clothing and like it can be a wonderful expression of yourself and
00:55:11.620like I do want to have clothing that represents how I feel and I do want to be able to enjoy
00:55:16.340lipstick or whatever the fuck and I just I struggle so much with how to call this what it is and also0.83
00:55:23.660acknowledge I don't want to assign a total negative value to weight loss either something0.98
00:55:29.040that feels true to me is that our individualized interpretation of feminism I think at this stage
00:55:41.020culturally is very much about something you are versus something you do yeah yeah yeah that your
00:55:49.060individual behavior could be feminist or not feminist and that that's how you quote unquote1.00
00:55:56.560do feminism is by making the right consumer choices as opposed to it being a political0.99
00:56:02.260movement about collective liberation that who cares what you look like or what your individual
00:56:08.780self-presentation choices are. It's almost irrelevant in some ways to the broader project
00:56:14.660of feminism, but there is a duality there because the reality is that systems are made up of
00:56:22.300individuals who either are or are not abiding by these norms right it does impact other people
00:56:28.400how much you decide to lean in it does impact other people but in the absence of a broader
00:56:33.820political movement with real meaning it feels like sometimes these things get very watered down
00:56:39.720to at the individual level you'll hear them talk about well how i feel about my body is not
00:56:45.500empowering or this is empowering or this body is feminist or this body isn't and it's like
00:56:50.440it all feels very beside the point and kind of like well we're asking our body type to like
00:56:57.720affirm or deny a political value and like that feels wrong to me i'm also even just thinking
00:57:04.700about what a weird word empowering is because we use it as like a fluffy like feel good like oh
00:57:09.680empowering but it really just means give power so like it's not necessarily wrong to say that
00:57:15.860Liv Schmidt saying you're going to lose weight and feel empowered, you actually will.
00:57:20.460Yeah, in a society where power means thinness, yeah, you are going to gain power. Like, that is
00:57:25.540true. You will be empowered, technically. So yes, the focus on power, I think, in and of itself is
00:57:32.100kind of a canary in the coal mine that we're talking about this in the wrong way, if individual
00:57:37.720power is the thing that we are negotiating over. So I want to talk now about thinness as a cultural
00:57:43.680ideal. So it feels like the narrative right now is often presented like this. This is like the
00:57:49.200timeline of events that we get. Skinny used to be popular. Then we had the body positivity movement
00:57:55.240and things were better. By Barry Weiss. And now we are regressing and everyone wants to be thin
00:58:01.420again. I was just thinking, as soon as you said that Liv Schmidt was dropped by her modeling
00:58:05.820contract, I was like, oh, you know our girl Barry is just running through brick walls to try to get0.99
00:58:11.320to live about how she was canceled. Foaming at the mouth. Yeah. She's going to get a tenureship1.00
00:58:16.960at the University of Austin. So one popular phrase that will often come up in these pieces
00:58:21.940is the return of, quote, nothing tastes as good as being skinny feels, which is something that
00:58:28.400Kate Moss said to Women's Wear Daily in 2009. And it's funny because we usually talk about this idea
00:58:35.180again as something that used to be in vogue, then was publicly disowned, and now is popular again.
00:58:42.060But I want you to read this U.S. Weekly headline for me and when the article was published. What's
00:58:48.940the date on this article? Kate Moss blasted for saying being skinny is better than eating.1.00
00:58:54.840November 2009. There was immediate backlash when she said this. It was not well received
00:59:01.200at the time. And that surprised me because I thought that that was one of those ideas that
00:59:06.260just like aged poorly in retrospect. But no, even in 2009, people were angry at this model who had
00:59:14.280been posing topless for the modeling industry since she was 15 years old for being like,
00:59:20.820being skinny feels good. There was immediate backlash to this idea. But the current embrace
00:59:27.000of it feels quite reactionary to me. It feels like it's part of the broader backlash to
00:59:32.020quote-unquote wokeness as it appeared in the body positivity movement that became commercially
00:59:39.400viable for a couple of years. But the funny thing is that nothing ever really meaningfully changed
00:59:48.000through the body positivity period beyond superficial rhetoric. These were discursive
00:59:53.940changes. The underlying institutions, the underlying power structures of society did not
01:00:00.040change. So I would like to posit that the desire to be thin and the rewards for thinness were there
01:00:06.860the entire time. We just learned to shift around how we described that desire. We started using
01:00:12.400different words for it, fit, toned, to describe what was ultimately a remarkably similar aesthetic
01:00:19.160goal. And I think many people's relationship to the body positivity movement and like fat
01:00:25.800liberation ideas, it was aspirational in a way. I interviewed a journalist who wrote a three-part
01:00:31.480series about Manjaro, and she said something that I think captured this period really, really well.
01:00:37.220Quote, I believed in body positivity, just not for me.
01:00:42.520I completely agree with you. And I'm just thinking back before I stopped working to start this
01:00:48.220podcast, I basically throughout all of my jobs, all of my writing jobs in media, I had just had
01:00:54.740to interview nonstop because I would write kind of like the SEOE, like, what this therapist thinks
01:00:59.300about X or like, well, whatever. And one of my last interviews, I interviewed a relatively famous
01:01:05.360influencer, I won't say who, and she was a body positivity influencer. And I don't know if it was
01:01:12.420because like, I had like one foot out the door, but I spent a lot of time talking to her like,1.00
01:01:16.880fuck it. No, but she has gotten a lot of cosmetic work done. And I asked her, we had like a great1.00
01:01:23.460conversation talking about a lot of the products that she sells. And I was like, how do you square
01:01:30.480Botox and filler with body positivity? What do you think about skin positivity? And Katie,
01:01:37.600the call got so chilly so quick i think our phone call ended 30 seconds after that and i never1.00
01:01:47.500stopped thinking about it she has this whole bag of any woman can look good at any size and you1.00
01:01:54.240don't need to lose weight to feel good in your body and you don't need to lose weight to receive1.00
01:01:58.640love from a partner it was just a moment where i was like oh this means fucking nothing this is0.97
01:02:12.280Very narrow, and it's not about liberation.
01:02:14.860So Jessica Dufino made a really good point about how the body positivity movement coincided with a period when anti-aging injectables became extremely popular,
01:02:25.000and that it was almost as though all the energy and obsession that we had been pouring into our bodies shifted to our faces and became about, quote, skin care.
01:02:33.040And that's why people feel so confused and disoriented now about overt thin-spiration and how do we condemn this as bad.
01:02:43.320Because we had become so culturally accustomed to casting practices like Botox, like filler, like other plastic surgery as feminist body modification.
01:02:54.500And that same logic was applied to wanting to be skinny, which is exactly what's happening now.
01:03:00.080You're just taking the exact same rhetorical devices and going, okay, well, if we can modify
01:03:04.800this other stuff about ourselves, then yeah, it's not bad to want to be skinny either.
01:03:08.100It's like, oh, well, wait, why isn't this the same? So there's a sort of disorientation that
01:03:12.480follows because we never actually got to the root of how antithetical all of this is to collective
01:03:18.820freedom. None of it is liberating. None of it has ever been liberating. It's all effort. It's
01:03:24.140all conformity. It's almost like three Spider-Man pointing guns at each other where it's like
01:03:28.380all these influencers are trying to decide, are they going to give up their filler or are they
01:03:32.600going to admit that they want to be skinny? Yeah. Which are you going to do? And I think
01:03:36.360we're going to keep going in this trend. And I think a lot more influencers and celebrities are
01:03:39.500just going to go, yeah, I really restrict my eating because I want to be thin. And it's going
01:03:44.140to be much more like, yeah, I get injectables. Everyone gets them, you know? So let's talk about
01:03:48.180the advantages because the reality is we've alluded to this already. Having a quote perfect
01:03:52.860body still carries, never stopped carrying enormous advantages. So to quantify some of this,
01:04:00.240in 2007, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published a paper that found the wage penalty
01:04:05.600for being overweight was actually worse in the 2000s than it was in the 1980s, which is a little
01:04:12.660bit surprising because people have gotten, the average weight in the population has gone up
01:04:18.380over time. It's interesting that as more people have gained more weight, that the wage premium
01:04:26.120for not gaining weight has actually gone up, which I think indicates what's really happening here.
01:04:32.240You become more special as it becomes more uncommon. So strangely enough, the effects
01:04:37.960of weight discrimination are most observable in white women with a BMI over 25. Black women,0.77
01:04:45.340Hispanic women actually face a much lower wage penalty than white women do.1.00
01:04:50.580We're also earning less to begin with, right?1.00
01:04:52.920Yes. It's conventional wisdom that the causation that I'm describing here might be backwards,
01:04:59.220like, you know, it's, oh, they're not being penalized because they have a BMI over 25.
01:05:04.280It's that people who don't make as much money are exposed to social factors that may lead to
01:05:10.100weight gain. But the issue with that interpretation is that you don't see the same
01:05:15.220trend for men. Of course you don't. So from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, for men, quote,
01:05:20.380there appears to be very little association between economic standing and body fat.
01:05:25.980Oh, I'm so surprised. So in other words,
01:05:29.220you really only see this correlation between lower wages and higher body weight in women.1.00
01:05:34.700Right. So because many of these studies use BMI, which is sort of like a garbage metric
01:05:39.540at the individual level doesn't distinguish between body fat and muscle mass. There's some
01:05:43.780disagreement in the field about how accurate some of these results are, but the FRED paper that I'm
01:05:49.180talking about cited a study that attempted to measure body fat specifically and found very
01:05:55.480directionally similar outcomes for women that excess weight due to fat is statistically related
01:06:00.800to lower wages. So I want you to read this excerpt from a piece in The Economist about this.
01:06:07.240In this context, the arguments often made for why women and girls feel such pressure to be thin and suffer from low self-esteem when they are not appear woefully incomplete.
01:06:17.000Perhaps women do feel bad about themselves because they compare themselves to the gazelles that populate the covers of magazines and are duped into thinking those photos are unedited and attainable.
01:06:27.220Maybe their parents or a doctor commented on their weight when they were young.
01:06:30.280But in addition to those pressures is the powerful incentive of the market. Women accurately perceive that failing to lose weight or be thin will literally cost them. It is economically rational. Oh, I remember this piece. This was so controversial. It is economically rational for everyone to devote time to education because it has clear returns in the labor market and for future wages.0.99
01:06:52.060In the same way, it appears to be economically rational for women to pursue being thin.0.96
01:06:57.440Obsessing over what and how much to eat and paying for fancy exercise classes are investments that will bear returns.0.96
01:07:06.000I mean, and this is doubly true when you think about it's not only your career, but you think about what it means in terms of, quote, marrying up.
01:07:14.700You know, like when you're competing for access to someone else's net worth, too.
01:07:18.800So in conclusion, discourse had shifted. Standards had not. I interviewed Tressie McMillan Cottom and asked her what she made of all this. And she said, quote, subtle brag. No big deal. She said I was talking with Tressie the other day and I asked her what she thought of this.
01:07:36.240Don't you love how I just dropped it in there? Like, that's something that I casually do.
01:07:40.300She said, quote, for a brief period, there was social capital associated with diversity in
01:07:45.620progressive spaces, but there was never any actual capital, any economic capital with ideas about
01:07:52.280diversity. So my thinking here is that what's making skin fluencers attractive now is that0.99
01:07:59.660all the success of body positivity rhetoric created a vacuum. Because despite nothing really0.94
01:08:06.860changing about the economic and cultural reality that fat people faced, admitting that you wanted
01:08:12.160to be thin because you had either consciously or subconsciously learned that that was what society
01:08:18.060would reward you for, that got driven underground. So many fans of Schmidt were quoted saying things
01:08:24.640like, at least she's being honest about what it takes. So women found this perverse relief0.98
01:08:31.500in being able to admit openly what it was that they wanted to do, which was to be thinner,
01:08:37.540which is a completely, again, rational desire in a very fat-phobic world.
01:11:26.080And like until relatively recently in all of human history,
01:11:29.200you may have never encountered more than like 150 other humans in your entire life.
01:11:34.780And so now in these online subcultures, there is a completely unnatural and totalizing collapse of context. And so as Dixon reported about those group chats, the level of competition within that in-group comprises probably some of the skinniest people in America.
01:11:53.680I think it's the internet paired with this unique moment that we're in where you have this medical breakthrough occurring simultaneously in weight loss where the existence of GLP-1s is now making it not just more permissible to admit that you desire thinness, but it's medicalizing that desire.
01:12:12.040And so more people taking this drug changes that real-world context of what it means to be fat or to be skinny. And in order to get that same high referentially, to feel thinner, your thinness now must be more extreme.
01:12:28.520The flip of that is that that contextual experience and also the competing with others in a sort of self-selecting system is also true for creators.
01:12:38.920So in order to gain followers and in order to have any sort of business, you do actually start to have to say something different.
01:12:47.260And I think that is something that I feel not sympathetic to, but empathetic to with Liv, where it's like, yeah, she realized that she was going to create serious ground for herself and sort of carve out a space for herself in probably one of the most competitive markets possible online, which is body dysmorphia.0.98
01:13:06.660The fucking whole self-care industry, the makeup industry, the dieting industry are very fucking saturated. And in order to create space for yourself, you have to say something that feels transgressive or subversive. And so it doesn't surprise me that she found success with this and then doubled down.
01:13:25.280Right. It's an important thing to keep coming back to in this conversation is what are these institutions of power incentivizing people to do? Because again, the more that we just focus on shutting down or deplatforming individual people without changing the broader structures that are incentivizing them to behave the way that they are, nothing will change.
01:13:45.220So I think it might be useful to go way back and explore some of the sociological origins
01:14:11.080And part of the research indicates that it depended on the availability of a stable food supply and how much effort was required to access that food supply.
01:14:21.400So, like, in that sense, body type and fatness and, like, desire around that aesthetic was reflective of viability and what was actually necessary to sustain life.
01:14:37.460That was in our paid app. This mild college professor made an argument that, like, you got to have big hips to give birth, and if you don't, then you're going to have miscarriages or whatever the fuck.0.99
01:14:47.220The other thing that's interesting about perceptions of body fat today is that they find that where you carry the fat plays a really big role in how socially acceptable it is. So it's not just about how much you have, but it's about the distribution on your body, which is kind of a tell that, like, it's not about health.0.95
01:15:05.400This sociologist named Sabrina Strings wrote one of the most comprehensive and cross-discipline works on the origins of fatphobia. It's a book called Fearing the Black Body. So she combines evidence from fields like art and philosophy and science and history to demonstrate how the emergence of fatphobia in Western culture coincided with the slave trade and with colonization.0.51
01:15:29.780So during the Renaissance period, and to our knowledge in a lot of cultures before that,
01:15:34.100a beautiful woman portrayed in art was plump. Fatness was a prized aesthetic feature. And0.86
01:15:42.440Black slave women were represented in art as like thin and sickly. And so by the 16th century,1.00
01:15:49.920colonization becomes widespread across the Americas. And one of the resources that was
01:15:54.920extracted was sugar. And it's around this time that Enlightenment-era rationalism begins to see
01:16:00.620food and consumption as like morally fraught as opposed to something that sustains life
01:16:07.100and almost like an obstacle to higher thinking and intellect. You see this real separation
01:16:12.780between the mind and the body, so a disconnect happening. And then by the late 17th century,
01:16:18.460fatness becomes more explicitly tied to racial categorization. So there were these like race,
01:16:24.720scientists who basically assigned gluttony and stupidity as characteristics of Africans.0.99
01:16:31.700And it's that process of dehumanization of people who were being enslaved to categorize them as0.99
01:16:36.820somehow other that necessitated a visible physical difference. So thinness began to be seen as both
01:16:43.380a sign of intellectual superiority, which I think you still hear echoes of, self-discipline, control.
01:16:50.160you feel sharp and light and then this biological evidence of racial superiority. So the thing that
01:16:56.980was really interesting to me about this time period is that definitions of whiteness were
01:17:01.580shifting too. So like Italians and Eastern Europeans were not considered white, but as
01:17:08.420white came to be seen as just not black, body size and shape was a huge part of that distinctive
01:17:15.700process and how white people and particularly upper class white people distinguished themselves
01:17:21.380makes me think of what we discussed in the trans athletes episode about how
01:17:25.520the victorian era reinforced these ideals of fragility and the white middle class women0.56
01:17:32.020performing their uselessness and like showing how they couldn't do physical labor and work and1.00
01:17:38.340having restrictive fashion and like doing everything and performing this type of like0.98
01:17:43.240frailness and how they used Black women working as kind of like the foil to that.1.00
01:17:48.960Perfect example. So I want you to read this excerpt from one analysis of the book.1.00
01:17:55.600You know what's so interesting is that so in my field, which is novelists, you would think that
01:17:59.760people wouldn't care about bodies at all, but it's like a very ongoing controversial thing that
01:18:04.240hot people get bigger deals, even if you're just like a novelist.
01:18:08.760Oh, really? I thought you were going to say that there's always an emphasis in like Sally
01:18:12.320Rooney novels on how like way fish and well that too thin all the protagonists are that like being1.00
01:18:18.240thin is an intellectual trait for women and novels yeah that too okay by the early 20th century the0.95
01:18:24.160culturally scientifically and religiously embedded derision of fat as a sign of racial otherness
01:18:29.820intellectual inferiority and moral debasement set the stage for a century that culminated in
01:18:35.600the newest moral panic around fat the so-called obesity epidemic which problematizes black women
01:18:41.100in particular as social dead weight, relies on deeply political knowledge about bodies
01:18:46.440cloaked in rhetoric of objective science. Culminating in a Foucaultian critique of
01:18:52.280various waves of medical discourse around fat in the 20th century, Strings makes clear how
01:18:58.220the legacies of African enslavement and genocide that solidified global white supremacy have relied
01:19:04.200on processes of racialization that inferiorize Black women's bodies as both overly sensual1.00
01:19:10.480and excessively shapely. Without understanding how fatphobia emerged in response to slavery and
01:19:16.960in order to solidify whiteness as an embodied phenomenon, we cannot grasp how our contemporary
01:19:22.120obsession with thinness is rooted in anti-blackness. The most current manifestation of institutionalized
01:19:28.180fatphobia around, quote, obesity as a public health crisis is deeply reliant on the same
01:19:33.660ideologies that European race scientists drew on to construct fat as indicative of the laziness of
01:19:39.440body, mind, and spirit. Go off. Dude, that also makes me think about how when they're talking
01:19:45.600about Black bodies as overly sensual, it's crazy how fucking sterile all of this skinny stuff is.1.00
01:19:54.540Oh, bitch, don't jump ahead to the conclusion.1.00
01:20:02.320On the note of the obesity epidemic, because I think that there is an element of this that's1.00
01:20:07.580often justified or legitimized by like, well, their society is so unhealthy, blah, blah, blah,
01:20:13.320blah, blah. Typically, the metric that is used to measure population-level body weight is BMI.
01:20:20.720And around 30 years ago, in 1998, the NIH moved the BMI cutoff for normal weight to overweight
01:20:29.180from around 27 for women and 28 for men to 25 across the board. So they brought it down
01:20:36.780by like three points to bring it in line with what the World Health Organization out of Switzerland
01:20:43.320was like recommending. I should also note that a major reason why they even collect this data
01:20:48.600in the first place came down to insurance information for actuarial purposes. So life
01:20:54.560insurance companies trying to find ways to analyze risk factors for death. They also changed the
01:21:00.160classification to pre-obese. So a woman with a BMI of 27 would have gone to bed one night as0.98
01:21:07.800medically normal weight and woken up the next day pre-obese because of this classification change.
01:21:13.140So this is from a paper that I pulled from the National Library of Medicine archives,
01:21:18.820if you will please read. It should be understood that in Western population-based studies,
01:21:24.280generally the mean or median BMI is about 24 to 27. Thus the consequence of adopting the WHO
01:21:32.240classification is that 50% or more of the general adult population will always be in the overweight
01:21:38.840now pre-obese and obese categories. Indeed the term overweight or particularly pre-obesity
01:21:45.520is prejudicial since people in this category are a major part of the expected normal distribution
01:21:50.820of BMI in the general population, and this has been the case for decades. Unfortunately,
01:21:55.700in discussing the so-called obesity epidemic, the number of people in the overweight, pre-obese
01:22:00.300category generally is lumped together with those in the obese category in order to advertise and
01:22:04.840dramatize the perceived seriousness of this issue. This is like how RFK talks about how cancer rates
01:22:09.900have spiked, but really it's just early detection has gotten better. This is what really blew my
01:22:15.280mind. It is true that human bodies have changed over the last hundred years, that they've gotten
01:22:20.460heavier. They've also gotten taller. So please read this. Overall, the history of changes in
01:22:28.380height and weight in Western European men and probably women has been that of an increase in
01:22:32.760both weight and height. In the 17th century, the average height of men in Northern Europe was 5
01:22:37.860foot 3 inches. It now approaches 6 feet. Okay. These data suggest that the BMI category should
01:22:43.680be adjusted upward periodically to accommodate population-based changes. Improvements in
01:22:49.340mortality rates also suggest an adjustment would be useful. This is kind of like the bell that I
01:22:54.900feel like we ring on this podcast a lot, and so I don't want to over-ring it, but just references0.88
01:23:00.080to earlier time periods are so fucking fraught. Even the fact that the average life expectancy
01:23:05.800now is, you know, I think 80s in the U.S., which is lower than other developed nations, I think
01:23:11.080it's like 77 now. And it's like, well, yeah, I guess that maybe you could argue that some people
01:23:17.020are heavier, but even that data feels very fraught. And it's like, well, people were dying
01:23:21.20020 years early. It just feels silly. I feel like there is a lot of moral panic around the fact0.54
01:23:28.480that people have gotten heavier over time. I think the fact that they've also gotten taller
01:23:32.620kind of proves that, like, yes, at a population level, like, human bodies do shift and change as
01:23:37.980resources become more available to them. And even though the U.S.'s life expectancy is lower than
01:23:44.560that of other high-income nations, and we should absolutely work on the public health measures
01:23:50.020that would improve that, people live longer now than they ever have. So this idea that, like,
01:23:55.160there is some huge public health crisis and everybody is unhealthier than they've ever been
01:23:59.120just, like, isn't really supported by the data. Again, that's not to say that we should not focus
01:24:03.840on public health, but fatness as a proxy for that issue is like very, very fraught.
01:24:12.720The other thing that I just have to say is like this, okay, you know what? Actually,
01:24:16.540this is a perfect thing for me to say something that I've been wanting to say on our podcast for
01:24:20.680a very long time, but I never had the ability to shoehorn it in. I'm going to shoehorn it in now.
01:24:25.220How certain data is reported is so dependent on what we deem is worth reporting. And I've
01:24:31.720been thinking about this a lot in terms of hate crime reporting. Which populations in America
01:24:36.000are allowed to report a hate crime? Which populations are believed? Do we care about
01:24:41.260Islamophobia in America? We sure fucking don't, which means that the hate crime incidences quote0.97
01:24:46.280unquote reported are much lower than we all know that they are. The same is true in terms of0.77
01:24:51.660damaging health effects on the body related to weight. If someone is perceived as heavier,
01:24:56.840a doctor will blame all of their health issues on this, but the same goes in inverse for someone
01:25:03.280who is much thinner. So if a woman walks into the doctor's office and has a failing heart because
01:25:09.320her weight has been yo-yoing for over decades because she has been intermittently starving
01:25:14.500herself to keep off 15 pounds, that doctor is so much less likely to say, yeah, you're experiencing
01:25:20.880the effects of intermittently starving yourself there are such damaging effects to weight cycling
01:25:26.720which is like trying to lose 10 pounds and then gaining it back which is what so many people in0.92
01:25:32.160america do like fight for that 10 throughout your whole fucking life try a thousand diets0.90
01:25:38.500to get that again 10 to 15 pounds it's so bad for your metabolism for your body altogether but0.98
01:25:45.780a doctor is not going to check on the death certificate box. This is because of their weight.
01:25:51.900Well, and so something you're hitting on is really crucial here, which is that at least
01:25:55.120some of the negative health consequences that are associated with excess body fat are thought to be
01:26:00.780driven not by the weight itself, but by stigma. So if you recall from our Maha episode, one of the
01:26:06.740indicators that they use in public health of social and community health metrics is how often
01:26:12.800someone encounters discrimination in their environment. So it's interesting, I read the
01:26:18.140paper's abstract and it like mentioned that fat people face discrimination and like, oh, therefore
01:26:23.680in order to fix the problem, we should lower the standards by which we call someone medically fat
01:26:28.280and like try to make them lose weight such that there are fewer fat people around. It's this
01:26:33.100rhetoric that's also in the skinny talk videos, which is that it's easier to fix a fat person
01:26:37.360than to fix a society that is fat phobic and it's like how much longer are we going to keep beating
01:26:44.300our head against this wall i also think that it really highlights the futility of what we are
01:26:49.700asking people to do when you flip it and imagine how exhausting it would be to just tell someone
01:26:54.500to be shorter and just be like well people used to be shorter be shorter why don't you try to be0.58
01:27:00.140fucking shorter and it's like yeah you can technically lose weight and you can't technically0.80
01:27:03.820but it's like it is a futile exercise we know from the studies that people do not keep weight0.98
01:27:09.240off that people tend to be a certain weight but we spend so much of our time dedicated to it a lot
01:27:15.020is made about how being overweight can like shorten your lifespan or have negative health
01:27:20.360consequences and i looked at a few estimates for this it basically sounds like the people who have
01:27:25.380the lowest mortality rates are actually in the 25 to 30 bmi range so technically overweight those
01:27:31.660people have the longest lives. But when a study would cite a life expectancy hit associated with
01:27:37.780weight, it was usually in the range of like three to seven years for folks with BMI's north of 35.
01:27:45.340That sounds like a big difference, three to seven years, until you consider something that correlates
01:27:51.860way more strongly with life expectancy, and that's income. A 2016 JAMA study found that there is a
01:28:01.50015-year life expectancy gap between the rich and the poor in the United States. Caroline,
01:28:08.70015 fucking years. If we are going to have an intellectually honest moral panic about an0.99
01:28:14.840epidemic of anything, taking years off of people's life, it would be about income inequality.
01:28:20.400The only moral panic that we should be having in this country is about poverty. We should be having
01:28:24.820a constant moral panic about a system that impoverishes so many people because that is
01:28:30.100the public health crisis. Yeah, Caroline Leavitt is like, you're just a little fucking snowflake.1.00
01:28:35.780Shut up, Marxist. Shut up, Marxist. And so I want to talk about what thinness represents and some of1.00
01:28:41.720the contradictions. I want to really shine a light on this that you're going to encounter in Liv
01:28:45.620Schmidt content, but also in the broader skinny talk ethos and like just in this cultural idea
01:28:50.260of thinness. So the first is this emphasis on accountability and discipline. Liv Schmidt's
01:28:56.000success is attributable to the glamorization of an ultra-thin lifestyle as representative
01:29:02.300of luxury. And Carol, didn't you tell me that being ultra-thin is kind of like an East Coast
01:29:08.780elite thing? I don't want to say that the East Coast has a monopoly on thinness, but East Coast
01:29:14.140wealth is so dominated by like old money Protestant and Puritan elites. And so there is this real
01:29:20.600kind of celebration of deprivation. And so the classic stereotype is like going to Nantucket or
01:29:26.900Boston or the Hamptons and seeing a waifish Protestant-looking woman with honey-highlighted
01:29:33.780hair who looks bored and has a vodka soda and a salad she's not touching and is wearing0.93
01:29:39.840goop-label clothing. It's very much about depriving oneself and discipline and like
01:29:45.280you're not going to dance at the party. That really tracks with kind of where I was going
01:29:48.780with this. I think that what's happening in a lot of this content and why it might be striking such
01:29:54.200a chord right now is that we're in a very precarious economic moment. And I think people
01:29:59.840like Liv are creating an unconscious correlation for her audience between wealth and thinness.
01:30:06.440So like Megan Day interviewed the author of a book called Outclassed for Jacobin recently,
01:30:11.580And they talked about how poor and elite values differ from middle-class values because middle-class values are defined by avoiding that gravitational pull of structural precarity.
01:30:25.880So, like, elite values are very much about intelligence and articulation and differentiating yourself.
01:30:33.060Middle-class values are about conformity and work ethic and keeping your head down.0.97
01:30:38.580You are going to do whatever the fuck you need to do to cling to your stability in the middle.0.63
01:30:44.220And in that ethos, self-discipline is a very attractive idea in a culture that is defined by clinging to stability and avoiding precarity.0.96
01:30:55.580So I think that our economic moment is perversely primed for this sort of message about deprivation and how someone's body should look in an indirect way.
01:31:04.960It's associating being thin with economic strength.
01:31:10.340Yeah, and I also think that the economic precarity of a recession is also compounded by the economic precarity of capitalism, where it's just like, yeah, you have no control over anything.
01:31:21.320And so you create these mechanisms of creating the illusion that you can thin your way out of the total lack of control in your own life that you feel.
01:31:32.260But the contradiction is that Liv and the skinny talk girls constantly frame thinness as chic and effortless. Remember, oh, it's so freeing. You don't have to take any time to get ready. It's just, it's so liberating. It's so freeing. It's so effortless. As well as evidence of stride and discipline and willpower. But effortlessness and discipline are extremely contradictory ideas.
01:31:58.720And I also just think this is a moment of genuine sadness for Liv and for so many other people who deal with this, fitness influencers, body influencers, when you enter the game at a period in time when it's easier than it will be, I will say, to maintain your body.
01:32:16.340I just can't imagine the anxiety over having to maintain your body type because she says she lost
01:32:22.840weight right she lost weight so at some point she was heavier and then now the weight that she is
01:32:28.440at now is she has said herself kind of like her whole business model right is showing women how
01:32:33.440to do it and implying that you can maintain it forever and I just can't imagine the anxiety
01:32:38.420that that would instill in a person. Another thing that I want to call out because this was
01:32:43.700kind of when I first started looking into this episode, and I'm kind of reading, what is the
01:32:48.020discourse online about this? What are people saying about this? How are people thinking about
01:32:50.900it? It kind of feels like the mainstream take is that Skinny Talk is all about this idea that they,
01:32:57.440the unnamed they, want women to be smaller. They want women to shrink themselves. They want women
01:33:02.440to take up less space. A thousand slam poetry events have been born. I don't think that that's0.98
01:33:09.140necessarily wrong, but I think it's extremely oversimplified. If for no other reason than
01:33:15.420these messages are propagated by women for other women. Skinny talk is a nearly universally0.95
01:33:21.780female phenomenon. And so something Tressie had said when I spoke with her was beauty is the only1.00
01:33:29.260power that women are allowed to wield, but never own. It's like Maha. It's very similar where it's0.99
01:33:35.680Like, it's a space that you have been granted the ability to have some control over, and you get to kind of get your bag.
01:33:42.560Like, you get to be an influencer there.
01:33:44.240You get to be a thought leader, and the men are going to be elsewhere.
01:33:48.140And so you get to really create that control.
01:33:50.580You basically get to create your own little patriarchal pyramid.0.96
01:33:53.400That's why I think it's overly simplistic to be like, they, the patriarchy, wants women to be smaller.0.99
01:33:59.420because it is, by and large, women who have to be willing to reproduce this message and enforce0.98
01:34:04.820these rules for other women in order for this to be propagated. It's women as a tool for1.00
01:34:09.280patriarchy. So, I'm like, we really should be more specific when we're naming the subject of1.00
01:34:14.060this sentence. I know that men reinforce these perceptions, but I also do know that a lot of
01:34:20.440times, like, if you actually will talk to a guy, he'll be like, yeah, no, I think she's pretty,
01:34:25.460about, like, a girl that someone else was saying needed to lose 20 pounds or something.0.56
01:34:29.420There is a lot of this, I think, yes, is reinforced by the male gaze, but I think the male gaze is, as you're saying, every bit as constructed by women as it is by men. I don't think that it's as simple as men thinking women need to be like this.
01:34:44.500so much of this is women and men talking past one another it's like the tweets of the two male
01:34:51.100bodies and it's like one body is this very average looking dude and the other one is like
01:34:56.220super jacked super ripped super shredded and it like went viral because the guy was like ladies
01:35:01.000which one looks better and overwhelmingly the women preferred the normal looking dude and all
01:35:06.700the men were so confused exactly they're like no the other guy is so much more shredded he looks
01:35:12.900so much better and it's like sexual attraction is so much more animalistic and sensual than like
01:35:21.080desire is not about restriction desire is the opposite of restriction so these ideas of these
01:35:27.540very like restricted body types and these very obsessed sterile ideas of what a body should look0.93
01:35:33.200like it's like it is antithetical to sexual attraction there is nothing more fucking terrifying0.68
01:35:39.140than when you meet and fall in love with someone0.96
01:35:58.940and I will just say I'm lucky enough to have a partner0.96
01:36:00.900who genuinely does not give a shit about my body weight0.94
01:36:03.860and genuinely does not care if I wear makeup,0.97
01:36:06.140and the voice in my head is still there.
01:36:07.980and that has been one of the more illuminating moments of feminism in my life of just being like
01:36:12.560oh I actually almost get annoyed when I say something about my body and he's like oh I
01:36:17.460don't agree at all and I'm like well it's not for you and then I'm like who is it for who is it for
01:36:22.180if it's not for me and it's not for him then like who is this for and the answer of course is like
01:36:26.980the Greek chorus right of course it was never for him or for me it was for like the capital T
01:36:32.440they, that collective cultural force. It's crazy. I think the other thing too about this is the way
01:36:38.880that this manifests for men. The flip side of skinny talk is steroid talk. The accelerating
01:36:45.320body image issues are happening to men too. It's just easier to write off. And it's grind set talk.
01:36:51.660It's like neuroses and control, but like American psycho style because they are allowed to funnel
01:36:56.820their obsession into work. Women have to funnel their obsession into their bodies, but men get1.00
01:37:01.560to funnel their obsession into like performance of masculinity in a sense it seems like a lot of
01:37:07.240this is downstream of the gender role orthodoxy resurgence and binary of we have to look extremely
01:37:15.600different our physical forms have to be extremely blockably different and so it's like women being
01:37:22.260as thin as possible men being as bulky and big as possible we have to like force our bodies into
01:37:27.560what is quote-unquote natural. Exactly. To reinforce that it's fucking natural. Like,
01:37:32.320look how big my pecs are. I'm like, yeah, well, you're taking like 500 cc's of whatever the
01:37:36.740fuck you got from your friend Bob in the hallway. And like, yeah, no wonder you look different from0.99
01:37:41.220me now. But if we just stopped customized fitness routine where like the women do the Pilates to1.00
01:37:46.620reinforce the females. Oh my God, I'm ranting. That's exactly what I'm talking about. When I1.00
01:37:50.980was listening to Jessica and Emily Kirkpatrick talk about this in one of the interviews they
01:37:55.940did for the review of mess their podcast together they were talking about how it's much easier to
01:38:01.160ridicule men who have these body image issues who are orthorexic who are doing damaging things
01:38:05.800physically to like live up to the standard because disordered eating and body image issues are seen0.93
01:38:12.220as very feminized experiences and problems so it's this weird way where when men exhibit that
01:38:18.600type of behavior it's almost like a form of misogyny that comes out when we're like oh you're1.00
01:38:23.920being a pussy. Like, we make fun of it, and we don't see it as serious in the same way. So,0.99
01:38:30.160one example that I found online of how this is showing up in media is the example of Hugh Jackman
01:38:37.280playing Wolverine in 2000 versus in 2024. And he's obviously 24 years older in the 2024 version,
01:38:45.540but look at how different he looks physically between the 2000 standard and 2024.
01:38:52.440four oh my god oh my god oh my god okay i just to describe it on the left i'm looking at a human
01:39:06.580and on the right i am looking at like uh he has like a 14 pack his pecs i mean his his chest is
01:39:15.760an unbelievable triangle okay you know what i will say rob mcelaney do you know have you ever
01:39:21.520watch Always Sunny? Yeah. Oh my God. Love Always Sunny. Rob McElhaney. So you'll probably know
01:39:26.440gained weight and then lost it for part of being the show. And he did something I really liked
01:39:32.560where he, I don't know if it was a tweet or a video, but he basically made a joke of it where
01:39:35.960he was like, yeah, all you need to do to lose weight and gain a six pack like me is to like
01:39:41.020work out 40 hours a week, have a personal chef, have a nutritionist, get paid to care about your
01:39:47.760body have a really nurturing wife who takes care of the kids and you'll be able to do just what I
01:39:52.740did and I really appreciated that because it's like not only is it impractical and I think that0.99
01:39:57.460that can kind of be viewed as like a woke naggy thing of like oh they have free time that we don't0.64
01:40:02.840and I feel like conservatives are often like well things are unfair like people find the time but0.81
01:40:07.300like I also just think this is so striking looking at these photos and being like it feels like a
01:40:12.380culture that is moving towards ai like his body looks ai-ified oh interesting do you know what i0.85
01:40:19.520mean like his body looks robotic it looks inhuman it looks like the era of facetune where like you
01:40:25.360have to promote this vision of humanity that is cgi it's cgi-ified in conclusion we are all banging0.65
01:40:34.440on the walls of the prison of the gender binary and performing for one another and who wants this0.97
01:40:39.680nobody that way katie that makes me think of i recently made the very stupid mistake of going
01:40:45.220into the substack analytics section where people explain why they unsubscribed oh jesus don't tell
01:40:50.240me the one like piece of negative feedback we got was from a woman where i saw i saw it coming from
01:40:57.640a few episodes away she had expressed her displeasure in a few episodes and one thing she
01:41:02.100said was you guys tend to make grand sweeping conclusions at the end of episodes and i would
01:41:07.180encourage you to think about that. And then you just go, in conclusion, the gender binary is
01:41:11.080failing us. And I was like, yep, check. Grant, correct conclusion. Well, joke's on you because
01:41:18.480that's not actually the conclusion of the episode. I have a much more grand and sweeping conclusion.
01:41:23.720Here's where I'm going to throw a kind of much bigger curveball into this conversation,
01:41:28.320is that I think there are versions of this that we are all way more comfortable with.
01:41:33.720What do we typically point to when we discuss why wanting to lose weight is unhealthy? Like, we've touched on a lot of these things today. It's the fact that it is obsessive behavior. You're counting calories. It's like taking your experience of being in your body and externalizing it and analyzing it and restricting it.
01:41:52.940But where do we draw the line? Like, we are both wearing aura rings right now. And wearing an aura ring or another, like, tracking device is not really seen as maladaptive. But there was this story recently that collecting that much health data is harmful and creates health paranoia and very, like, obsessive behavior. So I'm going to have you read something from this piece.
01:42:17.040I've heard that also in addition to the aura rings I've also read really interesting articles about those new full MRI scans you can pay for and how they lead to sometimes like early detection for things that aren't problems or make you obsess over something that isn't a medical problem and doctors have been kind of had some trepidation over it.
01:42:37.540Okay. Not long after the release of the first Fitbit in 2009 and the first Apple Watch in 2015, the potential hazards of technology so closely entwined with the body's natural processes became apparent.
01:42:51.020Over the last decade, many have spoken about how wearable tech has worsened their eating disorders and led to other obsessive behavior.
01:42:58.720Yeah, I know that game in terms of obsessive behavior.
01:43:01.080Still, the siren song of these devices remains strong for some people who might be better served by simply opting out of the latest smartwatch or ring.
01:43:09.280The proliferation of technology designed to track our biology can also make it easy to forget that human beings are pretty well equipped to do that on our own, said Jacqueline D. Wernemont, an associate professor at Dartmouth College in the Film and Media Studies Department who specializes in histories of quantification.
01:43:24.680Yeah, it's also just like, the gamification of health has really uncomfortable implications. And I have experienced that. Like, I would say the most mild example of this I would get is how Aura gamifies sleep, and how it becomes fun to be like, oh my god, I got a 98 on sleep.
01:43:44.240What's your score? Yeah. What's your sleep score? And yeah, I think that in some cases,
01:43:50.500that's totally mild. And in other cases, it creates and reinforces a very different
01:43:56.080relationship with your body than I guess, quote unquote, a natural one. But I'm even
01:44:00.180uncomfortable with the idea of like a natural, I don't know what a natural relationship to health
01:44:04.000is. Well, I think the point is a disordered relationship to health is so much bigger
01:44:08.880than just wanting to be thinner. And I think the tripwire that we have gone off course is when
01:44:17.060you're outsourcing and externalizing our core humanity and relationship to our bodies. So
01:44:23.460whether that's thinness, like a number on a scale or an HRV result on an aura ring or
01:44:28.280some of these things, like you said, that we're kind of more inclined to think of as more innocuous
01:44:32.580because all of these things train us not to trust ourselves. I see it as very much a parallel to the
01:44:40.220way that like the enlightenment thought separated mind and body and like separated intelligence and
01:44:45.720rationality from like your corporeal self. So like you'll see it in the skinny talk in the context of
01:44:52.540don't trust your hunger cues. You're just thirsty. You're not actually hungry. You're just thirsty.
01:44:57.560There's an underlying, like, you can't trust what your body is telling you. Or I've made jokes in the past about waking up and feeling tired and run down and then seeing my aura scores and they're good. And I'm like, oh, I guess I'm fine. And like, I should just push through then. Like, you start to trust this kind of machine or this external quantification more than your own internal signals.
01:45:21.280And so I think this leaves us with this complete void of sensuality and like the somatic experience. There's this disembodied experience of life that things like skinny talk and steroid talk and these other like more innocuous health markers promote.
01:45:37.460And so what's so striking about the desire to be thin or to more broadly obsess about your body is that obsessing about your body means you're not in your body.
01:45:47.540And so if your goal is optimization of that body, your outcome will never be pleasure.
01:45:52.740It even shows up with, like, the way that they talk about exercise and walking.
01:45:57.160Physical exertion is a very categorically healthy thing for the human body.
01:46:00.660We know this. But when you are that in a calorie deficit all the time, you don't have the energy
01:46:07.000to exert yourself physically. So there's so much emphasis on being hot, having a hot body,
01:46:13.200like that Dobson woman said. I'm hot. I'm not fat. And that's the grandest irony of how sexless
01:46:20.040all of this is. You're losing the most fundamental sources of pleasure that are theoretically
01:46:25.180available to you taste sex rest you are optimizing a body that you can't even use i also would just
01:46:33.680add with the physical exertion when you are only working out in order to either maintain or achieve
01:46:39.760a certain type of body then you aren't actually able to access the benefits of exercise and you
01:46:44.540start to associate physical exercise with negative outcomes or with negative experiences i was
01:46:49.760thinking about this a lot, this feeling that I kept having of, it's so interesting how an obsession
01:46:55.220with the body becomes so disembodied and disconnects you from your core humanity and
01:47:01.440what makes you human. And then I had this realization yesterday, it's not even about
01:47:06.020your humanity, it's about the things that transcend humanness even. It's like life itself,
01:47:11.580the things that we share with every other living creature with consciousness, that corporeal
01:47:17.240pleasure that like you lose access to. And it's like you are truly losing the core of your
01:47:22.480consciousness and vitality when you become trapped in this idea. Calorie deficits in women are1.00
01:47:29.520associated with a loss of libido. You will literally feel less desire. There's even an0.99
01:47:35.360interesting parallel with the addiction research around GLP-1s that they're thought to regulate
01:47:41.880desire? Neutralize the feeling of desire?