00:00:43.740If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase.
00:00:47.880You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts if that's easier for you and you prefer.
00:00:52.480you should also listen to mike's new show if books could kill and today michael we are talking about
00:00:59.560a book that i wrote yeah usually when you say that about my little podcast i'm like and you
00:01:05.480should pre-order aubrey's book but we're approaching the stage where you can just like
00:01:09.420order order aubrey's book yeah we're releasing this a week before it comes out into the world
00:01:14.460so if you uh are so inclined you can pre-order it for folks who are unfamiliar pre-orders matter a
00:01:22.100great deal to the success of a given book. So if you're looking forward to a book, I would strongly
00:01:27.180recommend pre-ordering it just in general. You guys, if Aubrey's on the New York Times bestseller
00:01:31.560list, she gets to put that in her LinkedIn bio for the rest of her life. So I'm acutely aware
00:01:37.180that poor Aubrey has spent the last month doing press for the book. So she has been asked every
00:01:44.180fucking question about it like 300 times. And she's been telling me how sick she is of answering0.99
00:01:50.480all the same questions and giving the same spiel so i'm gonna try really hard like not to pitch you
00:01:56.760any like softball questions that you've answered a million times but i will say i spent the
00:02:03.480christmas holiday reading aubrey's book and really enjoying it actually i say actually as if i was
00:02:10.580like surprised but like no of course it's like wow her book is actually pretty good this lady
00:02:15.740actually knows how to string together a sentence but it's just a really good primer of a lot of
00:02:21.520the stuff that we talk about on the show it's a great overview of sort of where we are on this
00:02:26.240issue it's obviously extremely well written extremely well researched people have this
00:02:30.860idea that it's like you're just gonna have to feel guilty when you read books like this but
00:02:33.780it's actually like super fun to read super easy great airplane read i don't mean that in a mean
00:02:39.180way i was gonna say a future topic on if books could kill given the rest of my career i do not
00:02:45.180mean that meanly. I think on this episode, we're not going to go through the entire book because a
00:02:49.460lot of it is stuff that you've covered on the show before. There's a chapter about why the BMI sucks
00:02:54.400and there's a chapter about why calories in, calories out sucks and various other things that
00:02:59.060we've already covered on the show. So for this episode, we pulled out a couple of the myths
00:03:04.280that we kind of haven't covered on the show to like dig deeper into them.
00:03:09.220Yeah, absolutely. And I will say, I think that, you know, a bunch of the sort of chapters in this book, it's 20 short chapters, are things that our listeners have requested of us a number of times, right?
00:03:22.200That people have said, okay, I know you made this whole, like, whatever, three-hour arc about the BMI and the obesity epidemic, but can you give me five pages that I can hand to my doctor?
00:03:34.120Or can you give me, you know, like, a little packet that I can give to my family to tell them why they need to lay off my little brother about his size?
00:03:44.320This is the, like, short form, here's the research, here's what you need to know,
00:03:48.760And here's sort of some ways to either fully debunk some of these myths or to add some much needed nuance and complexity and like history to them.
00:03:59.260It's equivalent to like sending your dad a link in the group chat.0.92
00:04:02.280Be like, I don't have fucking time to explain this to you.0.96
00:04:18.080you can pre-order it wherever you get books. You can also find a compilation of links at
00:04:24.380aubreygordon.net slash myths. Although considering it's your second book, I'm livid that it wasn't
00:04:29.720called Too Fat, Too Furious. So we have chosen a couple of the specific myths to pull out and
00:04:38.840unpack. Let's start with the emotional eating myth. This is myth number nine. Fat people are
00:04:47.740emotionally damaged and cope by eating their feelings yeah this tends to be one of the0.82
00:04:53.780explanations for fatness that is like one step better than like they're all lazy and that's
00:05:00.340why they're fat right it's like no no no it's not that they're lazy it's that like something0.57
00:05:04.920fucked up happened in their past totally so it sort of sounds sympathetic yeah but it's like an0.99
00:05:10.680inch below the surface it's like oh they're all like wretched creatures who are eating because0.98
00:05:15.540they have to totally it seems quote-unquote better and nicer but what it is is pity right
00:05:21.780based on your appearance I can tell you're emotionally broken yeah yeah this one emotional
00:05:27.320eating was like a big one in my upbringing in the 80s and 90s it was like a really sort of
00:05:33.880prevailing model it has weirdly come back it's a big deal on tiktok these days sort of the idea
00:05:40.800that fat is, quote unquote, like trauma trapped in your body and you need to release the trauma.
00:05:47.300I'm curious about for you, this like emotional eating stuff. Have you heard this before? Where
00:05:53.260have you heard it the most? Are there sort of like common sources of it in your life?
00:05:57.120Actually, the main source of it is my mom. One of her main struggles was emotional eating. So for0.99
00:06:02.620me, that actually became like one of the templates that I use to understand fatness when I was
00:06:07.800younger and like my mom was the only person who i had ever heard talk about fatness so i was like
00:06:12.940okay some people do this and i also i i've never been an emotional eater but i'm a bored eater0.93
00:06:19.660when there's nothing else going on and there's something in the fridge like i will fucking eat
00:06:23.740it whether i'm hungry or not and so the idea always sort of felt true to me that there's some0.67
00:06:30.820connection between your mental state and your eating habits because i was using two people as
00:06:37.720as examples. I was like, well, this must be true. An N of two. Yeah. And they're not even the same
00:06:42.120thing, but two people doing different things. I mean, I think you're touching on something
00:06:45.000that feels really important here, which is there are lots of reasons that people eat.
00:06:49.860Right. Sometimes you eat because you're hungry. Sometimes you eat because you're at a birthday
00:06:53.100party and there's cake. And what you do at a birthday party is you eat cake. Sometimes you're
00:06:57.280bored. Sometimes you're sad. Sometimes you want to feel connected to home if you're far away from
00:07:02.040home. So you want to eat some comfort food that reminds you of your home. Yeah. There are lots
00:07:06.400of reasons to eat food. And we have decided because we are so hung up on this idea of
00:07:12.020people not getting fat, we have decided that only some of those reasons are OK.
00:07:16.860Even the ones that are OK are like a little suspect. Even if you're really, really hungry,
00:07:21.340you should be really careful about what you eat and how much and blah, blah, blah. Right.
00:07:25.120Right. I appreciate using it's your mom as sort of a major source of it. I feel like my mom and
00:07:30.080her friends are also a major source of it for me. And I think some of this stuff is a little
00:07:35.340bit generational because one of the biggest champions was the founder of Weight Watchers,
00:07:41.820Jean Neidich, who we've talked about on the show a little bit.
00:07:44.760Yeah. And you have a great section in your book about her, too.
00:07:46.480She essentially said when she was a kid, if she had a fight with one of her friends or
00:07:53.220if she couldn't go outside because it was raining or she didn't get invited to a birthday party or
00:07:58.240she was upset with someone in her family, her mother gave her a piece of candy to make her
00:08:03.940feel better. And she talked about that sort of growing into a broader set of behaviors like
00:08:11.520buying malomars to eat in secret, right? To eat sort of in private away from other people.
00:08:19.100She was talking about that in the 60s and 70s, which is long before any eating disorders were
00:08:25.540really in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is the sort of like manual of, you know,
00:08:31.240mental health disorders as determined by the American Psychiatric Association.
00:08:36.020Right. I was really surprised to learn that they were only added to the DSM in 1980.
00:08:40.420Yeah, absolutely. And binge eating disorder, which I would say is like
00:08:43.620some of the behavior she's describing, that sense of shame around eating, that sense of
00:08:48.680eating in secret, all of that kind of stuff. This was the most widely available framework
00:08:54.240at the time when frameworks around eating disorders were not really present, right?
00:08:59.720There was another boost for this sort of framework around emotional eating in the medical world in the 1980s around the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study.
00:09:13.440Yeah, I was going to ask you about this.
00:09:14.860Yeah, yeah. Have we talked about the ACE study?
00:09:16.380The most detailed description of it I've ever read was in your book.
00:09:22.220so basically there was a doctor named vincent feliti who was working for kaiser permanente
00:09:29.280in san diego in the 1980s he was running a weight loss clinic for kaiser permanente that clinic used
00:09:36.340what they called supplemented absolute fasting which is basically just optavia or optifast you
00:09:43.000know it's like one of those diets that is an extremely calorie restricted diet we're talking
00:09:48.320starting people on between 400 and 800 calories per day.
00:09:54.260Fat people who went to his clinic lost a lot of weight in the short term.
00:09:57.760But shocker, the only stories that I was able to find from people who went to that clinic
00:10:04.380are stories of people who regained significant amounts of weight.
00:10:07.080So at one point in the 80s, this doctor famously ran into one of his patients
00:10:13.740and saw that she had regained a real considerable amount of weight.
00:10:18.320in a very short period of time. In a matter of months, she had regained quite a bit of weight.
00:10:22.860And he sort of asked her what happened. There's not a lot of detail on this conversation.
00:10:27.440So when I read about it, I'm like, this is probably a terrible conversation for that patient.
00:10:33.640Your doctor, who was sort of in charge of your weight loss,
00:10:37.820sees you and has some expression on his face or says something awful.
00:10:42.740And then you've got to explain that like, oh, right, I wasn't starving myself anymore.0.98
00:10:47.380yeah yeah i started eating food like a human i was eating so i i with these fucking programs i0.94
00:10:56.040never know like what did you expect to happen of course when somebody eats like one fifth of what0.98
00:11:04.980you need to live they lose weight and of course when they go back to eating normal amounts of
00:11:10.580food they return to their previous size i don't everyone is like oh it's just calories in calories
00:11:15.820out like, oh, it's the second law of motion or whatever. Yeah. OK, then what the fuck did you
00:11:20.240think was going to happen? Well, so here's the interesting thing. That feels like a pretty good,0.98
00:11:24.600obvious conclusion to me. That did not feel that way to Dr. Fellini. It's so weird to me.
00:11:30.520He asked this patient sort of what happened as they were talking. She said that a co-worker
00:11:37.980had expressed interest in sleeping with her and that really flipped her out. She disclosed also
00:11:44.200that she had a long history of childhood sexual abuse. For Dr. Felitti, this was not evidence of
00:11:51.140like, hey, maybe my clinic is built on a foundation of sand. Right. Like maybe this lady doesn't need
00:11:55.860to lose weight. Maybe losing weight is not the thing. Maybe that's not what we should focus on.1.00
00:11:59.780He took that as, you know what, actually, I haven't taken trauma histories from my patients
00:12:04.060at my clinic. So he went back to his clinic and took trauma histories from all of the patients
00:12:09.560who were there at the time, most of them had experienced major traumas. And for 55% of them,
00:12:16.280that included histories of childhood sexual abuse. That prompted him to start work on the
00:12:21.920Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It is one of the largest scale trauma studies in the United
00:12:28.340States to date. And the core, the sort of origin story of that study is it's because all these fat
00:12:37.640people couldn't lose weight and that's why we need to figure out what's going on with people's0.99
00:12:41.640trauma i'm like boy oh boy oh boy wouldn't it be great if we found another road to giving a shit0.92
00:12:47.040about what happened to people right as kids yeah that has made them like have like a bunch of0.76
00:12:52.180really tricky life experiences and has made things harder than it needs to be like wouldn't it be
00:12:56.380great if we could just care about people for the sake of caring about them and not being like that
00:12:59.760person looks real fat how do we make them unfat oh i guess they have some emotional stuff right
00:13:03.900But also, this sort of extremely anecdotal origin story becomes sort of a real bolster to this idea that fat people are fat because we are emotionally damaged, right?
00:13:18.840Do you have a sense of what actually explains such a high percentage of the patients had sexual abuse in their past?
00:13:25.240Here's my guess, and this is genuinely a guess. For folks who experience childhood abuse, it is much easier to believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with you that you need to fix in order to be accepted by other people. And my guess is that that includes weight loss, right?
00:13:43.100Whether or not trauma makes people fat, I would argue there are lots of fat people for lots of reasons, some of whom have experienced major life trauma, some of whom haven't, just like thin people.
00:14:00.780What's weird is that, like, this seems like a relatively easy thing to, I guess, debunk of just, like, you could do long, like, detailed qualitative surveys of fat people and thin people and then compare the percentages.
00:14:16.120Like, it just seems like this explanation is, like, galloping forward on, like, pretty thin data.
00:14:22.520I think you're right that the data that this one is writing on is very thin.
00:14:26.200And I think this is a case of the Michael Hobbs checkpoint question of like, what do we not need evidence to believe?
00:17:33.380If you're wrong, it's garbage. Right. And you're revealing a bunch of assumptions about that person. If you're right, it is so mean. It's also garbage. Right. And I think like, look, I think here this is a place where we get into like really tricky territory because there are people for whom this resonates. And those are also people who learn to see fat people as failed emotional eaters who didn't get it under control. Right. Right.0.99
00:17:58.320So, like, even for the people for whom it resonates, it is worth interrogating where that comes from, what it allows you to believe about yourself, and what it allows you to believe about people who are fatter than you.0.98
00:18:09.500Like, this is what I honestly think my mom is, like, quite good at, partly because she listens to the fucking show.0.80
00:18:14.640She's like, I've struggled with emotional eating my entire life.0.99
00:18:18.560And, like, some people are fat because of medications, and some people have been fat their whole lives.0.93
00:18:21.760And, like, some percentage of fat people do struggle with emotional eating, but, like, I have no fucking idea what that percentage is.
00:18:27.700don't go around assuming that about fat people totally but also i always try to affirm my mom's
00:18:33.420like explanation for herself just because it doesn't seem like it's my place to like for sure
00:18:37.580take it away from her you know for sure i mean i think like listen what you're talking about is
00:18:42.120the kind of behavioral stuff that i'm like that's really useful to check in with yourself and go
00:18:46.700right this is my experience it's not other people's experience and reminding yourself of that
00:18:51.660frequently feels like a really helpful tool for this kind of stuff right the trick is most people
00:18:58.060take this position and treat it as sacrosanct and therefore think this means my behavior is
00:19:03.860unassailable because i know what's going on with me yeah that's a really good point to me that's
00:19:07.640like a big part of the take-home point here is like for any of this stuff for a diet for a an
00:19:14.080exercise practice for an emotional framework for understanding this stuff reminding yourself in a
00:19:20.480really constant way that your own experience could be really different from someone else's
00:19:25.340and you've got to create the space for them to speak from their own experience while you speak
00:19:30.380from yours yeah it's really important stuff and not doing the deeply human thing that most of us
00:19:38.140do most of the time which is assuming that the thing that we're doing and the thing that makes
00:19:43.100sense to us is at the center of other people's world too yeah it is funny to me that like one
00:19:48.560at least one third of this show is us just reminding people that like what is happening
00:19:54.020with you and your body is not what is happening for other people and their bodies for sure
00:19:58.800well and also like there is an expectation that fat people owe everyone else an explanation for
00:20:05.340why we are the size that we are oh yeah that's a really good point and if your explanation meets
00:20:09.000muster which it won't then i'll leave you alone right like that's sort of the cultural script
00:20:14.540here and for thin folks when they're asked for an explanation of their body it's always0.99
00:20:18.540what's your secret how did you do it yeah god i don't know man it's a grim fucking place to live0.98
00:20:25.120where even the people who think they're doing you a favor want you to explain why you look the way0.99
00:20:30.960you do dude yeah okay i'm gonna move us on to i don't like gaining weight but i don't treat fat
00:20:35.340people differently because it feels like we're already sort of there and then i'm gonna take
00:20:38.520us back to glorifying obesity to close on is that okay transition us do do a do a deft transition
00:20:44.760leave that in the part where you do a deft transition get us get us there somehow so
00:20:52.800we've been talking about sort of this idea of emotional eating and the frameworks that we use
00:20:56.480for ourselves and i think there is sort of a kingpin version of this there's like the mega
00:21:02.560version of this which is the phrase i don't like gaining weight but i don't treat fat people
00:21:08.140differently right is this a phrase that you've heard before i've mostly heard it from you
00:21:12.860this is like your biggest pet peeve i hate it i feel like so much of the show is like me
00:21:19.920subtweeting specific people and you subtweeting specific people yeah yeah yeah yeah and i feel0.72
00:21:25.780like this is one like this must be one that you have heard from actual people numerous times i
00:21:31.620have definitely had multiple friendships in my life where I realized partway through that I am
00:21:37.760actually a project to the person that I'm talking to. Oh, yeah, dude. People will try and slyly
00:21:44.180sneak in things like, do you ever think about going to the gym? Oh, they are viewing me as like
00:21:50.800a fixer upper. Like I'm a house they can flip. Right. And that makes them feel like a good
00:21:56.580person who's doing something good for a person right who they fundamentally see as like kind of
00:22:03.060wretched do you know what i mean like a hard luck case almost all of the people who have
00:22:08.300been that person in my life would say with a great deal of certainty that they treat fat people
00:22:14.980no differently than thin people now i just feel sad like i want to give you a hug but
00:22:20.040city. The part of this one that I really want to push on is the but I don't treat fat people
00:22:28.180differently part. Yeah. Yeah. If you don't want to be a fat person, it's worth unpacking
00:22:32.440how much of that is socially determined. Right. And how much of that is a result of how fat
00:22:37.560people are treated. If you don't like gaining weight. Why? If you say it's because your clothes
00:22:41.960fit better. What if people made clothes that fit you at a different size? Right. Yeah. Or you feel
00:22:46.640more accepted or you feel you're going to have better career success. Why do you think a thinner
00:22:52.400person would have better career success than a fat person? Right. It's worth looking at the ways
00:22:57.300in which bias is baked into some of those assumptions as well. But I'm not going to get
00:23:02.980between you and your relationship to your own body and your own size. That's you stuff. You get to
00:23:08.120manage it. I do feel like I mean, we live in a fucking wildly fat phobic society. So the idea1.00
00:23:13.040that somebody would be like, you know, whatever, I'm a corporate lawyer. To be a corporate lawyer
00:23:17.660in America in 2022, I have to stay thin. Part of me feels like, okay. Like that's fucking true.
00:23:25.480Like the sort of the fundamental challenge of living in America right now is like,0.99
00:23:28.680how do you live within a like super broken and unjust country? Like, what do you do about it?
00:23:34.400Totally. Like I have had a number of people who have had weight loss surgery or gone through
00:23:38.680major diets who have said, I went to pick up my kid from school and other kids were making fun of
00:23:43.740him for having a fat mom and I'm not going to do that to my kid. Or my boss told me that he doesn't
00:23:49.060think I can physically do this job unless I prove to him that I can physically do that job. And for
00:23:54.920him, that means me being thinner. I'm going to go do that thing, right? Like now at least we're
00:23:59.820talking about some kind of concrete external thing and you can go, hey, those kids shouldn't0.55
00:24:04.680have been making fun of your kid for having a fat mom yeah like can i support you in this moment
00:24:09.680right like that calls for a different thing than just being like i'm just talking about me and i0.64
00:24:13.540just don't like gaining weight and just leave me alone right right but listen the part of this that
00:24:18.120i want to talk about is the i don't treat fat people differently part yeah because in my own
00:24:23.920experience with this stuff and also according to quite a bit of data most of us are bad judges of
00:24:30.460own biases. Most of us want to think of ourselves as egalitarians, as justice minded, as fair
00:24:37.120people, you know, and the idea that we might be acting in a biased way feels like not only
00:24:43.620revisiting of that action. Right. But it feels like potentially an assault on our idea of who
00:24:50.680we are. Right. Like I wouldn't do that. A bad person does that. And I'm a good person. Good
00:24:55.340people don't have biases. Right. Yeah. And what that means is any kind of feedback about this
00:25:00.180stuff then gets pushed through the filter of are you calling me a bad person? Right. Rather than
00:25:06.420you're giving me feedback on an action. What can I take from that feedback? And what do I want to
00:25:11.300do differently or not next time? Right? Well, to me, the weirdest thing about this is the confidence.
00:25:16.640Like, I host a podcast pretty substantially dedicated to this issue. I do not go around
00:25:23.500telling people like I don't treat fat people any differently. That's not really for me to say.
00:25:28.260I can say that I try I can say that I think about this issue a lot I can say that I talk to my fat
00:25:32.920friends I check in but like part of living in a structurally unjust society feels like it requires0.99
00:25:40.960the acknowledgement that like yeah there's probably some weird toxic shit rattling around0.88
00:25:44.960in my brain yeah and like walking around as if you know everyone in society is bad but not me0.98
00:25:52.320just seems like the kind of attitude that is going to make you incapable of addressing that
00:25:58.580stuff when it does come up. And there is some research that is like specific to this question,
00:26:04.120right, that seems worth digging into. There's a 2014 study in the journal Body Image
00:26:09.480that looked at white women who participated in this practice that they call body surveillance,
00:26:15.120which is essentially like close monitoring of the appearance of your own body.
00:26:19.780And what they found was that those white women who engaged in body surveillance, who were hyper-focused on the look of their own body, who held anti-fat stereotypes, who held anti-fat beliefs, experienced less body dissatisfaction in themselves.
00:26:38.000They were literally looking at fat people and going, I feel better because I'm not that fat.
00:26:43.320So it's just like self-soothing by being around people bigger than you and be like, at least I'm not like her.
00:26:49.020Absolutely. This is all coming from emotionally like a pretty similar wellspring, right? Of just like, when I look at people who are fatter than me, I feel better about myself. And the idea that you could then look at that person with such revulsion, disgust, maybe some pity, and then treat them identically to a person who you view as being part of the beauty standard. We're kidding ourselves.
00:27:16.280it's not borne out by the data it's not borne out by what we know about people and how they work
00:27:20.640yeah and it's also highly unlikely because most of us treat fat people differently fat people get
00:27:26.540paid less for the same jobs we don't get the same health care that then people get right like
00:27:31.400we aren't believed um in like very baseline ways when we come forward with stories about
00:27:37.400you know sexual assault because the response is no one would want to sexually assault you
00:27:42.440So when someone says, ah, ah, ah, that's everybody else, but not me, feels like really self-protective thinking to me rather than let's solve the problem of anti-fatness kind of thinking.
00:27:53.140This is one that we have to dig into because one of the main accusations of this show and of like fat activists writ large is this thing that always comes up that is like fat activists think it's fatphobic to work out.
00:28:09.480They think it's fatphobic to lose weight.
00:28:11.120This is something, this is, like, one of the main arguments that is used to discredit people who are trying to build a better world for fat people.
00:28:19.820This one I have encountered way less than you have.
00:28:35.900I have studiously walled myself off from Reply Guys.
00:28:39.920I'm like, yeah, most of the fat activists that I know are deep believers in body sovereignty, right? Which is the idea that your own body is yours above all else. And it is your decision how you want to interact with that body, period. So when someone says they all think it's fat phobic to lose weight, that is shadow boxing with a made up idea in their own brains, right? Or more likely, hearing a thin person go, I heard they think it's fat phobic to look, you know what I mean?
00:29:09.920Like, it's like a game of telephone with no source code.
00:29:13.300It's like peak simulacra, a copy with no master.
00:29:16.740I think it's like this fear among members of the majority, kind of like how people freak