Maintenance Phase - What's Our Deal？

00:00:00.000 Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase. My name is Aubrey Gordon, and I am here with my

00:00:16.400 co-host, Michael Hobbs. Hello. Yeah. Hi. Hi. We're doing like a little overture episode. This is

00:00:21.560 like a little teaser because we know that when people find a new podcast, oftentimes they scroll

00:00:25.940 down to the bottom of the feed. That's what I do. Yeah. Yeah. So we wanted to give folks a

00:00:31.360 little introduction to who we are, what this podcast is, and sort of what are some of the

00:00:36.220 like underlying critiques that are going to come up. And we're going to talk about our own

00:00:41.460 experiences in relation to those. False. I will be revealing nothing about myself,

00:00:45.780 but proceed. Ironically, the anonymous person here is going to be the vulnerable.

00:00:50.620 should we talk about our inspirations for the show and how we got the idea of doing it yeah

00:00:56.820 why don't you kick us off on this one so my desire to do a show like this came from a couple months

00:01:01.960 ago i was looking through the sort of the top charts on apple podcasts and health you know

00:01:07.220 is one of the categories and i was scrolling through the top i don't know 50 100 health

00:01:12.760 podcasts and like very very very few of them were subversive at all or seemed to be in any

00:01:20.000 way skeptical of like the wellness industry. So I thought like it would be a good idea to have a

00:01:26.340 show that is kind of curious about this stuff. And if we find good ideas, that's fine. But also,

00:01:32.180 I think it's important to be like, are we really becoming healthier with all this stuff?

00:01:36.880 Totally. And like, we have sort of very conveniently as a culture just collapsed

00:01:42.020 our definition of health into our visual assessment of our own weight.

00:01:46.880 That's a good way to put it.

00:01:47.480 even really smart, thoughtful people accept fully that how fat you are is a direct measure of how

00:01:56.020 healthy you are. And the underpinning of that is that it is your responsibility to be as healthy

00:02:02.680 as possible. Yeah. A lot of the other shows seem to have this kind of like our fat people,

00:02:07.320 people kind of vibe. We're like this very exotic concept. And so we're just sort of taking that

00:02:13.680 as a starting point. Yeah, we're going to assume that fat people are people.

00:02:17.660 You know what? So do you want to tell people who are these millennials telling me about

00:02:23.200 Gwyneth Paltrow into my ears? Who are these millennials ushering me into the extended

00:02:27.120 Goopiverse? What's your deal, Aubrey? What is my deal? So I am a writer. You may know my work

00:02:36.500 as your fat friend. If you have read anything by that person, that's me. And I started writing

00:02:42.780 about being fat because i'm a fat lady and i have been a fat lady pretty much my whole life

00:02:47.380 when i graduated from high school i was a size 24 which was at that point the largest size

00:02:53.300 available even in plus size stores so yeah a lot of uh high school spent wearing sweatshirts with

00:02:59.740 polo collars sewn in they're like if you're this fat you must be 60 or 80 oh god that's why i started

00:03:07.980 wearing menswear as we were talking about earlier anyway oh like pretty much every fat person i try

00:03:12.580 every weight loss method that was available to me as I did that as I went on diets and diet drugs

00:03:19.660 and detoxes and cleanses and lifestyle changes and whatever else the same thing pretty much

00:03:25.860 always happened which is that I would lose a little bit of weight 10 or 20 or sometimes as

00:03:30.720 much as 50 pounds I would lose that weight and then I would reliably gain it back and then some

00:03:36.840 the more I tried to lose weight the fatter I got it's a very rare experience that only happens to

00:03:42.560 99% of people who go on extreme diets. So we're really, we're uncharted waters now.

00:03:49.400 Totally. And you know, the only explanation that was available to me for that was that it was a

00:03:54.740 personal failure. That's the only message that we ever get. If a fat person is fat, especially as

00:03:59.580 fat as I am, it has to be their fault. Subsequently, we sort of deserve whatever's coming to us.

00:04:05.340 If people are shitty to you, sorry. That's just what happens to fat people. 0.98

00:04:11.420 Yeah. Weight is the number one reason that kids are bullied at school. I feel like a lot of people 0.99

00:04:15.620 don't know that. Yeah. And it's generally something that we just like accept, like, well,

00:04:19.320 you know, she is pretty big. So, you know, like that's, that tends to be the way that these kinds

00:04:24.900 of bullying experiences get framed. And it's great. Yes, absolutely. And it becomes like such

00:04:28.820 a big thing, right? That there are some cases of children being taken away from their parents

00:04:33.100 because the kids are fat and that must be a failure of parenting, right? I didn't know about

00:04:37.400 that that's bad oh yeah so like we have sort of taken this reasoning to such extremes that we are

00:04:43.120 building social systems around it right and that is like really troubling to me but look look what

00:04:48.460 you look what you just did we were talking about you and then you got into academic research which

00:04:52.480 is which is what you do no matter what we talk about i asked you something about yourself and

00:04:57.780 then like two minutes later it's like according to a peer-reviewed journal in 1997 let's like

00:05:01.280 Aubrey, Aubrey, go back, go back.

00:05:06.800 Listen, you and I are very well matched for a number of reasons, and that is one of them.

00:05:12.980 Part of what's so exciting to me about the podcast is that it relates really closely to stuff that has helped me a great deal in sort of making peace with my own size,

00:05:23.240 but also thinking critically about how fatness and anti-fat bias and sort of this idea that

00:05:30.220 everyone owes it to everyone else to be healthy.

00:05:33.620 Right. Because nobody gives a shit about the resting heart rate or the LDL cholesterol 0.98

00:05:38.180 readings of someone who's skinny. 0.99

00:05:40.200 Right. I think people can genuinely believe that they are concerned for fat people's health

00:05:44.540 and that that belief can be rooted in faulty information and biased beliefs that they have

00:05:52.280 been fed and sort of consumed pretty uncritically for most of us for our whole lives right not all

00:05:58.060 discrimination against a group manifests as like shouting slurs at them from a pickup truck right

00:06:04.220 it can very easily just be an overwhelming sense of paternalism or this like fake concern right

00:06:10.060 there is this sort of like noblesse oblige that happens with thin people right which is sort of

00:06:14.920 this belief that like i have cracked the code on being thin and you have not so it is my duty to

00:06:20.340 instruct you on how to have a body that is less like yours and more like mine.

00:06:25.740 Yeah. But let's talk about your writing because this is how I found you. This is how a lot of

00:06:30.680 other people found you. You started writing anonymously on the internet, what, five years

00:06:35.300 ago, four years ago? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had gotten into an argument with a friend of mine

00:06:40.000 who I love dearly. She and I had gotten into this back and forth about a Cheryl Strayed quote

00:06:46.780 of all things shut up that's where it started that's where it started where like i had posted

00:06:52.020 this cheryl straight quote that was something like is there anything more boring than listening

00:06:56.520 to a woman bemoan the size of her own body or something like that so i had had this whole sort

00:07:02.460 of back and forth with my friend who was like well but you don't understand how hard it is to stay

00:07:07.100 thin oh we sort of went down this road where she was like you don't understand what it's like to

00:07:11.480 be me and i was like cool but also you don't understand what it's like to be me right right

00:07:16.540 we had this back and forth and I wrote her a letter and sent it to a friend of mine

00:07:20.380 to take a look at and I was like hey can you just tell me if I'm being like 0.69

00:07:24.140 a total industrial strength jerk in this letter or if I'm like this is okay to send to someone

00:07:31.700 and he was like it's okay to send to someone and also maybe you should post it somewhere online 0.98

00:07:35.560 because he was like I'd like to share it and I know a handful of people who probably would like

00:07:39.140 to share it I was like sure so I posted online and then within about a week I think 40 or 50

00:07:43.540 thousand people had read it. So all of this means that you were into systemic bias before it was

00:07:47.740 cool. Audrey, I think this is what you're saying. Like you had the early EP. Anyway, so I started

00:07:53.280 writing, you know, for that audience, for people who were good, thoughtful, kind people who had

00:07:59.720 never really thought critically about the ways in which they think about and interact with and treat

00:08:05.760 fat people. Right. We are the same age. We have both read a billion Newsweek cover stories that

00:08:11.860 are like, the obesity epidemic, obesity among our kids, like the same framing around obesity

00:08:18.620 our entire lives. Like, how many times have we just seen a random sentence in a random article

00:08:24.540 that's just like, da-da-da, fat people are unhealthy, da-da-da, right? It's one of those

00:08:28.720 presumptions that sort of doesn't even need unpacking anymore. There's a lot of people who

00:08:33.220 like believe this because this is something we've all been told a million times. And it's actually

00:08:37.680 more complicated than that. Believe it or not, it's not as simple as every fat person is unhealthy

00:08:42.680 and every skinny person is healthy and every fat person needs you to tell them that they are

00:08:46.900 unhealthy constantly and that will help them. And, oh, it's just like smoking. If we shame them,

00:08:51.760 everybody will not be fat anymore. These are things that a lot of us believe without really

00:08:56.440 interrogating them. Well, I mean, like that's also part of what's, again, like helped me pretty

00:09:00.980 immensely right in feeling okay in my body is doing this kind of research right and finding

00:09:09.080 that actually those messages those specific actual messages are part of what's making us fat

00:09:15.020 and so is trying to lose weight i mean should we talk about the science a little bit i think

00:09:20.660 except hang on because i introduced myself and then we started talking uh i feel like you should

00:09:25.260 do a little intro of who you are and what brings you to this conversation too i wanted to skip that

00:09:29.180 part. Um, I was trying to keep the focus on Aubrey and the science. Uh, I'm sure you were

00:09:34.940 reporting. So I was, this was like, I don't know, eight years ago or something. I was on a date

00:09:41.620 with a guy who was, I think an anesthesiologist. And I was like, Oh yeah, how has your job changed

00:09:48.740 since you started doing it or something like relatively benign. And he started complaining

00:09:53.120 about all of the fat people that he has to see and how it's hard to do anesthesia on them. And

00:09:58.820 basically complaining about like the fundamental tenets of his job which are like finding out what

00:10:02.320 an appropriate dose of an anesthesia is for a patient and i was getting more and more angry 0.95

00:10:06.900 at him and like visibly annoyed on this fucking brunch date and he was very quizzical about like 0.98

00:10:12.560 why i was defending the basic humanity of fat people and then at one point he sort of stopped 0.99

00:10:18.280 and he's like wait did you have a fat mom or something like he's like accusing me of like 0.97

00:10:24.960 the only reason why i would give a shit about this issue is because like someone close to me 0.99

00:10:29.100 is fat right and the worst thing about it is that he's fucking correct my mom my mom was fat growing 0.97

00:10:35.680 up and it was a huge part of my life growing up was that i saw how hard my mom was trying yeah 0.99

00:10:42.400 she was on a diet all the fucking time which means the whole family was on a diet and we saw her 0.69

00:10:48.560 make different food for herself like she would make the whole family like a nice meal and then 1.00

00:10:53.540 she would sit there and eat raw carrots out of a bowl because she was on the fucking ornish diet 0.99

00:10:58.140 and that was like a huge thing in the late 80s and early 90s and i saw how hard she was trying 0.96

00:11:03.460 and i saw how shitty the world was to her my friends made comments we would be in public and

00:11:08.420 people would make comments waiters and waitresses at restaurants would make comments if she asked

00:11:12.460 like basic questions about the food like oh is the salad included with that she'd get these sort 1.00

00:11:17.580 of eye rolls right like oh the fat lady wants to know about the salad like it was so palpable to 1.00

00:11:23.520 me just what bullshit it was right because she was constantly being told that she should lose 1.00

00:11:28.160 weight and it was like behind the scenes i knew as young as like five six seven that like she's 1.00

00:11:34.040 fucking trying her best man and it's not working everyone is shouting at her to do this thing that 0.91

00:11:38.660 she is already doing and nothing is ever enough right and also like as a kid i don't know man 0.99

00:11:44.620 if you have a decent mom right like a mom who's like not abusive or whatever i don't know that 0.97

00:11:51.180 there's anybody that you feel closer to in the world and more defensive of in the world fuck

00:11:56.560 that anesthesiologist truly i also think it's worth sort of busting one of the myths i think 0.73

00:12:01.900 one of like the accusations of sort of i guess like the fat politics or fat activism community

00:12:07.780 online is that sort of they're implying that there's no unhealthy fat people or that every

00:12:13.340 single fat person is just as healthy as every single skinny person and that is not the argument

00:12:18.520 Yeah. There are unhealthy fat people. There are unhealthy skinny people. There are healthy fat 0.62

00:12:22.780 people. I mean, I think the fundamental argument of the fat activism community and the fundamental

00:12:28.580 argument of this show is that this is all individual. Weight and health are two distinct

00:12:34.340 concepts and sometimes they overlap and sometimes they don't. So one of the most striking statistics

00:12:39.780 I came across when I was researching a big long article that I wrote about this two years ago now,

00:12:43.780 I think is that one third of quote unquote obese people have completely normal health markers like

00:12:50.820 they are not unhealthy they do not have any of the risk factors and around 25 percent of skinny

00:12:55.640 people do have the risk factors yeah so the whole point of this is that individual variation in this

00:13:02.240 matters and weight and health are not the same thing this is all one big scatterplot yes the

00:13:07.060 idea of a healthy fat person existing is like inconceivable right you can go on google scholar

00:13:13.380 and you can find a million studies that find a correlation, right? If you look at a population

00:13:17.860 of a million people, you'll find that weight is correlated with poor health. For decades,

00:13:23.620 what we've been told is that one thing is necessarily causing the other and that all

00:13:27.560 we need to know about is that like fat people are unhealthy, so people shouldn't be fat. Boom,

00:13:31.640 right? Like we solved it. But of course, it's not clear from those studies if the same thing

00:13:37.340 is causing people to be both unhealthy and fat, right? That there's actually more studies coming

00:13:42.200 out now that are showing that fat people who exercise regularly are healthier than skinny

00:13:47.100 people who don't exercise regularly. Diet and exercise do matter. Like no one is pretending

00:13:51.920 that those things have nothing to do with health. But oftentimes there are lots of people who

00:13:56.660 exercise a shitload and eat really well and they're fat. And there's a lot of people who 0.66

00:14:00.920 never exercise. We all know these people and they're skinny. And so we're not trying to sort

00:14:05.800 of transfer the stigma. Like let's be shitty to people who don't exercise regardless of their

00:14:11.020 weight, right? It's more about like taking the actual like the blaminess out of the whole thing

00:14:15.460 altogether. And I would say our research around fatness is very fundamentally shaped by our

00:14:23.840 existing biases and beliefs about fatness and fat people, right? There was a big deal study in like

00:14:30.480 maybe 10 years ago from the CDC was the first time they had studied anything funded any studies

00:14:37.500 related to lesbians. What? Oh, yeah. Their research question, the question that they

00:14:42.160 decided to fund, the very first one was, why are lesbians so fat? No way. 100%. The fundamental 1.00

00:14:51.400 research questions that we ask are not, hey, in what ways are fat people healthy? In what ways

00:14:57.160 are fat people, you know what I mean? Like, right. What's the role of bias in all of this? What's the

00:15:01.300 role of dieting in all of this? Yeah, the problem with these correlational studies is that fat

00:15:05.680 people have a lot more in common than just their weight, right? So another thing that links the

00:15:11.020 experience of fat people is worse medical care. Yeah. Because fat people often delay going to the

00:15:15.200 doctor because they know that doctors can be extremely stigmatizing about their weight. Like

00:15:19.560 I interviewed, I think it ended up being like 66 people for this article for HuffPost that I wrote

00:15:24.860 two years ago. Every single fat person who I interviewed has had terrible experiences with

00:15:30.080 the doctor. Like you go in for a migraine. I talked to one woman who was in a fucking train

00:15:35.300 accident and went in with like a dislocated shoulder. And the doctor said, how long have 0.99

00:15:40.200 you been this way? Yeah. There are all kinds of studies about the fact that fat people do actually

00:15:44.880 delay medical care. And so the idea that that would have some sort of effect on their health

00:15:50.360 over time is like not totally nuts. Like I have spoken to fat people who have had tumors like

00:15:56.140 growths that show up on their x-rays and their doctors will tell them oh lose weight before we

00:16:00.620 do anything about it and it turns out to be cancer 100 and i would say i had a doctor at

00:16:05.340 one point who i went in to uh to get examined and he would not touch me oh my god he was too

00:16:11.140 uncomfortable to make eye contact jesus christ and he told me to come back when i lost weight

00:16:16.240 oh it is often an indicator of the care that will follow oh yeah it is often an indicator that this

00:16:23.040 doctor or nurse or whatever stripe of healthcare provider is not actually equipped to care for you

00:16:29.060 because their biases are so front and center right because this is the only thing that they

00:16:34.620 can talk about and because doctors are frankly trained to assess patients on like what's the

00:16:39.980 most likely cause of x and such thing right and for most folks it is like visually presents that

00:16:46.000 you are fat therefore whatever you were having yeah must be a cause of that i will say i also

00:16:50.360 went in at one point i am like a 36 year old baby in that my stress reaction is that i have ear 0.97

00:16:58.020 infections oh it's like fully like an infant okay like i just get these like i just need like

00:17:04.440 bubble gum amoxicillin or whatever to like get through these ear infections i went in at one

00:17:09.400 point and i had a double ear infection so one in each ear and the doctor was walking me through

00:17:15.040 sort of like you need to use these ear drops you need to take these antibiotics and i was like

00:17:19.300 great is there anything else i need to know about aftercare and he was like well you need to lose a

00:17:23.340 lot of weight oh my god and i was like cool i'm talking to you about my ear canals which definitely

00:17:28.800 did not get fat yeah he was so sort of ingrained with this idea that like every fat person needed

00:17:35.680 to hear from him that they needed to lose weight in every interaction this to me is the much more

00:17:42.840 salient point like we could sit here and do studies back and forth about the complexity

00:17:48.740 of the relationship between weight and health and various you know small studies and big studies like

00:17:53.740 we could talk about the science for a thousand years and we will eventually do an episode on

00:17:58.220 the science around weight and health but it doesn't fucking matter yeah so even if every 0.65

00:18:05.000 single thing that your doctor and my anesthesiologist guy even if every single thing that they think is 0.74

00:18:11.120 true. Every single fat person is unhealthy. Great. You are correct, sir. Congratulations. 0.97

00:18:16.940 Now what? Yeah. We know from a billion studies for a billion years that between 95 and 98 percent

00:18:25.020 of attempts to lose weight fail. We also know that out of many of those attempts,

00:18:30.080 people end up gaining weight. Yeah. So what do we do with that information? Because we know that

00:18:36.260 telling people to lose weight does not help. We know that putting them on unsustainable diets

00:18:41.760 makes it worse. Whenever I tell people that I wrote this article or that, you know, this is

00:18:46.780 a really important issue to me, everybody wants to debate the fucking science. And they're like, 0.99

00:18:50.280 oh, what about calories? Like you get into these technical scientific debates immediately and they

00:18:55.520 don't fucking matter. Be nice to people. Like what fat people need is for their basic humanity 0.90

00:19:00.540 to be acknowledged. They need a medical system that actually asks them what they need. Like

00:19:05.580 what's going on with your ear, Aubrey? Like, that's what people need. They don't actually

00:19:09.400 need to be told for the 10 billionth time, lose weight, because that doesn't fucking work. 0.97

00:19:14.760 Well, it does do one thing, which is it makes us fatter. 0.98

00:19:18.640 Oh, right. It just makes it worse. Good point.

00:19:20.340 Totally. So the experience of anti-fat bias amongst fat people is extremely universal.

00:19:26.740 94%, I think, of fat people in the US report experiencing some form of anti-fat bias like

00:19:32.700 recently. Yeah, it's bad. And most frequently, that comes from family, friends, partners,

00:19:39.940 right? Folks will report about partners actually restricting their food intake or monitoring their

00:19:45.220 food intake. But it also comes from people like their doctors and their bosses and strangers on

00:19:50.600 the street and co-workers. It just comes from all sides, right? And what we know from research is

00:19:56.280 that that triggers what researchers call obesogenic processes, my least favorite term.

00:20:02.700 not great, which is a series of processes that actually make us fatter. In some cases,

00:20:08.480 it's a result of cortisol and other stress hormones, right? That hang on to whatever

00:20:12.520 energy you have got for your fight or flight response, right? That we don't really think

00:20:17.220 about the ways in which we are sort of triggering these biological responses in fat people by the

00:20:23.020 way that we treat them. Right.

00:20:24.760 To your point earlier about your article, one of the things that absolutely blew my mind about

00:20:29.480 that article. I've read it, I'm going to say 10 times. I just go back to it all the time and

00:20:34.720 recommend it to people constantly. It's so good, buddy. It's so good. I tried to interview for it

00:20:40.200 and you ghosted me on the internet. I'm still mad about it. You know what? The year that I ghosted

00:20:46.060 everyone. Fair enough. Within like the first year of writing as your fat friend, I was just like,

00:20:53.920 I don't know what to do with this level of attention. So I'm going to fully hide and not

00:20:57.440 respond to a single email like i don't know why i set up an email address oh anyway one of the

00:21:04.120 things that i sort of pulled from that article and that i think about constantly is that actually

00:21:09.500 the fatter you get the less likely it is that you will become thin in your lifetime right

00:21:14.960 which sort of stands to reason but particularly for people my size and particularly for women

00:21:21.060 my size so people with uh what they call uh an extremely obese bmi oh these designations

00:21:28.200 yeah or super morbidly obese is the other one i get cool cool cool yeah makes me feel like a

00:21:34.680 super villain yeah is that for women my size there is less than a one tenth of one percent chance

00:21:42.640 yeah that we at any point in our lives get to what is considered a quote-unquote healthy or

00:21:49.320 normal BMI, right? So we are talking about infinitesimal likelihood that this will succeed.

00:21:57.160 And all of our treatment of fat people is predicated on the idea that this is not only

00:22:02.100 possible, but if you can't do it, it's because there's something wrong with you.

00:22:06.700 And it's necessary. It's like, no, you have to do this thing that is almost sure to fail and

00:22:12.460 is likely to make whatever you have worse. And it's also, it's double dumb because we know, 0.98

00:22:18.420 Because, again, there's dozens of studies on this that regardless of the weight that you are at, if you eat well and exercise regularly, that's going to do a shitload for your health. 0.78

00:22:28.260 You might lose weight and you might not.

00:22:29.880 Yeah.

00:22:30.060 It's much more important to focus on people's lifestyles and something that they actually can control rather than weight, which people can't really control to the extent that we think they can.

00:22:39.480 a huge number of people are fat because of various medications that they took or, you know,

00:22:45.800 they can't walk around the block because they're disabled or they have a hip replacement or 0.97

00:22:49.860 there's a million reasons why people are at the weight that they are at. And there's not a lot 0.91

00:22:54.660 that they can do about it. I mean, I also think that like that, that whole thing of like lifestyle

00:22:59.600 choices and stuff. I mean, that's basically a conversation between somebody and their doctor.

00:23:04.400 I am not in the business of surveilling my friends to see how many minutes of exercise

00:23:09.900 they're getting every day and how many fruits and vegetables they're eating.

00:23:12.820 Like, I'm saying that from like, from an epidemiological perspective, we know that

00:23:16.560 lifestyle changes affect health.

00:23:18.260 On a personal level, it's really not up to you to monitor the lifestyle choices of your

00:23:24.340 friends, fat or skinny.

00:23:25.780 Totally.

00:23:26.260 And also like the health concerns around fat people are also very restrictive, right?

00:23:30.980 There's not general concern about the health of fat people.

00:23:34.400 There is very specific concern about the weight of fat people and the weight-related things that might happen to them.

00:23:42.220 That's a good point.

00:23:42.980 Yeah, because nobody's ever like, oh, you know, fat people have higher rates of depression or higher rates of suicide, which are true.

00:23:49.180 Nobody's like, oh, we need to do something about this.

00:23:51.420 It's just like, oh, we need to make them not fat anymore.

00:23:53.540 That's the only extent to which we actually care about the health of fat people.

00:23:56.160 Yes.

00:23:56.540 I had an experience earlier this year, in fact.

00:23:59.980 I recently had to switch doctors because I switched insurance.

00:24:03.060 I went to a new doctor who I found through the Whisper network of fat people.

00:24:07.340 She ran my blood work and she was like, hey, so it looks like you are on a statin.

00:24:15.080 Can you tell me why that is?

00:24:16.880 And I was like, I don't know.

00:24:17.760 My last doctor said it was good to, you know, protect my heart and my kidneys and whatever.

00:24:22.140 And she was like, cool, cool, cool.

00:24:23.960 So your cholesterol is supposed to be between 1 and 200, right?

00:24:28.380 It's sort of the range of healthy cholesterol.

00:24:29.960 she was like that's a cholesterol medication and your cholesterol is 19 oh she was like it's the

00:24:38.000 lowest number i have ever seen whoa she said you know looking at past blood work she was like i'm

00:24:43.700 guessing you already had you know cholesterol that was on the low side just based on how you eat

00:24:49.040 right oh wow so the last doctor just gave you a statin just like because you were there just like

00:24:53.540 spray the fat lady with statins right i talked to a friend who's a physician assistant uh who said

00:24:59.340 actually there is a school of thought in medicine that is like you just put fat people on blood

00:25:05.180 pressure medication cholesterol medication and blood sugar medication just do it straight out

00:25:11.240 whether or not they're diabetic they're going on metformin whether or not they're they have high

00:25:15.000 blood pressure they're going on a blood pressure medication and that was part of what this doctor

00:25:19.420 had done and it put me at like a significant health risk right the risks of very low cholesterol are

00:25:25.700 the same basically as the risks of very high cholesterol so i was at like super increased

00:25:31.580 risk of stroke of like you know heart attack of like major major problems right and that was a

00:25:38.800 direct result of sort of like being treated the way that a fat person is treated and not even 0.97

00:25:44.060 telling you to that's fucked too to be like oh i'm gonna put aubrey on this but not just like tell 0.99

00:25:49.680 aubrey hey because you're fat i'm gonna put you on this medication it's just like sneak in the 0.99

00:25:53.680 satin right but so what what do you want i guess non-fat people to know about like the history of

00:25:59.760 all of this yeah so i mean i think the thing that i think about most often is we are in a moment of

00:26:06.820 like full moral panic about fat people right it bears repeating and is often sort of left out of

00:26:13.560 this conversation but like despite the fact that we are all freaking out about fat people at this

00:26:19.260 moment in our history, there have always been fat people, right? There may be more fat people now

00:26:26.840 than there used to be, but like people's bodies look different. There have also always been tall

00:26:31.580 people and short people, right? There have also always been disabled people. We have to get out

00:26:36.780 of this mode of like envisioning a world, which I think many public health institutions do and

00:26:42.100 many individuals do, which is that like the best and healthiest world doesn't have fat people in

00:26:47.780 I remember coming across, I haven't been able to find it again, actually, but I remember very vividly years ago looking into this and coming across a European, like a PDF from some European institution that was basically proposing that all public health messages should be geared toward health rather than weight.

00:27:06.780 Knowing what we know about how ineffective diets are, we're never going to have a world where there's deliberately fewer fat people.

00:27:14.060 So what we can do is focus on health because, honestly, diet-related disease is a real problem.

00:27:22.420 Like heart disease is a problem. 1.00

00:27:23.500 Strokes are a problem. 1.00

00:27:24.320 And I think I stole this from Kat Pauze. 1.00

00:27:26.460 I stole this from somebody.

00:27:28.460 But it's like we've given up health to focus on weight.

00:27:32.440 That's the point of public health is to make us healthier.

00:27:34.760 It should not be the point of public health to make us skinnier.

00:27:36.820 I personally think that weight and weight-related messages should have no role in public health

00:27:43.800 whatsoever.

00:27:45.020 I pretty strongly agree.

00:27:46.820 I mean, I also think like part of, you know, if we really want to tackle sort of the sets

00:27:52.960 of issues that you're talking about here, diet-related disease, you know, getting people

00:27:57.380 moving regularly, getting people eating more vegetables, all of that kind of stuff, then

00:28:01.240 we need to create the conditions in which that is possible, right?

00:28:04.560 Oh, yeah.

00:28:05.140 Oh, yeah.

00:28:05.480 So we need to address the conditions that have parents and particularly single parents working multiple jobs to make ends meet, which means there is no time to prepare food and there's often no money to buy like fancier, fresher foods, right?

00:28:19.840 Right. We also have to, if we really want to get at, you know, sort of a collective and healthier society, we actually paradoxically need to stop treating health as a mandate and as a moral obligation. Right. And we need to stop believing that we can assess another person's that we can and should assess another person's health by looking at them.

00:28:45.760 If you really want to help somebody's health, build them a bike lane.

00:28:48.380 You know what?

00:28:49.340 Get out there with cones.

00:28:50.580 Totally.

00:28:51.020 If you really want to help somebody's health, make sure they have a living wage.

00:28:53.960 Yeah.

00:28:54.140 Make sure they have a place to live. 1.00

00:28:55.840 Make sure they have enough money for food. 0.95

00:28:57.740 I mean, the corollary to my belief that public health should give up on weight and focus

00:29:02.720 exclusively on actual public health is basically the idea that individual messages and cajoling 0.97

00:29:09.560 messages and fucking billboard campaigns don't work.

00:29:12.780 We've had 30, 40 years now of telling people that fruits and vegetables are healthy, that everybody should get 30 minutes of exercise every day. 0.99

00:29:20.340 I don't know if there's an American alive who doesn't know that.

00:29:23.060 In the same way, telling people cigarettes were bad for them did not work.

00:29:26.700 So to me, the primary goal needs to be changing the environment.

00:29:31.200 And like only 10% of kids today walk or bike to school.

00:29:35.300 It used to be 50%.

00:29:36.700 Very few people live close enough to their work that they can walk.

00:29:41.220 That's another thing.

00:29:42.100 like we need denser housing. Like there's all kinds of other policies that we need to make it

00:29:46.860 possible for people to live healthy lifestyles. Like right now, it's not really possible to buy

00:29:52.900 a bunch of fruits and vegetables and to like saute broccoli for dinner unless you can afford it.

00:29:57.380 So to me, I really have no interest in telling any particular individual you need to do X.

00:30:03.200 It's really much more about like, well, let's just have a shitload of bike lanes to school

00:30:06.180 and like really wide sidewalks so that kids who want to walk to school can. And some kids aren't

00:30:10.660 going to want to, and some kids won't be able to, and that's fine. The first thing has to be

00:30:15.440 focusing on like, what can we do to help people? And I really don't think that there's any point

00:30:20.580 in like telling people for the one billionth time that like apples are better for you than

00:30:24.900 Snickers bars. Totally. And also like, you know, again, if we're looking at sort of creating a

00:30:29.960 world in which it's possible for folks to make individual choices, right? We sort of, we really

00:30:35.340 like to focus in on personal responsibility it's this weird moment when like everyone becomes like

00:30:41.840 a hardline republican right we talk about fatness everyone's like personal responsibility bootstraps

00:30:47.660 willpower blah blah right yeah should uh should we talk about vocabulary briefly yeah what do you

00:30:54.000 want to say about vocabulary i mean just that whenever i talk about this i mean i do actually

00:30:57.980 feel a little bit weird about this as like a thin dude talking about fat people and i use the word

00:31:02.580 fat because I have been asked to, and that is my understanding from people who are in these spaces

00:31:08.020 who prefer to use the word fat rather than euphemisms like curvy or big boned or overweight

00:31:14.420 or obese, which are really medicalizing. But it's also an interesting term because it's sort of in

00:31:19.960 the process of being reclaimed that there are a huge number of people who do not feel comfortable

00:31:26.300 identifying, self-identifying as fat. Yeah. And some folks who are not fat, who have never been

00:31:31.780 fat who are very uncomfortable even hearing the word. Totally. Yes. Yeah. So yeah. Can you just

00:31:37.420 talk about that a little bit? So listen, the harm that comes to me as a fat person doesn't come

00:31:42.940 because someone calls me fat. It comes much more often because someone refuses to call me fat and

00:31:50.200 then treats me terribly anyway. Oh, okay. There's something that happens when I am with a person who

00:31:55.520 is willing to say the word fat. I know that they are not so afraid of my body that they will just

00:32:01.440 act out of their own weird biases, right? If someone is willing and able to say the word

00:32:06.760 fat in good faith, right? That tells me that they are as much concerned with how I identify myself

00:32:13.880 as they are with projecting their own beliefs about fatness and fat people onto me by calling

00:32:19.380 me like fluffy or like more to love or whatever, right? The sort of challenges that fat people

00:32:24.740 face don't come from a word. They come from the ways that we treat fat people. And if we can't

00:32:31.620 talk about that in a direct and honest way, we are always going to fall short in addressing sort

00:32:37.480 of what fat people need. And if we can't take direction from fat people in a conversation that

00:32:42.500 is fundamentally about us, right? Like part of what we're talking about here is that we have

00:32:46.180 been talking for the last, you know, 30 or 40 years about flipping out about fat people existing.

00:32:52.020 And overwhelmingly, that conversation has happened without fat people's participation.

00:32:57.180 Can I ask, how have you identified over the years?

00:32:59.580 Oh, around my body?

00:33:01.220 Yeah.

00:33:01.640 I just didn't for a long time.

00:33:04.040 Oh, yeah.

00:33:04.380 I totally remember having this experience at work.

00:33:07.960 I spent years as a community organizer and political organizer.

00:33:12.380 And I had this experience with a good, good friend of mine who was a co-worker at the time.

00:33:18.080 we were loading out boxes of materials from the state capitol and we had these huge boxes that

00:33:25.420 we were carrying just in our arms right we didn't have like a hand truck or anything we had to go up

00:33:29.780 two flights of stairs to get the materials to where they needed to be and i just looked at him

00:33:34.580 and i was like fuck it i'm taking the elevator and i went over and like with my one free finger

00:33:39.660 right press the press the up button on the elevator and he looked at me and sort of grinned 0.97

00:33:44.540 then went is that why you're you know large oh wow he was a good friend and he said it sort of

00:33:51.460 with a twinkle in his eye and honestly like my first response was absolute terror that he had

00:33:56.820 noticed i was so terrified that he had said anything about my size that i felt like my

00:34:02.740 whole job in the world was to get people to forget that i was fat which is an impossible task yeah i

00:34:09.600 am five foot six people are gonna notice right totally there's just sort of like core physical

00:34:14.360 characteristics that are going to follow us around. And I remember being first mortified

00:34:19.600 that he had noticed, and then absolutely delighted that he had actually just said something.

00:34:25.620 That's interesting.

00:34:26.180 But that was the first time that I really started like talking about being fat.

00:34:30.660 Did it feel really good?

00:34:31.540 It felt immensely freeing, right? I'd spent 20 some years hiding from my own body.

00:34:38.740 that is an impossible task right like wherever you go there you are do you have like a coming

00:34:45.680 out process now like when you meet new people do you do you have like a way of telling them like

00:34:51.140 this is a safe thing to talk about with me oh i just lead with it oh yeah i'm just like look i'm

00:34:55.940 fat and i'm queer yeah i try not to shoehorn it into conversations but i do try and make sure that

00:35:00.920 it is present in my first couple of conversations with someone to just let them know that i know

00:35:07.100 that i'm fat and that i don't have weird baggage around talking about it i don't you know what i

00:35:13.700 mean like i don't feel it doesn't feel emotionally heavy to me to talk about being fat and actually

00:35:18.320 it feels incredibly liberating it is very interesting because i feel like we have in

00:35:22.060 our brains this coming out narrative for gay people but the coming out process for a fat

00:35:29.540 person is like there isn't really a script for fat people to do it and there isn't really a 0.51

00:35:33.380 script for like nonfat people to sort of react to it totally we're totally not used to it and

00:35:38.700 what usually happens in that moment if you have like a concerted conversation that is like look

00:35:44.960 i'm fat i'm not trying to lose weight because that has never worked for me right and i'm just

00:35:50.620 going to be a fat person that what usually happens in that conversation it feels very

00:35:56.620 reminiscent of my like coming out conversations in the 90s around being queer which is thin people

00:36:02.260 will then unleash their many anxieties about becoming fat onto you oh my god that's like when 0.62

00:36:08.040 i used to tell my teenage guy friends that i was gay and they'd be like sometimes i watch gay porn 0.98

00:36:13.380 man and i'm like i don't need to we don't need to go there for this or like one time in in boarding

00:36:19.580 school a dude gave me a hand job i'm like i don't need to know we're both interns we don't need to

00:36:24.540 share this i will say one crossover question that i get both for being fat and for being queer is 0.96

00:36:30.580 how do you have sex oh my god for people who just want to know like how does it work right like

00:36:36.300 it's truly just like people's id just jumps out they're like here's a thing that i can't control

00:36:41.900 that i have to say to you right now right no there's totally not there's not really that

00:36:46.460 kind of script for coming out there's not really a script for reacting to it because i feel like

00:36:50.460 people are used to the sort of like the fat person who makes like self-deprecating jokes about being

00:36:56.500 fat like that's a script that most of us are familiar with but i think the thing that people

00:37:01.180 find really threatening is i am fat and i am not trying to lose weight yeah that as a concept is 0.54

00:37:07.920 weirdly like really fucking triggering for like non-fat people it's fascinating people have such

00:37:13.540 strong reactions to a fat person who is not actively performing shame yeah either in the 0.96

00:37:20.980 form of self-deprecating jokes or pratfalls or any of that kind of stuff, or in terms of,

00:37:27.480 I promise you I ate a salad today, like reporting out to them, right? Sin people often expect that

00:37:33.800 fat people will report out what we are eating, how we are exercising, how it's going, how much

00:37:39.260 weight we've lost, right? Those are the first things that they need to hear from us in order

00:37:43.760 to engage further at all. It's real wild. I'm curious about, you mentioned sort of response

00:37:49.840 to your article like here i am talking about sort of coming out quote unquote as a fat person

00:37:55.100 i'm super curious about sort of like what was the kind of what were the kinds of responses that you

00:37:59.820 got oh my god many of the responses were like people sharing their personal stories which were

00:38:04.220 like i was like weeping reading emails i was writing people back like the the sort of emotional

00:38:08.180 response from actual fat people was extremely gratifying and it seems like it touched people

00:38:12.740 which makes me really happy but then the response from non-fat people i don't know if you get these

00:38:18.960 But I got probably 50 or 100 emails from older, like 40 to 70-year-old dudes, all of which were like, no, no, no, no, no.

00:38:30.940 I have it figured out.

00:38:32.200 What the fat people don't know is there's actually this system. 0.99

00:38:35.600 And then they would walk through this like baroque fucking clockwork diet thing that they had figured out. 0.98

00:38:41.760 And it was like, eat like no more than 600 calories before 7 a.m. 0.98

00:38:45.160 And then switch to only carbs and then protein at night. 0.98

00:38:48.060 Like some of them were like eight pages long and all the diet plans were fucking nuts, dude. 0.68

00:38:52.800 It was like eat nothing but venison on Wednesdays and then like collard greens on like Thursdays from seven to eight. 0.89

00:39:00.740 Yeah.

00:39:00.860 I mean like the other thing that I get and I don't know if you get this.

00:39:03.720 I'm sort of like exploring this lately is the you've got blood on your hands.

00:39:08.280 Oh, see, I didn't get that as much.

00:39:10.320 So I get a lot of like you're killing people.

00:39:13.700 Glorifying obesity.

00:39:14.660 I got a lot of the glorifying obesity one.

00:39:16.580 That was great.

00:39:17.180 which is also which is fascinating because nobody ever talks about glorifying thinness

00:39:20.920 which is what we do all the time and like we know how damaging it is to glorify thinness to the

00:39:26.640 extent that we do but no it's like that's like that's fine because thinness is healthy right 0.96

00:39:31.220 like all the eating disorders that like fucking teenage girls are getting totally fine you know 0.90

00:39:35.180 because thinness is good but glorifying obesity like that's really dangerous yeah and also 0.98

00:39:39.880 glorifying obesity quote unquote like that is a response to one of two things it's either work

00:39:46.000 like mine that's like hey maybe treat fat people more like people right or it's like a fat person

00:39:52.340 posts a picture of themselves at the beach on their personal instagram account and then people

00:39:56.700 are like you're glorifying obesity and i'm like i don't know man it's literally lizzo like riding

00:40:01.660 a bicycle like everybody relax it's just like lizzo having an enjoyable day and then all the 0.97

00:40:07.600 comments are just fucking poisonous yes any picture of a fat person engaging in any kind of physical 0.97

00:40:13.480 activity yeah showing any kind of skin or with any kind of food in frame with them oh yeah are 0.99

00:40:20.500 all glorifying obesity i mean that's the thing of like not trying to lose weight though of like

00:40:24.800 just the image of a happy fat person it's amazing to me how threatening people find it yeah you know

00:40:30.940 i'm fat i'm in a bikini i'm on a beach i got a hot dog it's like that is enough to send people 0.78

00:40:36.280 into this like spiral of rage it's incredible yeah i mean i think so this is like the the white

00:40:43.260 whale right of my like writing and research is to figure out what that is about what is your answer

00:40:51.160 to that you have a theory i've had a few theories over time so early on one of my thoughts was oh

00:40:58.660 my god you feel like you have had to work so hard and be so vigilant to stay thin and you've been

00:41:06.960 so terrified of being fat that you've done all of this work to avoid being fat and now you're

00:41:13.020 seeing a person who actually is fat and is doing fine and it makes you mad another one of the

00:41:18.120 theories was this one feels closer to the mark to me but not quite it that like the way that people

00:41:24.140 talk to me as a fat person right like people like shout things from passing calls right like that's

00:41:30.100 the level that we're operating at and i've heard from other fat people and particularly people who

00:41:33.640 are fatter than i am who will talk about people throwing trash at them and i think in some cases

00:41:39.960 people are talking to me as their nightmare future self that they are so they object so

00:41:46.360 strenuously to my body that they get so strident and kind of mean frankly about like how to diet

00:41:53.120 and you have to do this and there's like such energy behind it that I'm like oh you're talking 0.98

00:41:57.800 to you are talking to yourself I actually think so much of the blame for that kind of shit I mean 0.96

00:42:03.080 obviously goes to the people doing that but also to like public health messaging I mean the sort 0.99

00:42:07.860 of the basic presumption of every, you know, billboard eat five fruits and vegetables a day

00:42:13.420 poster we've ever seen in our lives is it is bad to be fat and fat people are unhealthy. There

00:42:18.960 really aren't any positive messages about like leave fat people alone or like fat people are

00:42:24.960 fine or somebody else's health is none of your business. All of us have grown up in this just

00:42:29.700 toxic sludge of like being fat is the worst possible outcome for you. We have sort of been

00:42:36.740 so careless with the way that we talk about fatness and fat people, that we are now at the

00:42:42.820 point that instead of when we talk about health risks, we're actually talking about people,

00:42:46.840 right? And when we talk about people, we're talking about them as if they are health risks,

00:42:50.080 right? Like human health risks. And of course, that's going to have a huge impact on, you know,

00:42:56.140 the lion's share of Americans who have BMIs that put them in the overweight or obese category,

00:43:01.980 right? That's most of us at this point. I mean, I have interviewed public health

00:43:06.140 professionals about this and sort of put this argument to them. And the answer that I have

00:43:11.260 gotten back, and I think this has really become the sort of standard answer from public health

00:43:16.360 is this idea that like, okay, weight stigma is bad, but it's okay to stigmatize the condition

00:43:21.620 like obesity is bad, but without stigmatizing individual fat people. And I think that that

00:43:29.640 is impossible. I don't think that in a billboard campaign that is like presenting a very simple

00:43:36.500 message, right? Eat vegetables or else you will become fat. There is no way to do that in a way

00:43:42.320 that is not going to make people think that must mean that every single fat person refuses to eat

00:43:48.300 vegetables. Yes. Right. There's no way to not send that same message at the same time.

00:43:52.740 And it's extremely like there are so many parts of our conversation around like fatness and fat

00:43:58.560 people that feel like echoes of our conversations around gayness and gay people and transness and

00:44:03.480 trans people, which is we are spinning our wheels for so long on two very basic, very terrible

00:44:12.960 strategies, right? One is love the sinner, hate the sin, right? Yes. This belief that you can 0.99

00:44:20.840 reject a core part of who someone is and how they move through the world, but still somehow embrace

00:44:27.420 them. We have seen time and time again that this does not work and that it is deeply alienating

00:44:32.260 and stigmatizing. Right. And the other one that we spend a ton of time on is this idea that like

00:44:37.820 it's a choice. Right. Thin people will continue to behave terribly toward fat people until they

00:44:43.600 feel personally convinced that it is not a choice. Right. And no amount of data will do that

00:44:48.800 convincing. Right. The only times that I have really seen thin people turn around on this is

00:44:54.300 like the experiences that you're talking about, right? Of like, seeing someone very close to you

00:44:59.180 diet for a super long time, seeing how hard they try over the course of years, and how terribly

00:45:07.540 they are treated. That is actually like the only thing that I'm aware of that meaningfully turns

00:45:13.060 thin people around on this stuff. That's dark. It's super dark. And I know from being a queer

00:45:19.040 person who has done organizing around queer and trans rights for like a decade plus that like we

00:45:25.840 will spend years stuck on that conversation and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether or

00:45:32.040 not it's a choice it is a code word for i'm not comfortable with you yet somehow people are

00:45:38.200 convincing themselves that like yelling at a fat person from their car is like less of a moral

00:45:43.360 transgression than like being fat. Do you know what I mean? Like you can maintain your self-conception

00:45:48.980 as a good person, even while you are literally as an adult bullying other people. You're like,

00:45:54.360 no, no, but her being fat, that's bad. Me shouting at a random stranger from my car,

00:45:59.360 that's chill. Not only that's chill, but like the number of people who say garbage things to me and 0.99

00:46:05.780 then look so proud of themselves. Oh, I know. Yeah. It's like, oh, I must like, oh, I would 0.98

00:46:10.560 be remiss if i didn't tell this person to lose weight ridiculous i did my good deed for the day

00:46:16.860 i yelled at a fat person right and that helped them right like that is the belief here is that

00:46:22.100 like my abuse is to make you the best you right versus what i'm doing is abuse right like by any

00:46:30.020 stretch of the imagination shouting at people from a passing car that is an abusive thing to do the

00:46:37.380 The only times that it is appropriate to do that

00:46:39.340 is when somebody has a cute dog

00:46:40.560 and you say, hello, little friend.

00:46:42.660 I would love it.

00:46:43.580 Then it's okay.

00:46:44.240 I mean, like I had,

00:46:45.160 I tweeted about this recently

00:46:46.460 that I was wearing sort of like workout clothes

00:46:49.620 when I went to walk my dog

00:46:51.240 and someone's like stopped me to be like,

00:46:54.440 good for you, you'll get there.

00:46:56.160 I know, I saw you tweeting about that

00:46:57.860 and like my entire face

00:46:59.400 just like collapsed in on itself with a cringe.

00:47:02.000 I was just like, oh, galactic cringe.

00:47:06.480 Totally.

00:47:06.880 And that was a person who was absolutely, like, she sort of puffed out her chest and was, like, smiling really big.

00:47:12.740 Like, we did it.

00:47:13.800 We're doing it.

00:47:14.860 You're working out.

00:47:15.700 I'm complimenting you for working out.

00:47:17.420 Oh, my God. 1.00

00:47:18.060 This is not a workout, ma'am. 1.00

00:47:19.920 Don't.

00:47:20.280 I'm walking around two blocks.

00:47:22.180 She should have said, hello, little friend.

00:47:24.100 That's the key.

00:47:24.760 Totally.

00:47:25.140 Just say your dog is adorable, which he is.

00:47:27.080 That would be correct.

00:47:27.920 What did you say to that person, actually?

00:47:29.540 I just, like, waved and kept moving.

00:47:31.500 I didn't say anything because I was just like, I'm not going to see this person ever again.

00:47:34.340 Right?

00:47:34.480 Like, there's a calculus.

00:47:35.360 it's a little bit of like organizer brain, right? It's like, how deep is my investment in this

00:47:39.880 person and our relationship? And how much energy do I want to put into it consequently, right?

00:47:45.320 Like, I also had a person a few years ago, stopped me on the street and without even saying hello,

00:47:49.900 just said, Hey, have you heard about this weight loss surgery clinic? They're really good, right?

00:47:54.880 Like, that was another person who absolutely felt like they were doing their good deed for the day.

00:47:59.420 If that had come from a family member or a close friend or a co-worker or someone who I was going

00:48:04.960 to see more often and or if i felt like i was in a place of like really being ready to tackle it

00:48:11.080 then i would yeah in both of those cases i was like i am literally passing you by on the street

00:48:15.940 i am not spending time on this or on you that's like an emotional labor thing too of do you really

00:48:21.260 want to stop and spend 45 minutes like actually the peer-reviewed literature doesn't indicate

00:48:24.920 that weight and health are perfectly correlated like it's not your job and it's just it's

00:48:29.320 exhausting and you have other things to do today totally i mean i will say there are times when i

00:48:34.540 have done that with people in the street. Like a couple years ago, it was like 106 or something in

00:48:39.600 Portland, Oregon, which is where I live. So I walked to work and was wearing a like sleeveless

00:48:46.340 dress. And I was walking past a coffee shop outside my office. And this guy, I would just

00:48:51.280 walk past this guy and he just went, nobody wants to see that. And I was just like, first of all,

00:48:57.260 like, what are you doing? This is absurd. And I turned around and I just said, it's 106 degrees

00:49:02.380 today what do you think i should be wearing yeah fuck that guy and he got really sheepish and he 0.99

00:49:07.100 just went not that okay did you think about giving that guy a noogie just getting him under your arm 1.00

00:49:12.900 and just rubbing his head with your knuckles i think that would be just full wedgie was there

00:49:16.540 a toilet nearby could could there be a twister situation yeah i think you have those in your

00:49:21.360 arsenal we're talking a lot about weight stigma here and i also think there's something else that

00:49:25.440 we're going to talk about here, which is the role that capitalism plays in our understandings of

00:49:32.920 health and wellness, right? But like, a lot of the things that we think of as like, tried and true

00:49:38.420 public health knowledge as just like people out in the world is actually like a direct result of

00:49:43.320 advertising campaigns, right? Yeah, electrolytes. It is Gatorade marketing that has taught you that

00:49:48.540 you need to drink a sports drink. That's not real. You can have a banana or a glass of water.

00:49:52.620 It's fine. Yes. Probiotics are important in your digestive tract. And we don't know how to change

00:50:00.680 the bacteria composition in your gut. There's all this stuff that we so want to believe. We so want

00:50:07.220 to believe that we can exert a level of control over our own individual health. And like what we

00:50:12.080 know and what disability justice activists have taught us for a long time is that health is a 0.92

00:50:17.220 privilege it is an accident and it is it is necessarily sort of transitory right yes i would

00:50:23.500 also say that actual health advice like the things that we know from various peer-reviewed studies

00:50:30.860 and don't have tens of millions of dollars in marketing campaigns behind them are extremely

00:50:35.480 boring there is a vast array of healthy diets in the world right like there are healthy japanese

00:50:41.560 people they're healthy greek people they're healthy ugandan people these are countries with

00:50:45.580 wildly diverse diets. And we know that humans can be healthy with very different mixes of food,

00:50:53.560 mixes of macro ingredients. There's not going to be a single thing that is bad for you. There is

00:50:59.340 no such thing as a superfood. In general, the most important thing is finding foods that you like.

00:51:05.780 And all of the stuff you already know is good for you is good for you. And all of the stuff

00:51:09.940 you already know is bad for you is bad for you. And it's fine to eat stuff that is bad for you.

00:51:14.880 like if you want a brownie have a fucking brownie like yeah there's not going to be like this acai 0.99

00:51:19.620 berry i'm probably mispronouncing that even that like some weird smoothie that you drink that is 0.99

00:51:25.500 all of a sudden going to make you healthy or you're going to cut this one thing out of your

00:51:29.440 diet unless you have like a specific food allergy cutting one thing out of your diet or only eating

00:51:34.500 one particular thing is not going to be the road to wellness like that isn't really how our bodies

00:51:39.580 work. Well, it's also all very like Ponce de Leon, right? It's all very fountain of youth,

00:51:45.280 right? Oh, yeah. What we are addressing is not our actual health needs. What we are addressing

00:51:49.660 is not specific concerns about our own family history of X, Y, or Z condition. We are addressing

00:51:57.260 our own fear of aging. We are addressing our own profound fear of disability. And we are addressing

00:52:03.980 our own fear of our own mortality all of which are part of being human right there's also the

00:52:10.920 thing that people do not owe you healthiness yeah if you're interested in your health and

00:52:16.000 you really want to eat the healthiest diet that you can like that's great people have different

00:52:19.520 hobbies yeah but i think the only extent to which we're going to give specific advice on this show

00:52:25.380 is to not assume that your body is going to be relevant for other people's bodies that like

00:52:32.140 maybe you have a vegetarian diet and you love your vegetarian diet and like you have a ton of

00:52:35.760 energy and you're super happy with it great other people are not going to feel that way and just

00:52:40.700 because you are really diligent about getting your five fruits and vegetables a day doesn't mean that

00:52:45.020 other people want to be diligent about that or have to be diligent about that or can or can i

00:52:51.140 mean especially for cost but also like for various disability reasons a lot of people cannot do the

00:52:56.220 things that you can do or don't want to do the things that you want to do and it's fine to tell

00:53:01.820 people about like the health behaviors that you have without thinking or implying that they should

00:53:07.780 do those too like it's completely fine for you to tweak and mess with and optimize your health as

00:53:13.800 much as you feel fit but other people don't want to do that they have other things going on in their

00:53:18.420 lives or health means something different to them or they're focusing on their mental health and 0.79

00:53:21.760 they don't give a shit what they eat right now so like the only sort of like 10 simple tricks 0.87

00:53:26.900 life hacks that we're going to give you is just like mind your own house and whatever other people 0.98

00:53:31.700 are doing is really not any of your business. Totally. I will say anecdotally, I have a good

00:53:37.660 friend who is on social security disability. She lives in low income housing where they do not have

00:53:44.000 kitchens in their apartments. They just have microwaves and they have like a big roach 0.85

00:53:48.520 problems right in her building. So she can't and doesn't keep fresh food in the house. And also 0.99

00:53:54.140 she doesn't have the money for it, right? She is also diabetic. And she has found TV dinners that 0.99

00:54:01.640 she can afford that don't spike her blood sugar. So she eats like banquet frozen meals. That is

00:54:08.760 the healthiest choice that that woman could possibly make. Right. And that is a significant 1.00

00:54:14.700 leap forward for her own management of her own diabetes. And that is a big part of what all of

00:54:22.240 our public health campaigns are like, definitely don't do this. Under no circumstances should you

00:54:26.520 do this. And I'm like, that's actually like the best she has done in the 10 years that I have

00:54:31.900 known her. She does not need your seven page long email about how has she tried switching to an all

00:54:38.860 meat diet from 6pm to 8pm every night. Like, this is totally this is not what people actually need.

00:54:45.740 If that's your diet, and you're all venison all the time, have a blast, my friend. But that is

00:54:51.500 that going to work for everybody. Yeah. If, you know, this friend of mine pays her rent,

00:54:56.020 pays her phone bill, and at the end of that has $40 left for the month for food,

00:55:01.240 yes, she will be eating banquet dinners. And no, she can't make your like,

00:55:05.280 cool zucchini noodles that you found in the New York Times. Yeah. Like, I say that as someone who

00:55:10.360 makes a lot of zucchini noodles and a lot of New York Times recipes. Yeah. Putting a farmer's

00:55:15.000 market in her neighborhood is not what she needs. Right. You know, it's like food stamps that cover 1.00

00:55:19.540 more than 18 bucks a month exactly and she needs some fucking celebration of her accomplishment of 1.00

00:55:25.160 like figuring out how to manage an incredibly complex chronic illness on like zero dollars 1.00

00:55:31.600 like she is like fully like dietary health macgyver yeah no kidding with that stuff so

00:55:38.140 eat as much venison or as little venison as you require enjoy your however you eat as your hobby

00:55:44.640 Yeah. And leave Lizzo alone.

00:55:46.920 And tune it. I mean, I feel like I'm so excited about the conversations that we have had that we're going to continue to have right on this podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you all about like, not just the world of weight stigma, but also the world of like, wellness companies that are making their money off of, you know, sort of our insecurities, right? And the ways that they are sort of perpetuating those.

00:56:10.360 I'm super interested to, like, have these conversations about sort of, again, like, the role of capitalism and class and race and ability and all that sort of stuff on health and wellness.

00:56:21.200 And I'm really excited to, like, have a conversation that is, like, pretty dramatically underserved.

00:56:26.400 Sorry, I wasn't paying attention to any of that.

00:56:28.100 I had another window open where I'm ordering a jade egg off of Goop.com.

00:56:32.060 Really sorry.

00:56:33.460 You're just going to have to repeat that, please.

00:56:40.360 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - October 11, 2020

What's Our Deal？

Episode Stats

Transcript