“Glorifying Obesity” And Other Myths About Fat People

Am I tagging us in or are you tagging us in?

I'm tagging us in because it's your book.

Here we go.

It's my tagline.

Welcome to Maintenance Phase,

the podcast that doesn't talk about myths when we talk about fat.

Okay.

I'm trying to blend your first book and your second book.

My two

mouthfuls of titles.

19 When we myth about fat.

I'm Aubrey Gordon.

I'm Michael Hobbs.

If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/slash maintenance phase.

You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts if that's easier for you and you prefer.

You should also listen to Mike's new show, If Books Could Kill.

And today, Michael, we are talking about a book that I wrote.

Yeah, usually when you say that about my little podcast, I'm like, and you should pre-order Aubrey's book.

But we're approaching the stage where you can just like order, order Aubrey's book.

Yeah, we're releasing this a week before it comes out into the world.

So if you are so inclined, you can pre-order it.

For folks who are unfamiliar, pre-orders matter a great deal to the success of a given book.

So if you're looking forward to a book, I would strongly recommend pre-ordering it just in general.

You guys, if Aubrey's on the New York Times bestseller list, she gets to put that in her LinkedIn bio for the rest of her life.

So I'm acutely aware that poor Aubrey has spent the last month doing press for the book.

So she has been asked every fucking question about it like 300 times.

And she's been telling me how sick she is of answering all the same questions and giving the same spiel.

So I'm going to try really hard like not to pitch you any like softball questions that you've answered a billion times.

But I will say I spent the Christmas holiday reading Aubrey's book and really enjoying it, actually.

I say actually as if I was like surprised, but like, no, of course.

It's like, wow, her book is actually pretty good.

This lady actually knows how to string together a sentence.

But it's just a really good primer of a lot of the stuff that we talk about on the show.

It's a great overview of sort of where we are on this issue.

It's obviously extremely well written, extremely well researched.

People have this idea that it's like you're just going to have to feel guilty when you read books like this, but it's actually like super fun to read, super easy, great airplane read.

I don't mean that in a mean way.

I was going to say,

future topic on if books could kill.

Given the rest of my career, I do not mean that meanly.

I think on this episode, we're not going to go through the entire book because a lot of it is stuff that you've covered on the show before.

There's a chapter about why the BMI sucks, and there's a chapter about why calories in, calories out sucks, and various other things that we've already covered on the show.

So So for this episode, we pulled out a couple of the myths that we kind of haven't covered on the show to like dig deeper into them.

Yeah, 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?

Yes.

That 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?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or 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?

Right.

This is all that.

This is the like short form.

Here's the research.

Here's what you need to know.

And here are 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.

It's equivalent to like sending your dad a link in the group chat.

Be like, I don't have time to explain this to you.

Just bring Aubrey's book.

I'm done.

Here's the BMI stuff.

It occurs to me that we haven't actually said the title of the book yet.

The title of the book is You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People.

Yes, it sure is.

You can pre-order it wherever you get books.

You can also find a compilation of links at AubreyGordon.net/slash myths.

Although, considering it's your second book, I'm livid that it wasn't called Too Fat, Too Furious.

So we have chosen a couple of the specific myths to pull out and unpack.

Let's start with the emotional eating myth.

This is myth number nine.

Fat people are emotionally damaged and cope by eating their feelings.

This tends to be one of the explanations for fatness that is like one step better than like, they're all lazy and that's why they're fat right it's like no no no no no it's not that they're lazy it's that like something fucked up happened in their past totally so it sort of sounds sympathetic yeah but it's like an inch below the surface it's like oh they're all like wretched creatures who are who are eating because they have to totally it seems quote unquote better and nicer but what it is is pity right based on your appearance i can tell you're emotionally broken yeah yeah this one emotional eating was like a big one in my upbringing in the 80s and 90s.

It was like a really sort of prevailing model.

It has weirdly come back.

It's a big deal on TikTok these days.

Sort of the idea that fat is quote unquote like trauma trapped in your body and you need to release the trauma.

I'm curious about for you, this like emotional eating stuff.

Have you heard this before?

Where have you heard it the most?

Are there sort of like common sources of it in your life?

Actually, the main source of it is my mom.

One of her main struggles was emotional eating.

So for me, that actually became like one of the templates that I used to understand fatness when I was younger.

And like, my mom was the only person who I had ever heard talk about fatness.

So I was like, okay, some people do this.

And I also, I've never been an emotional eater, but I'm a bored eater when there's nothing else going on.

And there's something in the fridge, like I will fucking eat it whether I'm hungry or not.

And so the idea always sort of felt true to me that there's some connection between your mental state and your eating habits because I was using two people as examples.

So I was like, well, this must be true.

And N of two.

Yeah.

And they're not even the same thing, but two people doing different things.

I mean, I think you're touching on something that feels really important here, which is there are lots of reasons that people eat.

Right.

Sometimes you eat because you're hungry.

Sometimes you eat because you're at a birthday party and there's cake.

And what you do at a birthday party is you eat cake.

Sometimes you're bored.

Sometimes you're sad.

Sometimes you want to feel connected to home if you're far away from home.

So you want to eat some comfort food that reminds you of your home.

Yeah.

There are lots of reasons to eat food.

And we have decided, because we are so hung up on this idea of people not getting fat, we have decided that only some of those reasons are okay.

And even the ones that are okay are like a little suspect.

Even if you're really, really hungry, you should be really careful about what you eat and how much and blah blah blah.

Right.

I appreciate using it's your mom as sort of a major source of it.

I feel like my mom and her friends are also a major source of it for me.

And I think some of this stuff is a little bit generational because

one of the biggest champions was the founder of Weight Watchers, Jean Nidetch, who we've talked about on the show a little bit.

Yeah.

And you have a great section in your book about her, too.

She essentially said when she was a kid, if she had a fight with one of her friends or if she couldn't go outside because it was raining or she didn't get invited to a birthday party or she was upset with someone in her family, her mother gave her a piece of candy to make her feel better.

And she talked about that sort of growing into

a broader set of behaviors like buying Malomars to eat in secret, right?

To eat sort of in private away from other people.

She was talking about that in the 60s and 70s, which is long before any eating disorders were really in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is the sort of like manual manual of, you know, mental health disorders as determined by the American Psychiatric Association.

Right.

I was really surprised to learn that they were only added to the DSM in 1980.

Yeah, absolutely.

And binge eating disorder, which I would say is like some of the behaviors she's describing.

Yeah.

That sense of shame around eating, that sense of eating in secret, all of that kind of stuff.

This was the most widely available framework at the time when frameworks around eating disorders were not really present, right?

There was another boost for this sort of framework around emotional eating in the medical world

in the 1980s around the adverse childhood experiences study.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about this.

Yeah, yeah.

Have we talked about the ACE study?

The most detailed description of it I've ever read was in your book.

So

have you explained it?

So basically there was a doctor named Vincent Feliti who was working for Kaiser Permanente in San Diego in the 1980s.

He was running a weight loss clinic for Kaiser Permanente.

That clinic used what they called supplemented absolute fasting, which is basically just optavia or optifast.

You know, it's like one of those diets that is an extremely calorie-restricted diet.

We're talking starting people on between 400 and 800 calories per day.

Jesus.

Fat people who went to his clinic lost a lot of weight in the short term, but shocker, the only stories that I was able to find from people who went to that clinic are stories of people who regained significant amounts of weight.

So at one point in the 80s, this doctor famously ran into one of his patients and saw that she had regained a real considerable amount of weight in a very short period of time.

In a matter of months, she had regained quite a bit of weight.

And he sort of asked her what happened.

There's not a lot of detail on this conversation.

So when I read about it, I'm like, this is probably a terrible conversation for that patient.

Yeah.

Your doctor, who was sort of in charge of your weight loss, sees you and has some expression on his face or says something awful.

And then you've got to explain that like, oh, right, I wasn't starving myself anymore.

Yeah.

I started eating food like a human.

I was eating.

So I, I, with these fucking programs, I never know, like, what did you expect

to happen.

Of course, when somebody eats like one-fifth of what you need to live, they lose weight.

And of course, when they go back to eating normal amounts of food, they return to their previous size.

I don't...

Everyone is like, oh, it's just calories in, calories out.

Like, oh, it's the second law of motion or whatever.

Yeah.

Okay, then what the fuck did you think was going to happen?

Well, so here's the interesting thing.

That feels like a pretty good, obvious conclusion to me.

That did not feel that way to Dr.

Felidi.

It's so weird to me.

He asked this patient sort of what happened.

As they were talking, she said that a co-worker had expressed interest in sleeping with her and that really flipped her out.

She disclosed also that she had a long history of childhood sexual abuse.

For Dr.

Felidi, this was not evidence of like, hey, maybe my clinic is built on a foundation of sand.

Right.

Like maybe this lady doesn't need to lose weight.

Maybe losing weight is not the thing.

Maybe that's not what we should focus on.

He took that as, you know, what actually, I haven't taken trauma histories from my patients at my clinic.

So he went back to his clinic and took trauma histories from all of the patients who were there at the time.

Most of them had experienced major traumas, and for 55% of them, that included histories of childhood sexual abuse.

That prompted him to start work on the Adverse Childhood Experiences study.

It is one of the largest-scale trauma studies in the United States to date.

And the core, the sort of origin story of that study is: it's because all these fat people couldn't lose weight.

And that's why we need to figure out what's going on with people's trauma.

I'm like, boy, oh, boy, oh, boy.

Wouldn't it be great if we found another road to giving a shit about what happened to people?

Right.

As kids.

Yeah.

That has made them like have like a bunch of really tricky life experiences and has made things harder than it needs to be.

Like, wouldn't it be great if we could just care about people for the sake of caring about them and not being like, that person looks real fat?

How do we make them unfat?

Oh, I guess they have some emotional stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But 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?

Do you have a sense of what actually explains such a high percentage of the patients had sexual abuse in their past?

Here'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?

Whether 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.

Imagine.

Yeah.

Right.

But to tell you the honest truth, I don't know.

And I don't know that anybody does.

What's weird is that, like, this, 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.

Like,

it just seems like this explanation is like galloping forward on like pretty thin data.

I think you're right that the data that this one is writing on is very thin.

And I think this is a case of the Michael Hobbes checkpoint question of like, what do we not need evidence to believe?

Right.

And we don't need a lot of evidence to believe this one because most of us are already pretty biased against fat people.

So if you say that fat person is fat because there's something deeply wrong with them.

A lot of people are like, yeah, that checks out.

There are also ways to complicate this one, right?

Like if we're talking about like the role of trauma in fat people's experiences, we got to be talking about the experiences of anti-fatness, which is traumatic as hell.

If you urgently need medical care and you try to seek it out and a doctor won't provide it to you or tells you to come back when you've lost weight, that is a pretty traumatic experience.

Family rejection on the basis of your body size, starting from really young ages, including forced dieting, is traumatic as hell.

We have heard from a number of listeners who at very young ages, like five, six, seven, their parents would place padlocks on the refrigerator or cupboard doors so that they could not access food.

Yeah, that's abuse.

So, the idea that there is some trauma outside of anti-fatness that needs tending to, but we definitely don't need to talk about the trauma of anti-fatness, is a place where we culturally really tip our hand, right?

We don't really care about the trauma part, we care about the fatness part.

Well, there's also this sort of weird instrumentalizing, too, because the idea is that like, okay, they're not fat because they're lazy, they're fat because they're emotionally eating, fine.

So what we need to do is we need to deal with the emotional eating and then they'll lose all the weight.

Yeah.

But even when people change their eating habits, they oftentimes don't lose that much weight, right?

Because their bodies have this kind of higher set point.

So what happens then?

Yeah, totally.

Like there are people that struggle with emotional eating and there are people that sort of get it under control and they don't become thin people and that's also fine.

Right.

The core problem that this is seeking to solve is that there are too many fat people in the world.

So people who opt into this frame as a worldview, right?

I'm not going to take away from anyone their own diagnosis of their own relationship to food or to their own body or whatever.

If this resonates with you, totally, that's fine.

The trick is this has become our predominant way of viewing fat people.

And I would say it is one of the most overtly judgmental myths addressed in this book.

Right.

It is the the belief that you are fat, that needs to be fixed, and it's your own fault, right?

Right.

It's not just that your body is wrong, it's also your brain and heart.

Right, it also doesn't actually do anything for people who are struggling with emotional eating.

I mean, this is a framework that really resonates for some people, right, including my mom.

But also, it's like applying it to every single fat person is just so reductive.

And like, I'm just going to assume that you were abused as a child because of your size.

Right.

It's like, oh, it's so reductive and so gross, and and also like deeply invasive, right?

Deeply invasive.

If 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.

Yeah.

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.

So 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.

Like this is what I honestly think my mom is like quite good at.

Yeah.

Partly because she listens to the fucking show.

She's like, I've struggled with emotional eating my entire life.

Some other people haven't.

And like some people are fat because of medications and some people have been fat their whole lives.

And like

some percentage of fat people do struggle with emotional eating, but like I have no fucking idea what that percentage is.

Don't go around assuming that about fat people.

Totally.

But also I always try to affirm my mom's like explanation for herself just because it doesn't seem like it's my place to like

take it away from her.

For sure.

I mean, I think like, listen, what you're talking about is the kind of behavioral stuff that I'm like, that's really useful to check in with yourself and go, right, this is my experience.

It's not other people's experience.

And reminding yourself of that frequently feels like a really helpful tool for this kind of stuff, right?

The trick is most people take this position and treat it as sacrosanct and therefore think this means my behavior is unassailable because I know what's going on with me.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

To me, that's like a big part of the take-home point here is like.

For any of this stuff, for a diet, for an exercise practice, for an emotional framework for understanding this stuff, reminding yourself in a really constant way that your own experience could be really different from someone else's and you've got to create the space for them to speak from their own experience while you speak from yours

is really important stuff and not doing the deeply human thing that most of us do most of the time, which is assuming that the thing that we're doing and the thing that makes sense to us is at the center of other people's world too.

Yeah, it is funny to me that like one at least one-third of the show is us just reminding people that like what is happening with you and your body is not what is happening for other people and their bodies.

For sure.

Well, and also, like, there is an expectation that fat people owe everyone else an explanation for why we are the size that we are.

Ooh, yeah, that's a really good point.

And if your explanation meets muster, which it won't, then I'll leave you alone, right?

Like, that's sort of the cultural script here.

And for thin folks, when they're asked for an explanation of their body, it's always, what's your secret?

How did you do it?

Yeah, God.

I don't know, man.

It's a grim fucking place to live where even the people who think they're doing you a favor want you to explain why you look the way you do.

Dude, yeah.

Okay, I'm going to move us on to I don't like gaining weight, but I don't treat fat people differently because it feels like we're already sort of there.

And then I'm going to take us back to glorifying obesity to close on.

Is that okay?

Transition us.

Do a deft transition.

Leave that in.

The part where you go do a deft transition.

Get us there somehow.

So we've been talking about sort of this idea of emotional eating and the frameworks that we use for ourselves.

And I think there is sort of a kingpin version of this.

There's like the mega version of this, which is the phrase, I don't like gaining weight, but I don't treat fat people differently.

Right.

Is this a phrase that you've heard before?

I've mostly heard it from you.

This is like your biggest pet peeve.

I hate it.

I feel like so much of the show is like me sub-tweeting specific people and you sub-tweeting specific people.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I feel like this is one, like this must be one that you have heard from actual people numerous times.

I have definitely had multiple friendships in my life where I realize partway through

that I am actually a project to the person that I'm talking to.

Oh.

Yeah,

dude.

People will try and slyly sneak in things like, do you ever think about going to the gym?

They are viewing me as like a fixer-upper.

Like I'm a house they can flip.

Right.

And that makes them feel like a good person who's doing something good for a person

who they fundamentally see as like kind of wretched.

Do you know what I mean?

Like a hard luck case.

Almost all of the people who have been that person in my life would say with a great deal of certainty that they treat fat people no differently than thin people.

Now I just feel sad.

Like I want to give you a hug, but we're not going to say city.

The part of this one that I really want to push on is the, but I don't treat fat people differently part.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If If you don't want to be a fat person, it's worth unpacking how much of that is socially determined, right?

And how much of that is a result of how fat people are treated.

If you don't like gaining weight, why?

If you say it's because your clothes fit better, what if people made clothes that fit you at a different size, right?

Or you feel more accepted or you feel...

you're going to have better career success.

Why do you think a thinner person would have better career success than a fat person, right?

It's worth looking at the ways in which bias is baked into some of those assumptions as well.

But I'm not gonna get between you and your relationship to your own body and your own size.

That's you stuff.

You get to manage it.

I do feel like, I mean, we live in a fucking wildly fat phobic society.

So the idea that somebody would be like, you know, whatever, I'm a corporate lawyer.

To be a corporate lawyer in America in 2022, I have to stay thin.

Part of me feels like okay.

Like that's fucking true.

Like the sort of the fundamental challenge of living in America right now is like, how do you live within a like super broken and unjust country?

Like, what do you do about it?

Totally.

Like, I have had a number of people who have had weight loss surgery or gone through major diets who have said, I went to pick up my kid from school and other kids were making fun of him 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 think I can physically do this job unless I prove to him that I can physically do that job.

And for him, that means me being thinner.

I'm going to go do that thing.

Right.

Like now at least we're talking about some kind of concrete external thing and you can go, hey, those kids shouldn't have been making fun of your kid for having a fat mom.

Yeah.

Like, can I support you in this moment?

Right.

Like that calls for a different thing than just being like, I'm just talking about me and I just don't like gaining weight and just leave me alone.

Right.

Right.

But listen, the part of this that I want to talk about is the I don't treat fat people differently part.

Yeah.

Because in my own experience with this stuff, and also according to quite a bit of data, most of us are bad judges judges of our own biases most of us want to think of ourselves as egalitarians as justice-minded as fair people you know

and the idea that we might be acting in a biased way feels like not only

revisiting of that action right but it feels like potentially an assault on our idea of who we are, right?

Like, I wouldn't do that.

A bad person does that.

And I'm a good person.

Good people don't have biases, right?

Yeah.

And what that means is any kind of feedback about this stuff then gets pushed through the filter of, are you calling me a bad person?

Right.

Rather than you're giving me feedback on an action, what can I take from that feedback?

And what do I want to do differently or not next time, right?

Well, to me, the weirdest thing about this is the confidence.

Yeah.

Like I host a podcast pretty substantially dedicated to this issue.

I do not go around telling people like I don't treat fat people any differently.

That's not really for me to say.

I 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 friends.

I check in.

But like part of living in a structurally unjust society feels like it requires the acknowledgement that like, yeah, there's probably some weird toxic shit rattling around in my brain.

Yeah.

And like walking around as if, you know, everyone in society is bad, but not me.

just seems like the kind of attitude that is going to make you incapable of addressing that stuff when it does come up.

And And there is some research that is like specific to this question, right?

That seems worth digging into.

There's a 2014 study in the journal Body Image that looked at white women who participated in this practice that they call body surveillance, which is essentially like close monitoring of the appearance of your own body.

Okay.

And 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.

They were literally looking at fat people and going, I feel better because I'm not that fat.

So it's just like self-soothing

by being around people bigger than you and be like, at least I'm not like her.

Absolutely.

Ew.

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.

It's not borne out by the data.

It's not borne out by what we know about people and how they work.

And it's also highly unlikely because Most of us treat fat people differently.

Fat people get paid less for the same jobs.

We don't get the same health care that thin people get, right?

Like, we aren't believed in

very baseline ways when we come forward with stories about, you know, sexual assault because the response is no one would want to sexually assault you.

So when someone says, uh-uh, 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.

This 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 fat phobic to work out.

They think it's fat phobic to lose weight.

This 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.

This one I have encountered way less than you have.

Oh God, people will not shut the fuck up about this to me.

But listen, you live on like Reply Guy Twitter.

How dare you?

You're absolutely correct.

I have studiously walled myself off from Reply Guys.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, 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 lose.

You know what I mean?

Like it's like a game of telephone with no source code.

It's like peak simulacra.

Copy with no master.

I think it's like this, this fear among members of the majority, kind of like how people freak out about like word choice.

Like you can't even say this anymore.

Yeah.

Instead of thinking about how acceptance would affect members of the minority, they think about how acceptance would affect members of the majority.

Right.

And if we're nicer to fat people, I'm not going to be able to go to the gym anymore.

We're going to have to be meaner.

But also, I think it's deeper than that.

Like related, but like I'm going to take it, like if we're getting in an elevator, we're going down a level or two, which is they are afraid that people will stop.

Thinking of their bodies as an accomplishment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Quite a bit of this body image research includes sort of this idea that thin people feel like they need space to like speak negatively about their own bodies and talk about how fat they feel.

And overwhelmingly in that research, when fat people are included, they overwhelmingly return to this one phrase, which is, shit, if you're fat, then what do you think of me?

Right.

So I think it's also worth like thinking about this stuff through that lens of like, whether you mean to or not.

The social introduction of this set of conversations about how you're trying to make your body smaller at every turn sends a lot of messages to a lot of people.

And that constitutes treating fat people differently.

Do you remember, like me and you have done a number of press interviews together where people will like almost explicitly ask us for permission to be like trying to lose weight.

It's fascinating.

We've done a number of interviews like this.

There's one in particular where afterwards I remember it with sort of chilling clarity.

We were both like, oh, that felt weird.

It felt so bad.

And after the interview, I just like put my head down on my desk

and just like laid it there for a while.

And then I got the little like notification that you were calling and you were like, what the fuck was that?

And I was like, I don't know.

It was fascinating.

It was so rough.

But it comes up like a lot, right?

Yeah.

Which is sort of this.

belief that if we're going to talk about the dignity of fat people, someone's going to tell you at some point that your desire to lose weight is messed up and anti-fat.

And actually, you can't do that anymore, right?

Yeah.

One of of the first places that some folks' brain goes is like, don't take my diet from me.

It's like, you're going to tell me I can't do CrossFit anymore.

Totally.

I will also say neither one of us gives any shits whatsoever whether you do CrossFit.

Totally.

So Michael, I would like to talk to you about a phrase that is the bane of my internet existence.

Is it retweet if you agree?

You hate that.

I know you hate that.

Should we talk a little bit about glorifying obesity?

Yes, the glory.

Let's talk about the glory.

Glorifying obesity is one of those things that shows up largely in internet comments, right?

That's sort of where it lives the most in my own experience.

And there is one year where glorifying obesity had a real banner year, and that was 2019.

There were three big splashes on the internet, all distinct from one another, all of which sort of culminated in this big crescendo of accusations of some fat person glorifying obesity.

And it was usually for things like being photographed in a place.

Right.

There was one of the examples in your book is Lizzo appearing on the Jumbotron at like a Lakers game or something.

Yep.

She wasn't glorifying or promoting literally anything.

She went to sports.

She was glorifying and promoting the Lakers.

Yeah.

But, like, listen, this is also one that will be recognizable to any fat person with any social media presence, right?

If you have ever posted a picture of yourself as a fat person eating a meal, going to the beach, working out, wearing clothes, liking the way that you look, there's a decent chance that either you have been accused of glorifying obesity or you're a strong candidate to be accused of glorifying obesity, right?

It's usually a pretty incurious, freaked out, and angry place.

Let me read your live journal story.

Okay.

This was something that you included in this chapter.

Actually, do you want to do it?

Uh, sure.

If you have the paragraph handy, if you have the excerpt that you have.

Let me text it to you.

Sure, sure, sure.

It's funny to be texting you a paragraph of yourself.

It's really weird.

Very weird territory.

As a fat person, I have repeatedly been accused of glorifying obesity, even before my life as a minor public figure.

Early on in my life on the internet, I posted a picture of myself in a new bathing suit on Live Journal.

I was 18 years old and had found a swimsuit I liked.

It had a halter with a sweetheart neckline and a short ruched skirt.

Compared to my thinner peers' bikinis, my one piece was conservative, bordering on dowdy.

But for once, I felt comfortable.

I took my photograph in the full-length mirror in my dimly lit bathroom, then posted it to LiveJournal.

My My account was public not because of any desire for attention, but because it did not occur to me that a teenager with under a hundred followers would draw detractors.

But in the days that followed, faceless commenters descended.

One described in detail their revulsion at having to see my thighs and upper arms.

Another commented scornfully about how a whale could think she looked cute.

But most elevated their complaints to social issues, accusing me of glorifying obesity.

I was confused.

It was confusing.

I was a recent high school graduate, writing regularly about my life, my crushes, school, my mental health.

The only people who reliably read what I wrote were close friends.

How could I be glorifying anything?

So, first of all, I need the Live Journal archives.

I want to read your fanfiction.

Dude,

I want your thoughts.

I think it was like two days ago that I got, I've had the same Gmail account since time immemorial for my personal stuff and I got an email from live journal that was like it's your anniversary and it was there was like big multicolored letters being like 20 ohms 20 years since you started your goddamn live journal

what happened to it after like I imagine this made you start like posting differently or just like it it's like the first experience of realizing that you're like public on this platform and that like the public is watching.

Yeah, I mean, I just locked my account after that.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I just, I put it on private.

Um, and I think on live journal, it's called Friends Only.

Thank you.

It should have been Friend Zone.

Like, I don't know

how long it was before I posted another picture, but it was a long time.

To me, this is like the whole thing where it's like what people are getting mad at.

They're mad at having to see a fat person who's not like apologizing to them for the way that they look.

But like people's brains don't let them realize what's going on, right?

They're like, no, no, no, it doesn't bother me that somebody else looks away that I don't approve of.

It's like, no, no, no, this is her motivation.

This is what she's trying to do.

Or like, this is the impact that she's going to have on the world.

And the whole thing is basically just like reaching.

for any reason for you to justify your really gross emotional response.

Yeah, it's totally an emotional response.

And it is an emotional response that gets elevated to a level of like, this needs to be a societal concern.

And it elevates a picture of like a fat person at a pizza parlor into some level of like political agenda.

Right.

Even if that fat person is not espousing any political agenda at all, right?

It's the fact of a photograph of a fat person who's not like inside a Weight Watcher's meeting center or running around a track and crying, I guess, right?

Like, I don't know what.

It also feels like really weird on a couple of fronts.

One,

nobody really defines at any point what it means to glorify obesity, right?

It is this total floating signifier that sounds really damning and people can just reach up into the ether and grab it and pull it down and apply it to whatever they want, slap that on whatever they want.

Glorifying something means publicly praising it.

I would fucking love if we publicly praised some fat people some more.

And I think there is this little like Rube Goldberg machine that kicks off in the brains of people who have this level of discomfort, which is if there are images of fat people not actively trying to lose weight or suffering in the world, then people who are not currently fat will think it's okay to get fat and will start getting fat.

And people who are fat will never get thin as a result of this one photograph on Instagram.

I guess the idea is that like the reason fatness became more prominent in the 1980s is that like there started to be photos of fat people.

Yeah.

We horrified it too much.

Michael, the 80s is when we got Dom Deloise.

Bob Hoskins.

That's what did it.

This is also why I always feel a little bit weird about debunking the health stuff on this podcast because it's so obvious that the health stuff is a cover for people's feelings, right?

Because Even if it was 100% true, every single fat person is unhealthy.

Fine.

Everyone, regardless of their health status, gets to post a photo on Instagram and be like, I felt cute.

Yeah.

Everyone gets to do that without people being ghouls in their mentions.

And also, like, listen, then let's ask the underlying question, which is, I'm sorry, you think it's okay to treat people like garbage if you think they're not healthy?

Right, right.

You just gonna go around bullying people with chronic illnesses and disability?

Like, that's your stance?

Like, it's okay that I'm doing this because I think this person is unwell in some way.

Like,

Jesus Christmas, get a hold of yourself.

The funny thing is, like, the best counter-argument to this is all of the ways that society does, in fact, glorify thinness.

Yeah, totally.

I mean, listen, this goes back to our, like, no one should be drawing any conclusions about anyone else's health based on the way that they look.

Yeah.

And no one should be basing their treatment of strangers on their perception of that stranger's health, right?

Period.

That includes people of all sizes.

That includes people of all abilities.

That includes like across the board.

I mean, I think the other thing that I would say about all of this is like, spot the fuck on about us glorifying thinness all the time.

We got an email from a listener at one point who was like, I'm a very thin person.

I'm constantly trying to gain fat.

And there is like not any real resource around that.

Other than just like, you know, the extremely weird actor interviews that are like, to gain weight for this role, I just melted a pint of ice cream and chugged it or whatever, right?

She should be going on Instagram and looking at photos of happy fat people because that just induces fatness in others.

Yeah, surprise.

You're fat now.

Yeah, thermonuclear.

Just,

oh, I'm fat again.

I've looked at two photos.

I cleaned the heart and now I'm fat.

I mean,

I don't ever anymore say anything to people who make accusations about glorifying obesity because they're telling me who they are.

Speaking of people who are not worth our time,

who we're going to be spending time with.

Boy, what a fucking segue.

You have a section in your book about Piers Morgan.

I guess there was a music video that it includes a shot of a plus-size model doing like plus-size model things.

And Piers Morgan...

melted down and then like had the model on his show where he like tried to grill her about how she's like destroying society.

Yeah.

So I saw this in your book, and then I did the thing that I should never do, where I went on YouTube and I was like, Pierce Morgan obesity.

And I like looked at all the videos.

We have done some cursed fucking internet searches on this show.

The cursedest.

Pierce Morgan obesity might really take the cake.

But like, he has covered this so many times and he keeps coming back to it.

Like, one of the videos is called, Do plus Size Mannequins Promote Obesity?

Oh, it's about the Nike thing?

The most tedious, just like obvious, like, no, they don't.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Like, fat people also wear clothes.

So of course, there are fat mannequins.

They promote clothes for people to buy.

That's what all mannequins do.

But I wanted to watch a clip together.

I watched the clip of him interrogating the plus size model lady, which was just so egregious that like I didn't want to watch it again.

But this is one that I think is like very telling about how most of these conversations actually play out.

I'm just going to describe what's happening on screen before we press play.

Okay.

We're on the set of Good Morning Britain, sort of in the background on their little like screen mini jumbotron.

There is an image of Tess Holiday, who is a plus-size model on the cover of Cosmopolitan, and then a panel of like plus-size people.

Here we go.

Yeah.

And the caption is: Is it fine to be fat?

Here's the full Chiron.

Developing story.

Is it fine to be fat?

Question mark.

Dr.

Miriam Stoppard, colon, if you are overweight, you are unhealthy.

Yes.

Meryl Streep voice, groundbreaking.

Yeah.

I am paused and ready when you are.

Can I just ask a question at Dr.

Miriam's?

Yes, you may, Suzanne.

These lovely women here, even though Helen has already objected to the word obese, but as Piers points out, obese is technically a category when you're judging BMI.

Is the test holiday cover actually promoting something that is not a good idea?

Or is it, I think, about accepting who you are and not constantly fighting yourself?

Okay, I'd just like to say at the beginning, Susannah, that I think every woman has the right to be proud of her body.

Yes.

And her body is her own business.

I totally agree.

By the way.

I totally agree.

So what if you make Tess Holiday's body your business?

Oh, look fabulous.

Okay, so just a minute though.

I am bothered by things like the cover of Cosmo because I think it glorifies and glamorizes and I'm going to use the word obesity.

If this woman, Tess Holiday, this model, had been anorexic, genuinely anorexic,

and she was on the cover of Cosmo, what would you say about that?

So

it's a really tricky issue.

There are still...

Because I feel the same way about size zero.

When Victoria Beckham has used them on the catwalk, I've written scathing columns, right?

I think that is equally dangerous.

It's not about being just anti-300 pound people.

It's about people who are dangerously underweight or overweight being glamorised.

There are two things.

In terms of somebody being normalized or glamorised, there is huge amounts of research that proves that feeling terrible about your weight means you're more likely to put on weight and emotionally eat.

People who feel okay about their bodies are more likely to be like, you know what, I deserve good nourishing food and a workout.

So actually, if you're not...

I don't really agree with that.

I think

most people either get, they hear something about their weight,

or the doctor tells them something about their weight, or they look in the mirror and go, enough, I'm getting too fat.

In other words, there's an element of shame that drives you to lose the weight.

No, because I had bulimia after I lost all of my weight.

So I've been at two I've been at two ends of the spectrum.

I've been severely overweight and then to a point where I couldn't eat.

And I didn't have a positive frame of mind being that size.

Okay, can I just one last question to Dr.

Mirror?

I don't agree that body shaming or making someone feel bad about their weight helps.

What is the most effective way that people can lose weight?

Tell me about your...

First of all, bless this entire panel of people for putting up with this level of like personal fucking insults to their fucking faces.

Dude, right?

What world are we living in that someone's like, nope, that didn't happen to you.

Nope, that's not your experience.

And also just like, I don't know, man, we're coming right off of the holidays.

And boy, oh boy,

the like uncle you don't want to talk to

energy that is just radiating from Piers Morgan in this clip is like staggering.

This is so clearly shot through with so much misogyny, right?

I know, right?

I'm going to talk over every, I'm going to ask a question, let someone get four words into an answer, and then talk over them.

I mean, like, he's just a fucking trash monster of a guy.

What is so striking to me about this clip and like the 15 other abysmal clips about this that I watched from Pierce Morgan's show is that he always does this totally disingenuous preface where he's like, well, I think everybody has a right to be proud of their bodies, but...

Ba, but and then he does the sort of boilerplate, fatness is bad thing.

And it's like, if you actually believe that, that's just the end of the sentence.

I think everybody has a right to be proud of their body.

That's why I don't speculate about the health of someone whose like middle name I don't even know, someone whose health status I know nothing about.

But he's doing this thing where he, he, he doesn't want to accept the fact that he's being unkind.

He's being cruel.

And on top of that, there are baseline fact-checking issues happening here, right?

Like Piers is talking out of his ass about this idea that shame will motivate people to lose weight.

If you did any kind of fact-checking on that statement, you would find immediately that that has been fully debunked and disproven.

Yeah, it's just not true.

On top of that, there is this absolutely egregious from Piers and from this doctor both.

They both reference the idea that one of the four fat people on this panel has objected to the use of the word obesity.

And then they go back and use it to describe them

in the same way that like if someone if you were introduced to someone new and they were you asked them their name and they said Thomas and you'd be like great I'm gonna call you Tommy right that's weird you're being weird and mean right yeah I can like I can just feel my blood not boiling but like at a simmer well now luckily there's like 10 more of those clips in your right hand bar

youtube I know I just looked at the right hand bar and it's like Cosmo editor defends cover featuring plus size model.

Do we need to censor humor with a split screen between a mad person and a thin dude?

I got that one too.

So that was not worth our time, but we spent a lot of time on it.

But the point is,

go buy Aubrey's book.

It's good.

Thank you.

That's fun.

It has lots of other things to make you angry.

And also some happy stuff.

And Lizzo.

And Lizzo.

Lizzo makes a brief appearance.

We've got pre-order pre-order links for you in the show notes, or you can go to aubreygordon.net slash myths and get it there.

Pre-order.

And we will be back in the main feed next time with Michael.

Can I tell you?

Can I give you a preview?

Next time we're doing Elizabeth Taylor's diet book, Elizabeth Takes Off.

White Diamonds.

That's all I know.

I know literally nothing else about this woman.

Oh my God.