262. Aubrey Gordon: On Freedom from Anti-Fatness

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welcome back to we can do hard things aubrey gordon is here

we're so excited aubrey gordon is an author columnist and co-host of the maintenance Phase podcast, which Abby and I love.

She is the author of the New York Times and indie bestseller, You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People and What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About Fat, which rearranged my brain on a molecular level.

Her work has been published in the New York Times, Vox, Self, Health, Glamour, and more.

Aubrey is also the subject of the new documentary film, Your Fat Friend, which is just wonderful and explores her journey from anonymous blogger to best-selling author and activist.

Welcome, Aubrey.

I'm such a big fan.

It's ridonculous.

Are you kidding me?

No, I am not kidding.

Okay.

The 2015 World Cup is the reason that I watch soccer.

Like that's

like that was the like, that's it.

Yes.

Yeah.

So just like, hey, buddy, I'm flipping out a little bit to be talking to a series of living legends.

in this conversation.

What a joy, team.

What a joy.

What a joy.

And you live in my old stomping grounds.

I used to live in Portland.

Portland.

You know, Glennon and I were driving down the road

like a year ago and we were listening.

We were listening to a

maintenance phase.

What?

Yeah.

Great.

Aubrey.

Thanks, team.

Aubrey, I know like a lot about you.

Okay, so just

we'll start there.

But I know you're in a soccer way.

It's a non-creepy way.

No, non-creepy way.

I knew you were a big soccer fan.

And so I was like, I think, I told Abby, I think she might like us because of you.

So I'm really excited.

I like you because of both of you.

Oh, okay.

Right.

Like, I think I was listening back to episodes.

This is like a common practice.

I'm sure you do this when you go on podcasts.

Yeah.

You listen back to other episodes to get a little refresh.

And I was listening to your sort of critique of body positivity and loving your body.

And I was like, oh my God, I have landed at exactly the same conclusion, but for entirely different reasons.

It's very very fascinating.

I find it really refreshing to have someone just talk about: like, there are challenges in having a body,

period, right?

Like

the end.

I don't want to think about it.

I don't want to talk about it.

I just want to be in my body and just like leave it at that.

And I get there from a place of,

you know, it's a very different experience as a fat person, rather than having the sort of main challenges be in your own mind and brain chemistry, to have those challenges be reinforced by people who know you and love you and you see all the time, right?

That they're sort of demanding a disordered relationship to food and to your body.

And like, that's the price you pay as a fat person in the world, right?

There's a famous quote from Deb Burgard, who's been sort of working on these issues for a long time that says,

essentially, like what we diagnose in thin people as disordered, we prescribe in fat people.

Right.

So, like, we're requiring disordered eating behaviors of fat people.

We expect them to eat as little as possible.

We expect them to be seen like hurting themselves in order to become thin.

And anything short of that is like unacceptable.

But, like, for the same reasons, right?

Like, me loving my body, quote unquote, doesn't really change how all those other people act, right?

Like, that's still like an external world to me that I can't can't just like manifest through the secret or whatever, right?

Like, that's like not a possibility for me, right?

Like,

when I'm reading your work, I feel like for the pod squad, I just want to say that I, I see you

in all your work in maintenance phase in the new documentary, which is,

it's like, to me, you are

very much like, you're a teacher to me, like a Lok is for gender, or Dr.

Yala Blai is for race, or Losian has been for me for masculinity.

To me, it feels like I consume your work in two different ways that you are

pointing things out in the world that make being a fat person excruciating out there.

Not the body, but the reaction to the body is what makes.

So making the world safer for fat people.

And then you're pointing out this

hierarchy.

like Yabba does with race that is hurting all of us.

So it's like undoing a cultural thing over here for everybody, while clearly your first priority is always making the world safer for fat people in the meantime, while this hierarchy is erased.

And so I just see you as just an incredibly important teacher in the world.

Oh, buddy, back at you.

This is incredible.

Thanks.

I mean, your book just.

you know, one of those books that it just like, my brain just, I was like, oh, she's fucking me up like in the best sweat

so i'm like so curious about that stuff for you as someone who's been like very public very vulnerable in multiple states of diagnosis and recovery and all kinds of stuff i'm curious about how all of that is landing for you because it is a really different

experience to walk through the world as a fat person.

And I think when we talk about bodies, we end up talking about body image, right?

We end up talking about how you feel about your body and not how other people interact with it, how systems and institutions interact with it, and what that means for sort of like what you have access to, right?

It's a very internal inward-looking conversation that we usually have.

And I'm just super duper curious about like how all of this is landing for you.

What's popping up for you, all of it?

I have just an interesting experience because I feel like it's the same as queerness for me.

It's like, well, I am that in my house, but I suffer none of the consequences out there.

Totally, totally.

Same,

right?

Like, my gender presentation means that people think that I am a straight person.

And that doesn't mean I don't experience homophobia, but it does mean that I experience way less and way pronounced stuff.

I can go into any bathroom and be just fine, right?

Like, nobody's going to give me the side eye.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, totally.

Sorry, buds.

No, it's,

yeah, it's a super different thing.

Yeah.

So in the documentary, your fear is, I mean, you're going to go from anonymous to public, which has its own host of just terrifying things.

But you say your biggest fear is that people actually won't want to have this urgent, important conversation.

So to start off with, because that's, I heard that as your fear.

And so I want to start off by saying we will have it.

And what is it?

Let's do it.

It's happening right now today.

We're fixing it.

It's going to be,

we have 50 minutes.

So if we could just fix it by the end.

Yeah.

We could do this in the first 30 minutes and then we could spend the last 20 talking about if it makes you feel better.

Y'all fixed it in 50 minutes about race.

And Alok did, no pressure, but Alok did fix it for gender.

So yeah, absolutely.

We can do hard things within the format.

Yeah.

Yes.

So I would say, listen, we have been in a constant state for 30 to 100 years, depending on who you ask, of talking about fat people.

We've talked about fat people as being a cost.

We are sort of in a constant state of talking about how much fat people cost our healthcare systems and employment and so on and so forth.

We are in a constant state of scapegoating fat people.

We are in a constant state of oggling fat people.

We have whole news stories where the b-roll footage is just headless torsos of fat people.

It's very literally dehumanizing us on screen, right?

And there's also research attached to those sort of media representations that show that when people see photos of quote-unquote headless fat people with a news article, even if the news article remains the same and the image changes to be someone with a face and/or who's not holding a McDonald's bag, that folks have a totally different response to the entire news story, right?

And after seeing more stigmatizing images, they're more likely to report not only increased anti-fat bias, but also increased personal dislike of fat individuals that they meet after that.

So like, it's a really tricky conversation to get into because it's a really challenging bias that almost all of us hold.

At a time when

many other biases have either been plateauing or dipping, anti-fat bias has been ramping up.

And that means that fat people get paid up to $20,000 less per year than thin people, like fat women and thin women.

That's like a big divide.

It means that in 48 states, it's perfectly legal to fire someone from a job or deny them a promotion just because you think they're too fat.

All of these things we're setting up in systems and structures all around us, and we're doing all of that while only talking amongst thin people about how terrible fat people are.

This is an issue where thin people are still seen as the experts on fatness.

It's really weird and backwards.

And we for sure wouldn't do that with a lot of communities.

Like that's like

a

really weird framework to use.

It feels like

in amongst all that, part of what makes this super urgent is that we do have folks who are dealing with body dysmorphia and eating disorders, regardless of their size.

And our cultural defense against that is to go, it's fine, you're not that fat, right?

Which implies that.

If you are my size, I'm the person who's always that fat, right?

When people are like, you're not that fat, don't worry about it.

They're like, you don't look like this lady, right?

That our cultural response to that is to sort of imply that if you are fat, that behavior is warranted.

It would be okay.

If you were fat, that's an okay way to treat someone who's fat, but you're not fat, so don't worry about it.

So, the solution that we're proposing to folks is that you align yourself with thinness, you distance yourself from fat people, that's what keeps you out of the line of fire, rather than saying,

What if we made the whole world a safe and affirming place for fat people to be?

And you wouldn't have to worry at least about the social and institutional parts of that.

That would take away so much of that stress as well.

It's a real case of like our fates are intertwined.

And instead of sort of acknowledging that reality, we tend to, again, sort of like turn inward into our own experiences and rely on

biases that have been fed to us now for decades.

Yeah.

And it's so, we get it in terms of other things.

Like, I love all the ways you talk about, you know, when you're in the soccer stadium and

you say, there's no jerseys for fat people here or something.

Yeah.

And then what does the woman behind you say?

You're talking to your friend about fat.

And she taps you and says, oh, you're not fat.

Don't say that about yourself,

which when you'd switch it.

So like, say, I'm in line with Abby.

And I would never say this because she would,

our marriage would implode.

But if I was like, that woman's attractive or something.

Oh my God.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I should have used a different example.

If I were like, if I were like, I'm queer.

All right.

Yeah.

If the lady behind me tapped me and said, oh, honey, don't say that about yourself.

Yeah.

Like, why do we not think when we say to someone, don't say you're fat.

We are implicitly saying fat is bad.

Don't say bad things about yourself.

Yeah, absolutely.

Again, my favorite example of this is if you said to someone, I'm not, but if I said, I'm Canadian, and someone went, you're not Canadian, you're smart and you're beautiful.

You'd be like, what do you think about Canadians?

What is your deal?

Right?

Like, we are sort of all telling on ourselves about our attitudes toward fat people all the time without really reckoning with how that lands for those fat people.

We sort of talk about fatness as a specter without realizing that, you know, roughly two-thirds of Americans are fat people.

So most of the people that we're saying that kind of stuff to and in front of are feeling personally implicated in some way in that conversation.

And if we don't think about how those messages land, we're going to keep sort of reinforcing those distances and reinforcing the message that like being fat is really.

a terrible thing to be.

It's a character failing.

It's a moral failing.

It's a health failing.

It's all of these different things.

How did we get here?

Like, just real quick.

You got eight minutes.

How just like, nutshells.

How is this all rooted in racism?

Because, you know, you make it very clear that 80% of us that we should stop calling it fat phobia, because then that is an identity you can reject.

I'm not fat phobic.

Okay.

So

as opposed to it being a bias inside of us that if I think you say until and unless we work on, will be in us.

Yeah, absolutely.

So how do we get here?

uh so how we got here i mean i think a couple of things one

um as you noted uh anti-fat bias is deeply historically rooted in racism but also in ableism so in the 1800s we see laws that are called the ugly laws um not enough people i feel know about these no i don't um Yeah, so I believe the first big city to pass ugly laws was San Francisco.

Want, want, bummer, San Francisco.

They were laws that essentially said, it's too upsetting to have disabled people, disfigured people, and fat people out in public.

So you're required to stay at home.

You can go out and get things and come right back.

You can do little errands like that, but you need to be telling folks that you're just going for this one thing and then you're going back.

You're not like going to be out in the world.

There's an understanding that you should not and cannot be out in the world.

Holy shit.

It's gnarly, right?

Then in the 20s, we start to get state eugenics boards.

Those last until the 80s in the United States.

And that is a very prominent, like almost every state in the country had a eugenics board.

Oregon's was actually one of the last to be dismantled.

So we're having these active conversations about like what kinds of people are quote unquote dragging our society down.

At the heels of that sort of eugenics movement, we start to get a big freak out about body size.

And we start to get testing on the BMI.

Have you all talked about the BMI?

We have.

On here, we love it, Aubrey.

We feel strongly about it.

We think it's a real legitimate.

We have established it as complete horseshit.

Yeah.

So find that episode and we'll link it here.

But

historically, total bullshit.

Yeah, we can skip all that.

I mean, I think the headline to know about the BMI is that it was designed for white men who were in the French and Scottish militaries in the 1800s.

So if that's not you, uh-oh,

it's never been meaningfully tested or adjusted in any real way to sort of account for the fact that we know that has been proven time and time again, that this categorically does not work for black and brown people, right?

This is something that actively, incorrectly predicts health risks.

And even amongst white people, the people that it was sort of designed for,

its high watermark of being able to quote unquote detect obesity, which is a very funny phrase to me,

is 50%.

That's the most accurate the BMI gets.

It's about half the time it's right about who's fat and who's not, right?

Because you get the rock in there.

And if you're just dividing weight by height, the rock is going to seem like a fat dude.

And that doesn't tell you anything about their age.

It doesn't tell you anything about whether or not that's a person who's medically transitioned.

It doesn't tell you anything about that person's health history or their family history, right?

It is just this person looks too fat for their height.

That's what we're doing with the BMI.

And again, like deeply, deeply rooted in racism.

That leads to a redefining of quote unquote obesity,

which historically just meant the fattest like 15% in any given group was considered to be quote unquote obese.

Turning that into a disease.

over and above the objections of scientists at the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization, and interpreting that disease as being an epidemic, sort of implying that fat is contagious.

We've seen stories like this, that if you have fat friends, you're more likely to be fat yourself.

So steer clear of fat people, right?

Like it just sort of kicks off sort of from a social place, bounces back into sort of a medical place,

and then kicks back out a bunch of social values that reaffirm where we started, which is just sort of going, fat people seem pretty gross.

Yeah, right?

Like, that's essentially sort of what we're doing here.

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So the thought in the air is people should not be fat.

And so what they should all be is on diets, right?

So if you're a diligent fat person,

you will constantly be on a diet.

Yeah, if you're a good fat.

Okay.

So can you talk to us about diets and how they work and why you have a collection of diet books in your house, which makes me so happy.

And also, tell us about a couple of your favorite titles.

One of them is: The Serpent Beguiled Me and I Ate A Heavenly Diet for Saints and Sinners.

Does that not say it all?

There's also a chance.

Your body, his temple.

Help Lord, the devil wants me fat with like a sort of scary picture of a banana split.

Weird.

Terrifying.

More of Jesus, less of me.

Oh my God, help us.

Oh.

Wait, there's two more.

This one's not a diet book, but it is the slogan that appeared on the cover of every issue of Physical Culture, which was the first sort of like workout magazine in the U.S.

And the slogan was, weakness is a crime.

They would put that on every issue of the magazine.

And in that magazine, they would also be making arguments about why immigrants were ruining the United States.

Like

very clear connections between sort of refining your body and being like a quote-unquote master race, right?

Like very clearly, it's bonkers.

So these are the scriptures upon which the religion of anti-fatness is based, right?

You have your Bible study.

You can all get together and study these books.

And in fact,

diets don't work this is not the reason to not do that but yeah but as an aside yes correct categorically absolutely so listen uh the term diet has fallen out of fashion and all of the diets now are leading with we're definitely not a diet yes we just tell you to subsist on extremely limited calories every day and tell you that if you don't you will never know this really our thing right wellness feels like torturing yourself to death.

Yeah.

Don't you feel well now?

So like super stressed out about every meal.

Don't you feel well?

Yeah.

So when I'm talking about diets, what I'm talking about is includes things like cleanses and detoxes and any of the ways that people might adjust what they're eating in order to lose weight.

If that's a thing that you're doing, then that's what I'm talking about here, right?

Restricting what you're eating in order to lose weight.

What we find is that regardless of the diet, whether it's it's low fat, low carb, paleo, keto, whatever, diets all follow a pretty similar pattern, which is that folks lose weight pretty quickly for like two to three months.

It plateaus by six to 12 months, and then they regain that weight and usually

up to 30%

more within five years.

What that means for me as a fat person is that every time I have gone on a diet, I have absolutely lost weight.

I've lost considerable amounts of weight.

And when that diet is over,

I end up fatter than I was before.

And that is absolutely like part of the origin story of my body that I have dieted and dieted and dieted.

And each time I have wound up fatter than when I started.

And there's a little bit of research that sort of backs that up, right?

That they actually did a long-term study where they followed people who had been on the TV show the biggest loser

for years after being on the show, which you're making a sound

that makes me think we might be on the same page about the biggest loser.

Oh, what a fucking nightmare.

We watched that shit and like, yeah, it's like Romans in the Colosseum.

Yeah, we can only cheer on a group of people if they're trying, actually,

torturing themselves to lose the weight.

That's when we can get behind a fat person.

Oh, man.

It's if they are in actual pain and dehumanization.

That they are dehumanizing themselves so much so that they are crying, throwing up,

pissed.

It's just not fucking cool.

Well, and a core mechanism of that wasn't fat people doing it to themselves.

Right.

It was two terrible things.

So interesting.

Saying things to them like, I don't care if you come out of here in a a body bag.

That was the message of a show like that, regardless.

There was a longitudinal study that followed up with people who'd been on the biggest loser.

Only one of them was able to keep off the amount of weight that they had lost on the show or anything approaching that.

And that required one, one,

one, one, one.

And.

Other folks, they sort of measured their metabolism and how many calories they burned per day and found that as a result of this extreme caloric restriction, that had permanently altered their metabolisms and made them burn dramatically fewer calories just from like being alive, keeping the lights on every day, like hundreds of calories less per day,

which means that the next time you try to do that, it's going to be much, much, much harder to lose weight, right?

And that actually, probably if we had just been like, oh, it seems like this is the size of body that I have, how about I just hang out here?

That none of that health damage happens necessarily in the same way.

And a bunch of the health impacts that we associate with fatness, things like diabetes, things like hypertension, all of these sort of like ongoing chronic health issues are as strongly, if not more strongly linked to weight cycling.

Yes.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Than to just being a fat person.

But fat people tend to have those more because we are the people who are under the greatest pressure pressure to lose weight, not just to feel okay and get social affirmation, but to get a job, to be able to access gender affirming care or any basic surgeries.

Different surgeons will set different thresholds for what your BMI needs to be in order for them to operate on you.

We're talking about people getting really basic needs met or not met as a result of this,

as a result of this thing.

And it's all sort of built on a weird house house of cards that is, you know, this diet industry that I would say is on the order of big tobacco in terms of just

really selling us a bill of goods, right?

Like, yes, really selling us a bill of goods.

And it reminds me of very much of like I come from evangelical Christianity, which was a good time.

And

you have that book, More Jesus, Lesson Me.

Probably.

I mean, listen, there are more we didn't get to, team.

Sin is fast.

God forgot God for God.

God for God.

God for God was a real one.

But it very much reminds me, it's not the same, but it makes me think of all of the, you know, after I came out, after we talked, the Christian people who would say to me, but queer kids have a higher level of depression and have a higher level of, I'm like, but it's not their queerness.

It's you, motherfuckers.

Yeah, absolutely.

You.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, so I believe it's 92% of fat people say that they experience anti-fatness every day and that that comes from their families and their friends and the people that say that they love them the most.

Things that people who are not fat have been taught are like encouraging to fat people and helpful to fat people are all just ways of calling us fat,

right?

Like, hey, do you want a gym buddy?

Right?

Like, that's not a thing you're generally offering to your thinner pals.

Uh-oh.

Have you thought about wearing this?

It's a little more slimming on you, right?

Like, all of this sort of stuff that is like, I'm helping is all designed to make fat people

look thinner, right?

Appear thinner.

That's our pathway to success.

And it's also designed to make thin people feel like they have done right and good things to earn the bodies that they have.

That's right.

Regardless of what those things are or not, that they're doing or not doing, right?

Yeah.

It's a really tricky thing.

So it is, when you say it's a hierarchy that hurts us all, it really is a hierarchy that hurts us all, that it...

pulls thinner people away from their relationships to fat people in a really meaningful, intense way that I think many folks don't even really clock is happening.

And the culture uses fat bodies.

It's like when you see a woman who speaks out and then gets like, I'm from the Christian world, so crucified publicly.

Totally dope.

Right.

And then we all are like, okay, she's getting fucked, but like

in our bodies, we're like scared because we know that that's a warning to the rest of us to stay in line.

Absolutely.

So the culture uses those pictures of just bodies with no heads

being used

as a symbol of scaring everyone else to stay in line.

We're all part of the same shit.

Yeah, I used to

work near Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, which is like a big open town square sort of space, and would sometimes go there to get lunch.

And I stopped when I realized that that is where most of the news companies in town were filming their B-roll

of fat people.

And I was like, I can't handle like this, it is a very real fear of mine that I've had for a long time.

I can't handle seeing a torso walk by and being like, oh my God, that's my shirt.

Oh, my God, those are my nails.

Oh, my God, that's my whatever.

And I think this has just become so much part of the background noise of this conversation that like, I don't even think people really

realize what a horror show that is to watch.

as a fat person, right?

That those people are being filmed without consent.

They're being put up as a freak show, like straightforwardly as a freak show to be like, if you're not careful, this could be you.

Right.

And it's really exhausting to be the moral of the story all the time, you know?

It's really exhausting.

And talk to us about, I want to talk about concern trolling because

people will,

in a culture where everyone's been taught that this isn't healthy.

So the reason you get to say stuff about this person,

I feel like wellness, the wellness world is self-concern trolling.

Cause like everyone that I know that's on a juice cleanse

or any sort of cleanse is saying, and I would just say the people I know, my friends.

Yes.

Okay.

I'm not saying everyone.

The people I know are saying,

it's because I want it for my health.

But I know that's not why they're doing it.

I know they're doing it to lose weight.

So we're just saying health, but we mean.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, listen people say i want to get healthy as a way of saying i want to lose weight right so the assumption is a fat body can never be healthy right and a thin body is always a healthy body which you and i both know from very different ends that's not true right like that's like functionally false Concern trolling is a really tricky thing because we have so effectively collapsed the entire concept of health into this one number that is just your weight.

And honestly, even if we did that with your resting heart rate, even if we did that with your waist circumference, even if we did that with, I don't know what, your T cells, focusing your entire health on one number is going to lead you down a super weird path.

And that idea of like the entirety of health being encompassed by weight is so alluring because it makes it seem like our biases are scientific, right?

It makes it seem like

because of the science and because the doctor said so and because it's

everybody knows like being fat in itself is seen as a health condition now so people can say i'm doing it for my health and they can genuinely believe that and still have aesthetic and social concerns as the main things that they're trying to solve right and that shows up with fat people in the form of concern trolling So we all know what trolling trolling is.

It's just like saying terrible things to get a rise out of somebody.

Concern trolling is

doing that, but in a way with like a furrowed furrowed brow, right?

Like, hey, I'm just really, I've been really worried about you, right?

I'm really concerned about your health.

I'm really concerned that you're going to die.

I'm really concerned that you aren't going to be around for your kids that I don't have, right?

Like,

I'm really concerned about all of these different things becomes another way

for

both for thin people to tell fat people that they're going to die and it's going to be their fault, which is like an extremely gruesome, gnarly thing that we have seen with queer people and with trans people for ages.

And it becomes a way of a thin person getting to engage in an interaction that reminds them that they have succeeded where fat people have failed, right?

So there's both, there's a price that fat people pay and there's also like a reward to thin people, which is right.

You get to remind yourself, like, I did it and you can too.

I get to be the teacher in this moment.

It's my noblesse oblige to teach you how to to become more like me, which is the right way of being, right?

The right way of looking.

It's really

upsetting me because I feel like, no, I feel like I've done this like throughout my professional soccer career.

Do you know what I mean?

And I feel like this is just like me trying to take some accountability because as a pro athlete, I have to, in my mind, believe that I am like superior in order to kind of do it.

But I think that this is just like really helpful for even somebody like me to be very cautious and conscious and aware of like how I'm expressing myself.

Cause I've said that before.

If I can do it, you can do it.

Totally.

Totally.

Which like in fairness, by definition,

you have done a lot of things that other people have never done.

Exactly.

That's the lesson.

Leave us alone.

You are, by definition, sort of like a legendary soccer.

It's like fun.

Like,

I could not play in the World Cup.

That's like not in the cards for me.

According to the National Institutes of Health, someone my size has less than one tenth of 1% of a chance of attaining their BMI mandated weight.

That's like not in the cards for me.

All the science is real clear.

I'm not going to become a thin person.

And I super appreciate that.

And I also think the world of professional sports seems like a really, really different world in the same way that the world of professional dancing seems like a really particular world in relating to your body.

Right.

And in like, I would imagine coaches relating to your body and talking about your body and talking about what it can and can't do and how it needs to look in order to do those things and all kinds of stuff.

That's a little pressure cooker.

And I appreciate the taking accountability part.

And I also feel like, boy, if that's where you're living,

I don't know how you would get any other message, right?

This might be totally not true, but was the BMI, I don't, I don't think I've ever thought of, I knew it was a group of white men that was, but I didn't know they were, it was military-based.

Yeah.

Was there any intention there to create not identity of a healthy body, but of like, was there any, any goal to like create the perfect soldier as opposed to

somehow darker than that?

Oh, great.

It's somehow darker than military rhetoric.

Okay.

So the BMI was created by a statistician, sociologist, and astronomer named Adolf Kutle from Belgium.

He was trying to to put Belgium on the map.

He felt like they really got left behind in the Enlightenment.

And he was like, we got to make a big play, team.

And his way of doing that was by constructing something that he considered to be the ideal man.

And he thought that the ideal man, the ideal person, the ideal human, would be the average.

person of all of these traits.

Right now we think of the ideal as being elevated above the rest.

He's talking about, what if we could create a society where everyone's kind of the same and they're all aiming for this middle average thing?

So the only data that he had access to and the only people who were gathering data about weight and height at that point was the military.

And that was the data that he had access to, right?

Which means you're mostly getting white people, you're mostly getting men, right?

You're exclusively getting men.

You're exclusively getting white people in these things.

And his argument was that if we could all aim for that sort of middle body type, whatever that mean was in his calculation, we should also aim for the sort of middle of morality.

We should aim for the center.

He was a big centrist in a lot of ways.

That concept of the ideal man became the foundation for eugenics.

His work was drawn upon really, really heavily by Sir Francis Galton, who looked up to him a great deal, who was the father.

of eugenics in the UK.

From there, it went, the BMI in particular sort of sat on a shelf for a while until American insurance companies

around the the turn of the century were looking for ways to charge some policyholders more.

And the BMI offered a way to standardize amongst insurance companies.

This is the level of fat where we will charge you more.

And this is the level of fat where we just won't cover you.

Just to really drill down on that.

Yeah.

This has nothing to do with your health.

The insurance companies were looking to make more money.

Okay.

So they said, hey, y'all, what could we possibly use?

Oh, I know 200 years ago, there was an astronomer in Belgium.

That seems like the most recent, up-to-date, cutting-edge technology that we could rely on.

Let's go check his record.

An astronomer from 200 years ago, they get this and they're like, perfect.

It was

perfect.

It was like a Belgium lobbyist was right there.

Yeah.

You're still trying to make it.

Yeah.

Erquil Poirot from the Agatha Christie novels was there being like,

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

No, it's nonsense, it's nonsense, and it's been driven by either racism or capital or both at pretty much every turn.

The other thing that I would say is we get this big wave of news stories saying there's an obesity epidemic starting around 2000.

Prime time for this guy when I'm in high school.

What a great time to find out that you're an epidemic, right?

Um, so we start to get those news stories.

That is because

in 1999, the National Institutes of Health lowered their threshold for what BMIs would be considered quote unquote obese or quote-unquote overweight.

There was a lead on CNN at the time that said millions of Americans woke up Wednesday overweight or obese without having gained a pound,

right?

Which is just, we just change the definitions of those words.

But still, when you see news stories about a quote-unquote obesity epidemic, they'll show you a chart and it'll show a huge spike in 1999 and 2000, which makes you think a bunch of people got really fat one year, and not that we changed what those words mean to encompass a larger group of people.

Again, like at every sort of turn along the way, we're seeing this kind of downshifting and downshifting and downshifting to only seeing the thinnest among us as quote-unquote healthy people and therefore sort of deserving people.

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Can you talk to us about

thin security?

This was a part of your book that I was like sitting and reading and then I actually was like,

and then I went back and then I read it again.

And then I think I probably read the section three times because it was one of those rewiring of a lot of,

it was, I think it's really important for everybody to hear, if you don't mind, talking about how thin security shows up in your life and how the conflated moment of understanding, the nod from the thin person, like, yeah, I get it.

We're the same.

I totally get it.

Yeah.

All of that.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I will say, one of my personal examples of this was I went went to the doctor at one point.

And as a fat person, going to the doctor is really, really fraught.

Doctors have among the highest rates of anti-fat bias.

They

come in preconditioned to believe

over half of doctors believe that fat people are weak-willed, lazy, sloppy, and non-compliant, which if you're starting from that point before you've met a patient, the care you're giving is not going to be great.

That's right.

On this particular instance,

the doctor had come in and refused to touch me and refused to examine me and sent me away, which is like a legal thing that they can do.

And I was talking to a friend about it and I was like, this is really messing me up.

This has never happened to me before.

I didn't even know doctors could do this, just like send you away and be like, I'm not going to see you.

And my friend was like, I totally get it.

I'm having the worst body image day.

And I was like.

Buddy, I'm talking to you about something that a doctor refused to give me healthcare.

I'm talking about an institutional interaction.

I'm talking about engaging with someone else.

I'm not talking to you about how I feel in my own skin today.

That's not what this is.

And I spent a lot, a lot, a lot of time thinking about it.

A lot of these interactions are with people that I like really, really love and care about and want to give the benefit of the doubt to and sort of like figure out what's going on there.

And I realized that for this particular friend who's been very open about having a tough body image in general, that for this particular friend, she thought about this thing so much.

She thought about how she felt about her own body so much that she could not fathom that there was anything worse than that or anything bigger than that or anything outside of you that would change how you interact with your own.

body.

So the only thing that she could hear was the thing that she already knew how to feel, which was that this is like an internal brain struggle, not that, again, regardless of how much I love myself, regardless of how good my body image is that day, that doesn't change that doctor thinking I'm not a patient worthy of caring for.

That's right.

That doesn't help me find a doctor.

That doesn't, you know what I mean?

Like it's a, it's a totally different thing.

And in that moment, it felt really isolating from my friend.

I felt like I was living on a different planet, right?

That I was just sort of like.

Man, I really thought I was being clear about what's happening here.

And this person just can't hear it.

And that's been like a really consistent challenge for me and for other fat folks, sort of having this set of conversations is that people who are not fat are so accustomed to having conversations that center their own experiences of their own bodies that when we do something else, they're sort of at sea, right?

And they don't totally know how to interact with that.

And it's partly because

for many folks, they haven't experienced those barriers and they will even struggle to believe them.

Yes.

Another friend around that same instance said something like, Well, did you say something to him?

Did you do something?

Like, what did you do to make this happen?

And I was like, I showed up as a fat person.

I don't know what to tell you.

That is all also sort of part of thin security, which is just sort of this idea that, like, no, no, the way that the world interacts with my body is the way that the world interacts with all bodies, right?

It is a real struggle to get outside of that paradigm.

And it comes from a super legit place.

It comes from a super real hurt for a lot of folks.

And it becomes a barrier in your relationships with fatter folks.

And it becomes a barrier to advancing fat justice and liberation in some in some real concrete ways, right?

I mean, oversimplified, it's like the inability to understand that some things are on the inside and some things are on the outside.

Is that what it comes down to?

Like,

yeah.

Like you're talking about something that is a feeling on the inside and i'm talking about something that happens to me out in the world yeah i mean it seems like we have kids one of whom is japanese presenting the other two are white presenting

our children understand that the child who is japanese presenting has a different experience out in the world yep than the other two and they can understand that that's different.

So if the one kid comes back and says, this happened to me out in the world, the other two don't say, I get that because I'm also Japanese.

Right.

Like it's inside out.

Absolutely.

I mean, also, like on a medical front, if I had a friend, uh,

you know,

who was like going through a cancer diagnosis, I wouldn't be like, girl, I totally get it.

I'm super freaked out about getting cancer.

I really don't want it.

It seems terrible.

I'm super secure.

Like, there are so many ways to sort of come at this, right?

That are all sort of like, boy, if you sub out anything other than fat.

Yes.

It gets real gnarly real fast.

Right.

You're even worse.

Like you're yourself saying it in a different way.

Yeah.

And even worse, because in her reaction to you, she's not only saying, I get it, but also like, I'm my getting it is fear that I will be more like you.

Yeah.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Huh.

Yeah.

And I think, listen, as a person who does this as my job, I would say

90% of any given conversation that I have on this stuff with any given individual who hasn't been plus size, this one accepted.

Thanks, team,

is

them working through all of their feelings about their body and where they came from.

Oh my God.

And doing this sort of like therapy light that I am totally unqualified to do

with folks in order to get to the point where I can say,

hey, actually, you have chairs that don't fit me, right?

They can't hold me.

Or,

hey, I had this really challenging experience with the doctor today, right that like people feel like they have to work through all of their stuff before they can even entertain what somebody else is going through and that again just sort of like adds to the amount of work that fat folks have to do just to be yeah heard in a really basic way can you talk to us about eating disorders because there is a moment in your documentary where you say

you struggle with eating disorders or struggled.

I don't know if it's current, but you said, there's literally nowhere for me to go

to get help.

I thought, oh my God, can you just talk about that?

The difficulty.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I'll start with like a couple of structural things and then I'll talk about the personal stuff.

The structural stuff is: folks may or may not know this, that in order to qualify for a diagnosis of anorexia, you have to have a quote-unquote underweight BMI.

And if you don't, if you're a fat person who is exhibiting all of the behaviors and experiencing all of the health risks of anorexia or bulimia,

you will be considered to have atypical anorexia.

That's a new diagnosis.

And it just means you're anorexic, but you're fat.

What that means, because there's a separate diagnosis, is that some insurers will not cover atypical anorexia, but they will cover treatment for anorexia nervosa, right?

It also shows up in research world and eating disorders world that the research that we have into eating disorders until the last like two or three years has categorically excluded anyone who has a BMI of over 25.

So anyone in the sort of overweight or obese categories, we have not been studying eating disorders in them because we already presume that's not possible.

And if it is, it's probably good for their health, right?

Like that's the overwhelming message is that disordered eating is like a health solution for fat people.

So we have a whole world that thinks that.

Eating disorders don't exist in fat people because it has never asked fat people about their experiences with eating disorders.

Again, until pretty recently, there's a researcher named Aaron Harup out of Colorado who's doing incredible work around this.

But that's the context that you're stepping into is the diagnosis excludes you, the research excludes you, which means the clinicians have all been trained on bodies that are not yours and on a pathology that they believe can't necessarily be applied to your body.

And like any other healthcare providers, and like any other people on the planet, right, who've been living in this like sort of garbage discourse,

they they are also folks who have picked up the lessons of anti-fat bias from media from culture from all of these places and i just can't tell you the number of fat people that i've talked to who have checked in for eating disorder treatment and been put on calorie restricted plans

for their food in a recovery center i cannot tell you the number of people who have been laughed out of an eating disorder treatment facility by saying it looks like you haven't missed a meal in a while that like not only once again not only is it a rejection of like, you don't need treatment, it's a reification

of everything that led you to that place.

Right.

This is the very person who's supposed to help you is now telling you, nice try, Fatty, you don't qualify.

That's a really terrible position to be in.

I can't remember the precise numbers.

I believe it's people who wear straight sizes, so people who don't wear plus size clothes, when they

seek eating disorder treatment, on average, it takes them two to three years to access treatment, to like get to the place where they're able to acknowledge it able to seek out treatment all that kind of stuff for fat folks it takes 10 to 16 years

right

so like your life when we're yes that's your life that's your kids growing up that's your kids growing up with a parent in an active eating disorder that is untreated that's your life that's your access to health care that is again we're talking about like a disease with a really high fatality rate we're talking about eating disorders that are like likely to kill people and often do.

And if they do in that circumstances, they say, well, they were fat.

Totally.

And they were just trying really hard.

We don't see it as an eating disorder.

We see it as someone who's really trying.

And we applaud that.

That when I was sort of at the height of my own eating disorder, all I was getting were compliments.

Yeah.

God damn it.

Right.

Like, that's it.

It's only reinforcement.

That's cultural.

That's in eating disorder centers.

That's in the research.

that's everywhere.

I am like a weird unicorn that shouldn't exist, right?

According to this entire sort of field.

And that's to say nothing of like the incredible whiteness of the field and white supremacy in the field.

That's to say nothing of the wild ableism in the field.

There's like lots of stuff to sort of dig in on there, but I just have known enough fat people who have gone down the path of treatment.

And I don't know that I know a single one who has checked in to like a residential treatment center and has not come out worse than when they started.

Wow.

You know, like that's a really, really, really tough pill to swallow and it's a hard position to be in.

Yeah.

Based on everything I know, like I can't, I can't fathom checking into a center and not

having it make my eating disorder worse.

Still, not a single place.

Yeah.

I think that all of the health things,

doesn't it also become

like the access to health, all the medical people are saying, oh, fatness is a health risk.

Yeah.

And then you go in as a fat person to

get medical assistance.

But then the research says that then all the doctors say it's because you're fat.

And then they miss diagnoses.

And then they don't actually examine you because they say all your symptoms are for that.

Yeah.

If there is any data to show that fatness is comorbid with these other things, a huge percentage of it has got to be because they won't look at anything past fat to actually diagnose you and help you.

Yes, absolutely.

There have been a couple of big stories about this.

One was a woman in British Columbia who wrote her own obituary for the newspaper and was like, I'm dying because I was fat and because I went to a bunch of doctors and they missed my cancer and they said that I needed to go lose weight.

And that's why I'm dying.

So I just want to tell you, that's why I'm dying.

That's my obituary.

Bye.

And there's another one, a person named Rebecca Hiles, who started to seek healthcare in college because she was experiencing severe shortness of breath.

And they said, well, that's just because you're fat and you're winded all the time.

So you need to go work out and lose weight, whatever.

She got that for, I believe, eight years.

And at the end of that, eight years, found a doctor who discovered a massive tumor in her lung.

She had lung cancer that was untreated for all of this time.

So like, these are the sorts of stakes that fat folks are experiencing.

And then to have that minimized into something that is not, not a trial, which is sort of like your own mindset about your own body.

But it does feel like missing the boat completely, right?

When folks are like, I totally get it.

It's so hard to have a body.

Don't you love Lizzo?

She's so confident, right?

And that's sort of the sum total of the conversation.

And there's not really a room, room to go, hey, wait a minute, people who look like me die

because of stuff like this.

People who look like me don't get health care because of stuff like this.

And then we go, oh, look at how unhealthy they are.

And we don't go, well, wait a minute, we haven't been treating them and we haven't been diagnosing them and we're discriminating against them a lot.

Whoops.

It's a real tough one.

The medical stuff is really difficult and intractable.

And there is a little bit of data that suggests that people who are attracted to healthcare provision programs are more likely to exhibit anti-fat bias to begin with, and that the process of going through that schooling only increases their bias against fat people.

So it's a real big systemic rat's nest of stuff to disentangle.

And as a fat person, it feels like a monolith, right?

With no cracks in it.

There's no way in.

for me there.

It's really, really tough.

It's really tough.

I'm wondering if it's okay with you

if uh we play this one voicemail because i used to be an elementary school teacher and i always think i don't really understand something until i can figure out how i'd say it to like an eight-year-old

you know you know what i mean and and yeah and i just think this question is from somebody who's trying to figure out i think it's a parent who's trying to figure out how to approach something with her kid Yeah, let's do it.

Yeah.

I love in your book how the end is like this vision of

what it would look like if fat people had equal access to healthcare, all the things we've been talking about.

So, like, I always think if we're going to start, let's start with the kids because the adults are so fucked anyway.

Like, it's like, that's why I used to teach Sunday schools.

Like, just give me the newbies because it's so hard to undo everything else.

Let's start fresh.

So, if we were going to start fresh with this love bug, let's hear from Holly.

Hi, my name's Holly, and I'm 41.

I'm calling because I'm just so sad in this moment.

My 11-year-old daughter is away on a trip with her grandmother and today

I got

texts today that I will try and condense.

The first one, a lady said something really mean to me at a store and now I'm really sad.

She said I'm fat and not to eat so much.

It really hurt my feelings because I didn't think I was fat.

Why did she say that?

I can't stop thinking about it.

Now I feel like I'm fat.

So as I talked her through all of this and we discussed what quote-unquote fat looks like anyways,

she asked, but if I'm not fat, then what does she see?

I felt pretty, but now I feel yucky and I don't feel comfortable anymore.

She is

an 11-year-old child who hasn't even started puberty, and she's the shortest in her class, and her body is just what it is supposed to be in this moment.

But what do I say to my beautiful girl?

Why is that bad?

And why do I feel like I have to tell her she's not fat to offer support?

How do I keep her safe from this status?

That's such a tough one.

That's such a tough and real one.

I feel like, um, with questions like these, uh, I always feel hyper-aware that parenting is like an extremely singular experience, and it's not one that I am having.

So, take all of this with a grain of salt.

But, this is someone who does not

like intimately know the day-to-day of parenting and understands that that's like a super different experience of the world in a lot of ways.

Um, I will say, I have a niece and nephew to whom I am very close, uh, and we have had similar conversations

to this one.

And I think in those moments, I feel myself tempted to say,

everything that person said is wrong.

Everything that just hurt you is incorrect.

And you need to put it out of your head because they're wrong and they're just trying to be mean to you.

And usually how that comes out for people is saying, you are not fat.

Don't listen to them.

The message that that sends to that kid, whether we intend to or not, is that if at some point they gain weight, if at some point they become a fat person, even if they aren't now, that they can expect that kind of behavior, right?

And that that's like an okay way to be.

I would think instead about talking about, how do you think she was trying to make you feel?

How did it make you feel?

I hear you saying you don't feel pretty, now you feel fat.

Do you know pretty fat people?

Have you seen some pretty fat people?

Can you be pretty and fat?

Can you be smart and fat?

Can you be all of these different things and fat?

Do you know fat people that you like?

What are they like?

Isn't it weird to say that that, like saying someone is like that person is an insult?

That's weird.

That person's great.

Why wouldn't you want to be like that person?

There are reframes that we do around this stuff all the time with kids.

And this is one of those opportunities.

My niece at one point had a friend who was saying, I'm so fat, I can't wear anything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but would also call other people fat.

And my niece was like, I don't know how to engage with this because every time I try and come at this conversation, she just goes, I'm just talking about me.

I'm just talking about myself.

Right.

And so we had to do a bunch of unpacking of like, when she says you're fat, what's she really trying to say?

She's trying to say you don't belong here.

She's trying to say that you're being rejected.

She's trying to say all of these other things.

That's bonkers because fat is just a body type.

That's all that is.

And if someone's saying anything to try and hurt you, that's probably something to disregard.

If someone's someone's motivation is just to hurt your feelings, that's probably not like a great interaction to put a lot of stock in.

I think it can be that simple.

I don't, I don't know that it needs to be a whole lot more than that, but also you are road-tested parents.

So tell me what you think.

Tell me how that lands and tell me how, like, how did these conversations play out in your house?

We solely look to people who don't have children to give us parenting advice because nobody else has any fucking like marbles left.

So we are, I think that that was absolutely beautiful and definitely online with how we try to talk to our little babies.

It's beautiful.

I just, Aubrey, you are doing

world-changing, mind-blowing work that just it is past time for.

I am just grateful for what you're teaching.

I really appreciate that.

And likewise, I feel like you are modeling a kind of conversation here that is like actually open, actually relaxed, actually sort of

anticipating change in folks and expecting that as a natural part of things, whether it's on this stuff or on gender or on race or on eating disorders or on any number of things.

Like it's such a wonderful thing.

You know, it feels like we live in a political context where vulnerability is like less and less possible every day.

And to be in a space where that's the lead is a really lovely little privilege.

So thank you you for having me.

This is a joy.

We love you.

This is a joy.

You're fantastic.

Thank you, Pod Squad.

And Aubrey, please, please, please, if you ever want to come back, just please tell us because we will.

Oh my God.

We don't want to have you come back anytime.

You have a free hour.

Just please.

That's right.

Fantastic.

Okay.

Love it.

Bye, Pod Squad.

See you next time.

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