00:03:04.920And Mike and I are already researching our next episodes.
00:03:08.660we're already working on booking some fun guests potentially so we're moving forward we're full
00:03:15.840steam ahead and we just need to like be honest with ourselves and take you know a little a little
00:03:20.820couple of weeks yes so this episode is sort of our season finale and essentially the paul simon
00:03:28.560line she comes back to tell me she's gone this is us coming back to tell you we're not going to see
00:03:35.340you for a while yeah as if i didn't know my own bed yeah no i got you yeah this so now that we've
00:03:42.100disappointed you uh we also want to inform you about fat phobia and weight bias or whatever we
00:03:47.480end up calling this episode listen we want it now that we've disappointed you we want to disappoint
00:03:51.760you in new and exciting ways only this time about the world so aubrey tell us about i mean you
00:03:58.780basically set out to write a book exploring the parameters of weight bias in America.
00:04:05.000Yeah, that was a lot of it. And also, I just felt like, look, our conversations about fatness and
00:04:10.380fat people get stalled out in a couple of ways. One is that we all get really focused on talking
00:04:19.520about fat people without talking to fat people. So all of our conversations about the sort of
00:04:26.500obesity epidemic and the war on obesity, all of that stuff is overwhelmingly thin people
00:04:34.960functionally pointing the finger at fat people and telling us that we are a disease, that we are
00:04:42.740responsible for healthcare costs. There's a lot of scapegoating. There's a lot of stuff that
00:04:48.000gets called into question when fat people enter the conversation, when fat people enter the chat.
00:04:53.160And I wanted to write a book that was about both my own personal experiences with anti-fatness, but also the ways in which those are not just individual blips on the radar.
00:05:08.160Those are the results of policy choices that we have made, of cultural shifts that have been pretty intentional over time, of profit-driven decisions, of all kinds of things.
00:05:19.720And so I wanted to sort of like do a little mapping of like, how did we get here?
00:05:23.900Your fat friend might not be telling you about all of their experiences with anti-fatness.
00:05:29.500But like I think 74% of fat people have experienced even just other people making negative assumptions about them based on their size.
00:05:39.84010% of fat people have been physically attacked because of their size, right?
00:05:44.860This is not a minor issue. And this isn't something that you should pity an individual
00:05:50.920when they come up against it. These are systemic things that we need to address as systemic things.
00:05:55.980I mean, one of the numbers I pulled out of your book was that 68% of American women wear above
00:06:01.660a size 14 dress. Yes, correct. And yet it seems like, well, okay,1.00
00:06:06.000these are people with actual experiences of this. So we should actually be talking to those people
00:06:10.640as opposed to talking to everyone else and saying, here's how to prevent yourself
00:06:14.520from becoming like the majority of Americans.
00:06:17.440It's super structurally odd. And it has become such a prevalent way of thinking and talking
00:06:22.260about fat people that there are fat people who also do this, right? Our whole logic of anti-fat
00:06:28.720bias is predicated on the idea that it's okay to treat fat people this way because we choose to be
00:06:35.260fat, and we choose to sort of shirk our responsibility to be thin. And what we actually
00:06:40.500know, just based on like, a whole lot of studies about a whole lot of people, and frankly, what
00:06:46.260many of us know from our personal experiences, is that people really like to talk about weight loss
00:06:51.300being a really simple thing that anybody can do. And it actually really isn't. It isn't. We just
00:06:55.960don't know how to make fat people thin in the long term. You know what my overwhelming impression
00:07:01.240reading the book was. Tell me. I don't know. I felt conflicted because I know you and I know
00:07:06.160that you're a pretty private person generally. And yet the book is full of these like really
00:07:12.420rough anecdotes about the way that people have treated you. And like, it just made me think of
00:07:18.240the way that these forms of discrimination work. The onus of responsibility is up to you
00:07:23.440to put yourself out there enough to get people to see your experiences as legitimate.
00:07:29.820Yeah, totally. I mean, like, it's really tricky, right? I especially feel like as someone who's been an organizer around other communities that I call home, right, an organizer for queer rights, women and reproductive health, an organizer for like, lots and lots of things, right? It's really shitty, because I feel like I have seen the ways in which there's this economy of trauma that gets people to pay attention and reconsider.
00:07:52.880better and it sucks that i know feel like they need to see someone whose experience is different0.83
00:08:01.240from their own they need to see them sort of like uh vivisected in order to buy into the idea that
00:08:08.320what they personally are saying or doing is harming this other person it's actually like
00:08:13.140not enough currently for fat people to just say hey this hurts me and i wish you would stop right
00:08:17.960there are like too many people who just won't take our word for it or will say well then you
00:08:22.380just should have lost weight, or you shouldn't have gained it in the first place, or whatever,
00:08:26.680right? That it's extremely unforgiving. And that the only way that I have found to sort of write
00:08:33.840that is through both sort of like data and research. But again, I know, as an organizer,
00:08:39.560that data and research isn't what changes people's mind, it helps. But that's just not how our brains
00:08:45.340are wired. Our brains are wired to pay attention to other people's stories. These are the stories
00:08:50.520that i've got but that just means you have to tell your own stories over and over again of like
00:08:54.740totally bad things that happen to you yeah absolutely and like many many many communities
00:08:59.540have had to do that for a long time absolutely putting this trauma front and center and making
00:09:04.860it more central to your life than it is in a way even though of course this is central to people's
00:09:09.940lives because you're trying to get attention to this one aspect of your personality you sort of
00:09:14.540have to highlight the degree to which that has been this massive factor in your life yeah totally
00:09:34.280No, I mean, like, it's really interesting to me, right?0.82
00:09:36.960Because I think you're right that it sort of all gets collapsed into you're going to be the fat lady who's going to go talk about fat stuff.
00:09:43.060And I think it's really interesting in context of my own life.
00:09:46.740Like the way that this is operated is I didn't really talk to people about being fat until like the last five or 10 years.
00:09:59.380You know, I have sort of all these years and years of experience, but I haven't really talked about it until the last five or 10 years.
00:10:06.040And in terms of the way that anti-fatness shows up in my life, 95% of the time, I'm just out living my life being a big Muppet.
00:10:15.120and the way that anti-fatness shows up is as an interruption to an otherwise normal existence
00:10:21.680right that i'm going about sort of trying to get a cup of coffee or get to work and somebody tells
00:10:28.940me they don't want to see me in a sleeveless like a sleeveless shirt right or somebody threatens to
00:10:34.100kick me off a plane or on and on and on not only am i and other fat people confronted with very
00:10:42.060overt, very proud anti-fat bias. We are also confronted by the many bystanders who choose
00:10:51.480not to address it. There is research about that exact effect, which is thin women believe that0.99
00:10:58.460anti-fatness is motivating to fat people because it is motivating thin people to stay thin.0.99
00:11:04.460So not only are thin people not conditioned to interrupt, they are conditioned to perpetuate it,
00:11:10.840right? Harvard has these implicit bias tests, which millions and millions and millions of
00:11:16.920people have taken. And what they found was that anti-fat bias was significantly on the rise. And
00:11:22.380by the end of that time period, they found that about 80% of us have bias against fat people and
00:11:29.700in favor of thin people. I think it's also like an important sort of orientation to the conversation
00:11:34.880to say, anti-fat bias isn't something you decide to do and you decide to pick up. It is something
00:11:41.340that is sort of part and parcel of growing up in a society that has declared a war on obesity,
00:11:47.660that makes fun of fat people kind of every chance it gets, right?
00:11:52.680Right. I mean, this is a good way to get us into the content of the book, because,
00:11:57.340as I mentioned, my brain is broken. And I pulled a bunch of like categories out of the book
00:12:03.240for us to talk about because there's a lot of themes that you return to in the book and there's
00:12:06.920a lot of really good data and really great passages in the book so i think the first thing
00:12:10.920we should do is just establish that discrimination against fat people exists right because i don't
00:12:16.820think like to us that is really obvious and to fat people in general that's pretty obvious
00:12:21.260but that's not necessarily obvious or like an accepted form of discrimination that is really
00:12:26.540recognized by society at large yeah i mean like fat people earn substantially less money than
00:12:32.880thin people. Fat people are regularly fired or denied jobs altogether because we're not the
00:12:40.080image of the company, right? In my sort of last five years of writing about this, I haven't heard
00:12:45.840from anyone who has disputed that fat people are discriminated against. I have only heard from
00:12:51.260people who dispute whether or not it is deserved. I mean, that's another thing I pulled out of your
00:12:56.500book you mentioned that there's a study in 2006 that finds 59 types of obesity there are all these
00:13:03.520different reasons why people end up fat like people have polycystic ovarian syndrome or people
00:13:08.560have medications that they take some people just fat their entire lives i still remember you know
00:13:13.600that photo of the fattest twins like the two dudes on the motorcycle that we've all seen a million
00:13:18.720times sure i remember a documentary about them as a kid that talked about how they had been fat like
00:13:23.980they were fat basically from birth and their parents were always worried about it. And their
00:13:27.400parents sent them off to some fat camp where it was like exercise, constantly fucking kayaking all0.98
00:13:32.980day, eating salads, like the most hardcore regimen for weight loss that you can imagine.0.96
00:13:38.740And they both gained five pounds. Yeah. Some people's bodies just hold on to weight. And
00:13:44.660that's just the dice that got rolled. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that there are not fat people
00:13:49.180who do choose to be fat, right? Like there are fat people who are like, I just like being fat.
00:13:53.140That's fine. But that myth of everyone is choosing it, and I don't have to respect their humanity, because I believe it's a choice. It feels like an echo of what happens in conversations about queer people. It feels like an echo of what happens in conversations about trans people. We are sort of in a really unfortunate and really upsetting way. Once you sort of step outside of it, you can kind of see the ways in which we are looking for opportunities to stop treating people like people.
00:15:05.020And also, like, if you take away, sort of sequester the idea of, like, is it or is it not a choice, and you look at your own actions in sort of a vacuum, they start to look pretty gross.
00:15:18.920I think that's the other thing, right? That you're sort of like, well, I shouldn't have to respect it because it's your choice or whatever. The conversation that led to that point is like, hey, why did you beat me up? Or hey, why did you deny me healthcare?
00:15:33.320Right, right. Like, there are all these things that are like, unquestionably, every person should be able to walk down the street with a sense of safety. And many of us don't have that sense of safety, including fat people.
00:15:46.740Before we even get to the question of like, is it a choice or not? There are already all of these sort of like violations of just like basic decency.
00:15:57.480Thin people are conditioned not to treat fat people like people. And fat people are conditioned to understand that thin people won't believe us, won't trust us and won't change their actions. So we also learn not to bring this stuff up.
00:16:10.620totally one of the things that really struck me from the book is that there's these experiences
00:16:14.560that are just like people being absolute warlocks and then every single one of those stories is
00:16:20.580followed by you telling a friend like hey this terrible warlock ass thing happened to me and0.82
00:16:25.960your friend being like did it though like wasn't that person trying to help like some sort of0.99
00:16:31.080gaslighty follow-up conversation that doesn't recognize just like hey that sucks that person0.83
00:16:35.800sucks yeah totally so i think the one that folks really tends to make people's hair sort of stand0.94
00:16:42.000on end is this story of being at my local neighborhood grocery store doing my grocery0.82
00:16:48.620shopping and being in the produce section and putting a melon in my cart turning around to
00:16:53.620get something else and seeing a stranger reaching into my cart and taking it out and putting it back
00:16:58.880and that stranger explained to me that it has too much sugar for me a melon a melon give me a0.77
00:17:05.440fucking break it's a fruit also melons are like generally like lower in sugar than other0.95
00:17:10.800they're not even correct they're not even correct right like an apple actually has more sugar0.99
00:17:15.420and higher carbohydrates than the melon oh i will say don't try to fucking out food science fat0.88
00:17:21.700people it can't be done i know this from my mom like fat people and like habitual dieters know0.76
00:17:26.880so much more about food science than skinny people it's so noticeable and also we're i would say just
00:17:33.900anecdotally in my own personal life, I know way more fat people with eating disorders than thin
00:17:38.040people. Eating disorders don't come from nowhere. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But that was like, absolutely
00:17:44.280a person who I remember distinctly sort of like imagining that this person has like a my body,
00:17:50.380my choice bumper sticker on her car. That is a in this house, we believe house.
00:17:58.300In our America. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's the sort of thing like I would then
00:18:03.180take back to friends and family, and they would say, oh, she was just trying to help you.
00:18:07.600My theory about this is that they can see themselves doing something like that.
00:18:13.080So they feel more aligned with the person doing the thing that feels to me like a violation.
00:18:18.640And they want to defend themselves and their own logic, which is like totally understandable and
00:18:24.020totally human. And also the effect of that on fat people is absolutely gaslighted.
00:18:30.120Right. You're prioritizing the intentions of the person who did the mean thing over the effect of
00:18:37.580the mean thing. Totally. Well, and I will say this isn't just a matter of defending individuals,
00:18:42.280right? This also comes up in conversations about institutions. You know, I've been a community
00:18:47.260organizer for the last like 10 or 15 years, right? Even amongst those folks, including like union
00:18:53.480organizers, right? I will never forget a conversation I had with a friend at the time
00:18:57.080who was a union organizer. And I told him about a passenger asking to be reseated when I was on a
00:19:03.580plane. And he immediately went to, well, but the airlines have to protect their bottom line.
00:19:09.560And I was like, you're a union organizer, right? There is sort of this thing that happens where
00:19:15.240folks, even very thoughtful, very intentional, very sort of justice minded folks, their brains
00:19:23.300will just drop back into defending the status quo when it comes to people physical accommodations
00:19:29.840was another theme that i pulled out of your book yeah you know the airplane thing is the one that
00:19:34.720always comes up but also i mean a lot of the people that i interviewed for my article would
00:19:38.720say that you know i can't go to restaurants where there's boobs and yeah i get the sense
00:19:42.980from fat people that that's that's one of the hardest things to talk with thin people about
00:19:48.100Totally. So I went to high school here in Portland. Every week that we had assemblies, I would sit in the theater and I would sort of hug my arms to myself as closely as I could so that I wouldn't sort of encroach on anyone else's space.
00:20:05.880I would always sit in the aisle. I do that to this day so that I can sort of like tilt myself out into the aisle and away from the next person so that they won't complain.
00:20:14.280And I will reliably leave with bruises. I will come home, change my clothes that night, put on pajamas and see giant, deep purple bruising on my thighs.
00:20:27.020And I think that this is a thing, right, that like, thin people don't have to think about. And that it is a very noticeable omission that we are living in a country where, again, most people's BMIs put them in the overweight or obese categories. And yet still, the designs that we are making for physical spaces are sort of centered around a minority of people.
00:20:52.180Yeah. I mean, one of the people I interviewed for my article who's kind of become a friend of mine. Hello, Emily. She told me that one of the biggest ally things that people can do for her is in a restaurant that one of her thin friends will go up to the maitre d' and be like, sorry, we can't sit in that table. That chair won't hold my friend.
00:21:10.340yes she said the first time that one of her friends did that for her she started crying
00:21:13.580because it's like that's such a huge thing to have a thin person just recognize the basic
00:21:18.660humanity of like my that's that's not the right accommodation for my friend yes i have friends
00:21:23.620who will just will just walk into a place and they'll just turn to me and go where do you want
00:21:26.640to sit yeah it's very simple it doesn't call any attention to itself and it makes all the
00:21:31.360difference in the world we also have to talk about airlines we sure do you made this the first
00:21:37.280chapter of your book which i know you did deliberately because everything in the book
00:21:40.780is very deliberate and this is i mean this is one of your main this is one of your most viral
00:21:46.080articles too and something that you tweet about all the time yeah i think last i checked just
00:21:50.560the original version without reprints had been read by like two or three million people oh look
00:21:56.340at her but yeah it's i think it's because listen how many of us have heard someone just go oh god
00:22:09.740i was on a plane and like i just don't i just don't want to have to sit next to this great big
00:22:13.440fat person and they were spilling on to me and they were sweaty and and it's almost like small
00:22:18.900talk about flying oh i think what a lot of thin folks don't necessarily know is that pretty much
00:22:25.060every airline has something that they call their customer of size policy on southwest airlines which
00:22:31.920is the best one you can go get an extra seat and they will refund you at the end for free i believe
00:22:37.920is the state of their policy so you just pay for one seat even if you use two that's the best best
00:22:44.040best one we've got everything else is like if a flight attendant determines that you don't look
00:22:50.600comfortable in your seat, they can escort you from the plane. Even if there is not a second
00:22:55.900seat available, you can be charged for a second seat at the day of price.
00:23:01.380And also, it sounds like the anxiety comes from the lack of predictability.
00:29:33.000I could not fucking believe it. No.0.99
00:29:34.680So this is like a videotaped murder of an unarmed black man. And the defense put forth by the attorney for the police union and for this officer was that the officer couldn't have murdered him because basically he was going to die anyway because he was fat.0.94
00:29:53.560The thing, the quote that I cannot get over, this is a direct quote, which is in your book.
00:29:59.520This is from the lawyer of the officer who choked him to death.
00:30:42.020Because you have, there's some very interesting stuff in the book about sexual assault and1.00
00:30:45.680the way that there's this thing that sort of fat especially fat women it's like they deserve to be0.98
00:30:51.220assaulted and then the fatness is like a reason that they're lying about being assaulted because0.96
00:30:56.440like well who would want to rape her basically like this is a quote that people have said so1.00
00:31:01.280this is from your book in 2017 21 year old quantasia sharpton filed suit against usher for0.89
00:31:07.780failing to share his herpes diagnosis with her before she says they slept together quantasia0.99
00:31:12.960was just one of three people to sue the singer but she was the only one who appeared at a press0.98
00:31:17.000conference and she was a fat black woman the online response was swift and ruthless and then0.99
00:31:22.560you quote one of the tweets which received over 6 000 likes i refuse to believe usher fucked this0.99
00:31:28.600yeah so i sifted through a lot of tweets that sounds dark that sounds bad we have now been0.96
00:31:35.500through me too we now have sort of more of a vocabulary for sort of thinking and talking
00:31:42.540about sexual assault, and more of sort of a social script for how to handle it. And that social
00:31:48.740script, because we are talking here about a fat black woman, that social script got thrown out1.00
00:31:54.160the window, right? And people from just all sides were referring to her as it and that.1.00
00:32:03.440There were jokes about, is diabetes communicable? Did she give that to him? So with Eric Karner,
00:32:09.840we've got excusing the murder of a fat black man and with quantasia sharpton and sort of the public0.97
00:32:15.940response to that we've got excusing the sexual assaults of a fat black woman right i mean there0.88
00:32:21.000are interesting gender dynamics here because as you mentioned weight starts to affect women's0.92
00:32:25.660earnings much earlier than men's absolutely so the data is like a little bit all over the place
00:32:31.560on those sort of like how much do thin women earn more than fat women but across the board
00:32:38.260thin women earn more than fat women, right? The low end is that thin women earn, I think it's1.00
00:32:43.900like $1,300 more than fat women. And the high end is that they earn $20,000 or $25,000 more each year1.00
00:32:51.120for similar jobs. Fat people are fired for gaining weight. We're fired because we are assumed to be
00:32:58.740physically unable to complete tasks that need to happen, even sometimes when we demonstrate that
00:33:04.800we can. It's not just a matter of pay equity. It's also a matter of like straight up like
00:33:09.780employment and access to jobs, right? Yeah. Which brings us to the next theme
00:33:14.600that I wanted to talk about, which you don't actually mention specifically in your book.
00:33:18.800But I have been wanting to talk about this ever since we started doing this show.
00:33:24.120Should we discuss skinny shaming? Yes, yes, yes. Let's do it.
00:33:30.100I have very strong thoughts about this. We have talked about this like offline.
00:33:34.400I know you, I know, I generally know your thoughts on this. But yeah, one of the first things that
00:33:41.520comes up as soon as a fat person starts to talk about the discrimination that they've experienced,
00:33:47.040like, there is always a skinny person who pops out of a trash can to be like, what about skinny
00:33:53.940shaming? What about the people who when I talk about my body, they say, Oh, you should eat a
00:33:59.380sandwich what about that huh so aubrey what about skinny shaming okay aren't the victims aubrey
00:34:08.760the people with abs yes there's no question that thin people have it worse in this world than fat
00:34:14.620people starting table stakes let's just lay that out to begin from jump so listen no one should be
00:34:23.140shamed for the size or shape of their body yes or for what it can or can't do or for how it looks
00:34:28.980or for anything yes be nice to people and there's something that happens though where i'm like i
00:34:34.420don't actually hear thin people talking about skinny shaming in the absence of fat people
00:34:39.700talking about their experiences with anti-fat bias so that's thing one right there's not an
00:34:44.380independent conversation about skinny shaming that exists without a conversation about fat
00:34:48.700it's the all lives matter of weight bias right 100 and it is i think a discomfort reaction right
00:34:56.640I'm not being discussed here. And I don't know what to do in a conversation where I'm not being discussed and where I can't be in a grieved party, right? So that's thing one. Thing two is that this is a pretty intense derailing tactic that flattens anti-fat bias, right?
00:35:13.760We're talking about – when we talk about anti-fat bias, we're not just talking about individual people being mean to you.
00:35:20.660We are talking about institutional policies.
00:35:23.760We are talking about millions of dollars being spent on a war on obesity.
00:35:29.080So to say skinny shaming is bad when a fat person is talking about employment discrimination or about airline policies is like a complete red herring, right?
00:35:40.320like it is completely designed to sort of derail and to flatten all of anti-fat bias into the idea
00:35:46.800that an individual person is being mean to an individual fat person. This actually reminds me
00:35:51.580of another passage from your book. So what you say is, the concrete external harms of anti-fatness
00:35:56.840are often reframed and reinterpreted as insecurity by thinner people, especially women. After all,
00:36:03.180thinner women simply aren't subjected to the same levels of societal prejudice, harassment,0.99
00:36:06.820bullying, and overt discrimination as fatter people. As such, feeling insecure is among the
00:36:12.320worst things many thinner women can imagine. So many interpret fat people's story of explicit,0.61
00:36:17.740interpersonal, or institutional anti-fatness as insecurity. I mean, you talk about in the book
00:36:23.300of describing these experiences of, yeah, overt differential treatment, and people will be like,
00:36:29.060I've had days where I didn't feel very pretty either. That's right. So if we're taking sort
00:36:33.200of the classic setup of skinny shaming, which is like, fat person talks about some kind of
00:36:37.600usually institutional anti fat bias, thin person pops up and says skinny shaming isn't any better
00:36:43.240leave me alone, stop telling me to eat a burger. The implicit sort of follow up to that is so shut
00:36:49.640up. So stop talking, right? If there's like one thing that I can hammer home about this book,0.97
00:36:53.920it is that it is not a book about confidence or self love. It is about what lies beyond our own
00:37:00.080individual mindsets? And what are the sort of like social and institutional realities that create
00:37:05.640those mindsets, right? You can talk to fat people all day long about needing to love ourselves and
00:37:11.980have higher self-esteem. But like, ultimately, like the thing that will make that possible for
00:37:17.120many fat people is for us to create a world in which it is possible for fat people to have
00:37:22.200self-esteem. Well, this is the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. And we're going
00:37:25.700eventually do an episode on this body positivity like why isn't body positivity the way to look at
00:37:31.120this yeah so i'll back us up even one step from that if that's okay there is sort of like a great
00:37:37.480deal of contention in body positive and in fat activist spaces about sort of like what are the
00:37:43.480origins of body positivity to our point earlier about sort of like the ways in which thin people
00:37:49.100project onto fat people this is a big one right thin people will sort of say body positivity is
00:37:55.060for everyone to feel good about all of their bodies except fat people, unless you're obese,
00:37:59.860unless you use a mobility device, unless, unless, unless, right? There are sort of all these
00:38:04.040caveats that have come with the mainstreaming of body positivity. And I think like, the reason for
00:38:09.760me that body positivity is not the way to look at it is two things. One, again, it sort of reduces
00:38:17.200things to a problem of mindset. Thing two is that as body positivity has become mainstreamed more
00:38:23.300and more and more, there is now this sense of ownership that thin women have over body positive0.71
00:38:29.880spaces, that they are actually the arbiters of who can and cannot feel body positive, right?1.00
00:38:35.780So like, many, many, many harassing comments or very judgmental comments that you will see on like,
00:38:43.120pictures of Lizzo, for example, on like Instagram or social media or whatever,
00:38:48.160are like, listen, I'm as body positive for the next as the next guy, but this is just unhealthy.
00:41:30.680I mean, this is, to me, what feels like the political organizing challenge of our era
00:41:36.180that, like, it's very difficult to reach out to people on the right.
00:41:39.860So the gains that you're going to make as like a further left person are going to be from pretty normie left wing people.
00:41:49.180Absolutely. And that's like my whole world, right?
00:41:51.600So I totally hear you on this front and completely agreed, right?
00:41:54.720There's got to be a starting point and there's got to be like ways to sort of move folks up the ladder of their own understanding of this topic and their own commitment to it, right?
00:42:02.720In organizing world, if you are out knocking on strangers' doors or calling them on the phone and trying to get them to vote in favor of a ballot measure that you think is important, for example, there's a one-to-five scale that you use for every person that you talk to, most canvases, I should say, not all of them, where a one on that scale is someone who is all the way with you.
00:42:27.580they would probably volunteer if you asked them. They're like on board all the way, let's go.
00:42:33.900Two is someone who's sort of leaning towards support. Three is someone who's undecided.
00:42:39.160And four and fives are sort of mirrors of ones and twos, right? Fives are the people who are
00:42:43.660dead set against you. They're probably actively organized against you. And pretty much every
00:42:48.980campaign that I have ever worked on and every sort of organizing effort that I've been part of,
00:42:53.020we skip the fours and fives i don't think i'm going to get jillian michaels on board
00:42:59.240right with what i'm doing um so thinking instead about like okay how do we get folks in the door
00:43:05.880and then how do we deepen their understanding deepen their commitment and talk to them about
00:43:10.100like how to actually not just feel different but do different things right this is also sort of
00:43:16.560purpose of this podcast right yeah radicalize the normies this is we finally found a tagline
00:43:21.740that's it that's it to me the most challenging part of this is that logically academically i
00:43:29.620know that the most gettable people on this issue are the people who are like kind of into body
00:43:35.360positivity right like that's their sort of entry point the problem is those people are really
00:43:40.620fucking annoying the people i'm interacting with are the kind of people who are sort of semi sort
00:43:48.120of body positivity, they see the Dove ads, they're like, good for her. But then they also post memes0.99
00:43:53.060about Donald Trump being an obese turtle. Yeah, that's right. And so the challenge is to like,0.89
00:43:58.240not just flame those people. Yeah, I mean, almost every time I get a new batch of followers on like
00:44:07.060Instagram or Twitter or whatever, I will do a little clicking through to be like,
00:44:12.140who are these people? How are they describing themselves? Every time there is a good chunk
00:44:17.700of people who I click through to their Instagram bios or their Twitter bios and they have
00:44:23.520CW and GW. What does that mean? Current weight and goal weight. So the people who are like
00:44:30.760actively engaged in weight loss efforts and are for whatever reason, curious to hear from someone
00:44:38.300who's like, that doesn't work. Right. I think there are a number of fat people. I certainly
00:44:44.000know fat people online who are like, that's an instant block. I don't want it in my life. I don't
00:44:48.340want to hear from you. I don't want to do it. Which is like, that's a fair boundary to set.
00:44:52.700For me, it definitely I have a very strong reaction to it. There's no question just sort
00:44:58.400of like emotionally, it makes me feel real bad for like a while. And also, as an organizer,
00:45:04.900I think that's exactly who I want and need to be talking to is the person who's like,
00:45:09.940how many times have I done this? I feel like this time I might be able to do it. But also,
00:45:14.620I don't know, maybe there are other ways of thinking about this, right? Like,
00:45:18.380that actually feels like very promising and fruitful territory. That's like a four leaning0.97
00:45:23.740to a three, right? If we're talking organizer scale, the thing that matters most to me is that
00:45:29.220they are cognizant of how they are treating fat people and that they are not just defaulting to,
00:45:34.400I don't mean to hurt anyone. So I'm not hurting anyone.
00:45:37.280I mean, as I think I've mentioned on the show before, I really have no interest in making people choose anything differently individually.
00:45:44.200Like if somebody wants to lose 20 pounds by Christmas, it just isn't what I want to spend my time on trying to talk them out of that.
00:45:51.000You know, I've done so much work on homelessness.
00:45:53.140What people always ask me whenever I talk about like all the homeless people I've met and all the sort of policy stuff on homelessness I've done is they always ask me like, well, you know, should I give money to homeless people or not?
00:46:03.440And some people do and some people don't.
00:47:06.220And people who are in the process who are seeing some weight loss, we like to think that we are losing weight for our health and for all these other reasons. And that may be true. And that may be part of the reason. But ultimately, the strongest reinforcement that we get is social reinforcement.
00:47:22.200So part of what happens is when people start to lose weight, they start distancing themselves from people who are their old size, or they start lecturing those people on like, I used to be like you and you need to do this thing, right? Like, I think we all like to think that we are more thoughtful and more actively sort of directing our own actions than we actually are. Like, our brains are not that sophisticated.
00:47:49.120and also like i am the first go-to for anyone i know who's trying to lose weight and they just
00:47:56.680want to talk about how great their diet is and how great they feel and how awesome it is to lose
00:48:01.060weight i am the first person that they go to and that is may not be explicitly intentional right
00:48:07.300it might not be a conscious decision that they are making but it's also not an accident i don't
00:48:11.320know where i read it or when but i remember reading this thing where a writer tried a juice
00:48:16.540cleanse one of these cayenne pepper something something juice cleanses one thing i will always
00:48:22.140remember from this article is she said in you know the first second day when there's all this cayenne
00:48:26.960and stuff in your system and it suppresses your appetite and you basically haven't eaten for a day
00:48:30.740and a half or whatever she said the first thing that happened was she got really condescending0.83
00:48:36.320yeah and she would look at people at work who were eating and be like look at these pigs and
00:48:42.540of course, after 24 more hours, she gets too hungry and it doesn't, like, no one can maintain
00:48:47.480that, obviously, right? But it's like, even before the weight loss, she got this superiority complex.
00:48:54.040Absolutely. And like, again, like, the first reinforcement that we get for weight loss
00:48:59.140is near universal affirmation from almost everyone we know. So you're not being drawn to weight loss
00:49:07.540because of your health or because of whatever, like, again, maybe also that whatever, but like,
00:49:12.540We have to be real that, like, what is drawing us into weight loss is the affirmation, the support, and frankly, the privilege that comes with other people seeing you lose weight or even just hearing you talk about it.
00:49:40.920I do think we have to be able to separate out these conversations between like, what do you need to do to sort of protect your own peace of mind? And then also be able to have concurrent conversations about like, what's the strategy to change those conditions? And be able to respect that those two things are different things that sometimes align and sometimes don't, right?
00:50:00.880Right. I think there's a conversation to have about a strategy around divesting from diet companies. Right. Oh, yeah. I think there's a strategy to talk about about like moving capital out of the diet industry and sort of taking our money away from that. So like decide to lose weight if you want to. Don't buy a fucking keto meal kit. Don't go to Weight Watchers and pay them money.
00:50:25.880Right. Like, I think that's a conversation to have. And we could talk about when and whether
00:50:30.020that's strategic. That's a different thing. Right. Dude, I was at the store yesterday,
00:50:34.300and I was trying to buy soup, and they were all out of the kind of soup that I like.
00:50:38.660And the only thing that was left on the shelf was the weird keto soups.