We also talk about how the proliferation of weight loss drugs will influence cultural beliefs about fatness.

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Summer:
This episode of eat the rules is brought to you by you on fire you on fire is the online group coaching program that I run that gives you a step by step way of building up your self worth beyond your appearance. With personalized coaching from me incredible community support and lifetime access to the program so that you can get free from body shame and live life on your own terms. Get details on what’s included and sign up for the next cycle at summer innanen.com forward slash you on fire. I’d love to have you in that group. This is eat the rules, a podcast about body image self worth, anti dieting and intersectional feminism. I am your host summer Innanen. a professionally trained coach specializing in body image self worth and confidence and the best selling author of body image remix. If you’re ready to break free of societal standards and stop living behind the number on your scale, then you have come to the right place. Welcome to the show.

This is episode 271. And I’m joined by Aubrey Gordon co host of maintenance phase and author of what we don’t talk about when we talk about fat as well as you just need to lose weight and 19 other myths about fat people. We’re talking about how we can change beliefs about fatness within ourselves and in our culture. How the proliferation of weight loss drugs will influence cultural beliefs about fatness, the role that thin people have in ending anti fat bias in our culture and so much more. You can find all the links mentioned at Summer innanen.com. Forward slash 271. I want to give a shout out to Alicia and as he left this review, I have been recovering from an eating disorder for over two years. I love this podcast and have recommended it to several friends, and even my eating disorder therapist. Summer helps me stay on the road to recovery, self acceptance and finding value in myself beyond my appearance. I get a little stronger every time I listen and feel like she helps me give diet culture the middle finger. Thank you so much. I’m so glad it’s been so helpful for you on your journey to recovery. And I hope that that continues to go well for you. You can leave a review by going to Apple podcasts search for eat the rules, click ratings and reviews and click to leave a review or give it a rating. A review is always appreciated even more and you can also support the show by subscribing just hit the little button on whatever platform you use. Don’t forget to grab the free 10 Day body confidence makeover with 10 steps you can take right now to feel better in your body at summer innanen.com forward slash freebies. If you are a professional or a provider who also works with people who may have body image struggles, I have a free body image coaching roadmap for you at summer innanen.com forward slash roadmap. If you can’t find these links, easily just go to the body image coach.com That’ll take you to my website where you can find everything that you hear on the show. I am so excited to have Aubrey Gordon on the show. I honestly didn’t think she was going to say yes to my interview request. And I have been recommending her latest book, you just need to lose weight and 19 other myths about fat people to everybody, because it is such a helpful little guide to be able to flip to win if you are kind of struggling with any thoughts that you have about fat bodies. Or if you have other people in your life that are saying things like if they’re just saying like, well, there’s an obesity epidemic, for example. All of those answers are compartmentalize in a very succinct, and research supported way in this book, and I absolutely loved it. So I highly recommend it. It’s a really good one to have on your bookshelf because it just is it’s like a go to resource when you hear any of these things or when you think any of these things. Like well thought people just need to lose weight. Or what about their health I’m concerned for their health. I we’re going to answer some of those today, by the way, but I just want to plug the book genuinely loved it. I’m recommending it to all my clients. So check it out, and you’re gonna love this interview. Aubrey Gordon is an author, columnist, columnist, columnist, and co host of maintenance phase. Her work has been published in the New York Times Vox literary hub self health glamour and more. Her first book what we don’t talk about when we talk about fat was released in November 2020. Her second book, you just need to lose weight and 19 other myths about fat people is a New York Times and indie bestseller. She co hosts the podcast maintenance phase with journalist Michael Hobbs and together the to debunk and decode wellness and weight loss trends.

Let’s get started with the show Aubrey Gordon, welcome to the show. I’m so happy to have you here.

Aubrey:
I’m so delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Summer:
Yeah, it’s great. And I would love for you to start by telling us a little bit about what inspired you to write your latest book, you just need to lose weight and 19 other myths about fat people.

Aubrey:
This one came from sort of the organizer, part of my experience. So before writing, I was a community organizer for a dozen years or so. And it felt like in moving through releasing my first book, which was much more of a memoir, that people had these real nuts and bolts kinds of questions that just kept coming up. And there is a lot of research, there’s a lot of history, there’s a lot of analysis from a lot of folks that can help sort of illuminate some of these, like very widely held and very baseless ideas that we have about fat people culturally. So it felt important to compile all of that in one place, and give folks the sort of one and done for the moment on, you know, things like, quote, unquote fatness, as the number one killer of folks in the United States, that one’s not as straightforward as we might think, or the BMI is a neutral, sort of arbiter of folks health. And it’s only based in science, and therefore it can’t be bi straight, it felt important to compile things like that all in one place. So that as folks are moving through their own politics around fatness and fat people, they’re sort of like a little go to when you feel that resistance sort of crop up to sort of get underneath some of the assumptions that we’ve all been taught to have.

Summer:
Yeah, because there’s so much questioning that happens, I find, you know, even with, like, clients who are newer to this, or have been doing it for a while, I think it’s really easy to kind of slip back into some of these ways of thinking or like, but what about health, like, you know, there’s, there’s, there’s like a level of doubt. And obviously, like, you know, we’re all carrying around some level of of bias about things, whether it’s like totally conscious or subconscious in us. And so I really appreciate how you’ve compartmentalized it into, you know, all the different categories or questions that people have, so that they can really use this as like an ongoing reference.

Aubrey:
I super appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, my hope was to have a place where you could just like, particularly for other fat folks in the world, that if someone said something terrible to you, or has been consistently pushing back on you about, like, you know, you’re just quote unquote, glorifying obesity, I think is a phrase we hear quite a bit, right, that there could be a place that folks could go to and just coat just read these, like five pages. And please leave me alone about this thing. Right? It felt really important on that front.

Summer:
Yeah. So actually, that’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about before we get into like some of these myths that I wanted to highlight. But you I actually read this interview that you did with I think it might have been like stranger, like a publication where you were someone suggested that like Bill Maher needs to read this book. And I think, I don’t know if people can’t see your face right now. But it’s basically said, like, you know, it’s not for him, it’s for like his neighbors and his family who have to have Thanksgiving with him. So you know, but you think about people like Bill Maher, who have such a massive platform and are like, incredibly anti fat, like, is it possible to change those people’s minds? Like, and how do you? How do you do that?

Aubrey:
Yeah, I mean, so I’ll say this, I think there’s something to think about, particularly in movements like fat justice and liberation, which is like, where is our time best spent? Right? And the amount of time and energy that it would take to like win over say, a Piers Morgan or a Bill Maher or whatever like, Gremlin, dude, you want to write the amount of time and energy that that would take just even just to neutralize them on this issue? would, you know, be the equivalent of, you know, getting 100 folks who are conflicted but close to you on board? Or do you see what I’m saying? Like, yeah, because some trade offs to weigh here. There are ways of doing that. But I think the most effective ways, right, like we’ve seen significant sea changes and social attitudes in our lifetimes around, you know, queer people and trans people. And usually, the way that those folks change is that the culture changes around them so definitively that they may or may not stop believing what they have professed before, but they are less likely to say it and they are less likely to act on it. That seems to be the only The real path forward with folks who are so sort of wedded to their anti fatness? I don’t know, what do you think? Have you had any success in this room? Are there any diehards that you’ve won?

Summer:
Oh, no, it’s a really good question. I think, you know, I have reference points from people who, who are like, you know, I heard your podcasts and it just was like, there’s just no way and then I kept coming back to it. And so you know, but they’re not these like, you know, Boomer, white men that tend to be really, really committed to their role in this culture. And so I would say it’s, it’s really different. The, you know, the, the experiences that I have, I can think of just sort of, you know, some family members, and it’s kind of like beating a dead horse, you know, like, so, yeah, I don’t have a magic solution for it. Either. I think your recommendation of kind of, you know, like, let’s help the people who actually are open to, you know, hearing these things, then we can create a bigger, you know, greater mass instead of wasting our time on these other folks.

Aubrey:
I think there’s just a lot more low hanging fruit out there than people realize. And it’s very easy to get distracted by the people saying and doing the most sensational things. But yeah, when we look at the lives, the day to day lives of fat people in particular, the things that make the biggest difference, or change in our friends and family, the things that make the biggest difference or change in our health care providers, right, like, it’s way closer to home, of course, it just blows Bill Maher sort of go on and on about bad people, right? Like, it’s just terrible. And of course, the world would be a better place if that wasn’t happening. And also, the most meaningful change that we can make is actually considerably closer to home on quite a bit of this stuff.

Summer:
Right? Yeah. Yeah, that makes so much sense. So on the topic, like kind of the, you know, this idea of like, fat being bad for you, and one of my favorite episodes of maintenance phase is the episode you did called as being fat bad for you, that really, you know, looks into the claim that fatness is the leading cause of death in the US. And so are you able to kind of summarize some of the faults in that claim? Or maybe in other words, like, how would you respond to somebody who, who, who really, you know, still kind of touts that as a fact?

Aubrey:
Yeah. So the phrasing that folks usually hear in news reports is 400,000 Americans die every year, just because they’re fat is sort of the way that that’s framed in the news, and has been steadily for about 20 years. That comes from a study that has been retracted team. It comes from a study where in the actual methodology of the study, they say, essentially, they took the total number of fat people who died in a year and subtracted the total number of thin people who died in a year. And in that gap, they assumed that every single fat person who died in excess of 10 people who died, died because they were fat, not because they got in a car crash, not because they were struck by lightning, not because they died of natural causes. Just because they’re fat, right? There is a wide range of mortality estimates on the low end of those mortality estimates is about 20,000 people a year, which is a huge difference from 400,000 people a year. And I would also say, Listen, 400,000 Americans is a lot of Americans. If people were just dying from fat, you would know a person who had just died of fat. Like that’s like, yeah, generally a cause of death that you hear very often in your own, like personal networks, right. The other thing that I would say is that there was a pretty concerted campaign from folks who really wanted to emphasize that 400,000 number as a way of driving dollars into researching fatness and researching that through a very medicalizing very stigmatizing frame, there was a pretty concerted effort to discredit the researchers who came up with lower numbers and the researchers who pushed back on this stuff, including pre emptive calls to press including canceling their speaking engagements, including all kinds of stuff. It is a real wild like reality show plotline as academia often can be, but it is a really, really bonkers story that when you sort of pop the hood on this very simple, very large, very looming kind of number, that there is a really significant amount of disagreement on that number. And that the highest number is the one we keep naming and that’s the one that folks agree isn’t right. Move.

Summer:
Yeah, it’s amazing how something that like just kind of makes a headline once can just become so enmeshed in people’s beliefs about something like nobody or, you know, like, once it’s in someone’s mind, it’s like, it’s just, it’s just like, it’s just there as like that. And like, I don’t know if you know this, but like when it was retracted, like, did that make was that in the media as well? Or was that kind of like, not really in the media was just sort of retracted.

Aubrey:
It was just sort of quietly amended, the study was quietly amended to a lower number. I think they downshifted to 360,000, which is like, alright, team a little bit better. Not much. No, it didn’t make the news in a big way. And there were anti fat organizations sort of folks doing quote unquote, anti obesity work. We’re sharing those numbers continuously, even after they were retracted. Right, which is how those numbers ended up in speeches by, you know, heads of states, how it ended up in speeches by Senators and in the news consistently, like it is still getting published today. And this has been wrong and known to be wrong for many years. At this point.

Summer:
Yeah, yeah. Wow. Well, I mean, for people who want to hear more about it, like I’m always directing them to that maintenance phase episode, because it’s just like, it’s so good in terms of getting into the nitty gritty of of the summary that you’ve just given.

Aubrey:
Yeah, Mike really hit it out of the park with that one. It was fantastic.

Summer:
Yeah, definitely. And so, you know, like, one of the other kind of things that you talk about, and that I think, also kind of comes up quite a bit with people is like, a lot of people just claim Well, I’m just concerned, I’m just concerned for your health, like, I’m just concerned for, you know, for fat people’s health. So what’s your you know, what’s your response? When you hear those types of that type of when people say that, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say?

Aubrey:
Yeah, I would say two things. One, I totally understand where that concern comes from. We live in a society that is constantly talking about concern for fat, people’s health. And it has become a way of signaling that we’re like, good people. And we’re doing all of this out of care for fat people, when we recommend diet, when we suggest gym memberships, when we critique their appearance, all of that kind of stuff. What I would say to that is, that’s not what concern usually looks like, right? Concern is usually an act of care and love and tenderness, and telling fat people to just lose weight, or that you are concerned for their health, just because of their size is absolutely an appearance based judgment of someone else, right? You don’t actually know what that person’s blood work is, you don’t actually know what their blood pressure is, you can probably guess that it’s gone up by you bringing up their appearance, their blood pressure probably ticked up a little bit as a result of that. But like, you know, we’re not to borrow a phrase, we’re not walking MRI machines, we don’t have access to other people’s medical charts. And even if we did, talking trash to them about how they look is not going to help with their, with their health, right. Like that is not a healthy experience for people to have, right. So what I would say to all of that is like, again, it’s like a learned sort of script about fatness and fat people, that doesn’t necessarily come from a bad place. But it absolutely cloaks a pretty deeply biased perspective. And it completely disregards the wants and needs and boundaries of fat people who are many of whom are very vocal about not wanting to hear people’s concern about our health, not wanting to hear about the new diet that you’re trying, not wanting to hear everything that you’re doing or that you think that we should do not to look like us, you know, it’s not great. Isn’t that great?

Summer:
Yeah. And one of the things one of the quotes that I pulled from your book was just that the best way to express that concern is to address the overwhelming still stigma facing fat people in doctor’s offices like to actually learn about that and, you know, advocate for change in that realm.

Aubrey:
Yeah, it’s it’s a tricky thing. doctors and health care providers of all stripes are given an immense amount of technical training. They have an incredible wealth of technical knowledge. And none of that training asks them to address their own biases toward their potential patients, and certainly not their fat patients. Right. It has come up in the research quite a bit for this book and for the show that essentially every study that has looked at bias in health care providers, anti fat bias and health care providers, has found that a commanding majority of providers have a profound, implicit and often explicit bias against their own fat patients fat people get shorter office visits Health care providers develop less rapport with us, they’re less likely to order tests, they’re less likely to do all manner of things with us, which means that fat folks are more likely to be misdiagnosed or go undiagnosed for major health issues, right? So if you’re concerned about our health, or if you’re concerned about our mortality, a pretty good place to start is making sure that we have doctors that listen to us and doctors that we feel comfortable going to.

Summer:
Yeah. And what’s the uptick of like these weight loss drugs that are kind of, you know, becoming prolific in the market right now? Like, what are your What are your sort of thoughts on how that’s going to, like, influence people’s experiences at the doctor? And how can they sort of, you know, better advocate for themselves? Or how can we better advocate for ourselves because of this?

Aubrey:
Yeah, I mean, I will say this. So the median weight loss, as I understand it, or the average weight loss, I should say, on ozempic, or Manjaro, or any of the quote unquote, skinny jabs, as they’re being called, is like 20 to 30 pounds, right. So that’s not that far off from plenty of diets, right? Like, there are plenty of diets you could be on, that would lead to a 20 to 30 pound weight loss. And like any diet, the weight comes back, as soon as you go off of this injection, right. So in order to stay at that lower weight, you have to stay on that injection for the rest of your life. It feels worth noting that when people believe that their own weight is manipulable, when they believe that they can change the size of their own body, they are more likely to project that onto other people, and particularly onto fat people. And that has been linked to an uptick in anti fat bias and also personal dislike of fat people. So like, on a societal level, I worry very much about thin people losing an additional 20 to 30 pounds, thinking this is a miracle drug that will make their fat friend thin, not their fat friend 20 pounds less fat, right. And using that to reinforce all of their sort of harmful assumptions about fatness and fat people, very culturally loaded very sort of character judgments about fat folks, that includes healthcare providers, right. And I think, listen, for folks my size and larger in particular, we will have experienced this kind of pressure around bariatric surgery many, many times, right? This won’t look meaningfully different than that. And I would just remind folks that you can actually sit with yourself and keep your own counsel on this kind of stuff. And many, many, many doctors will recommend this to fat folks, just because we’re fat. And just because they believe that this is the you know, the best way to help us is to make us fat, if that makes you uncomfortable, if that makes you feel shame, if that’s not a medicine that you want to take, those are all perfectly fine reasons to refuse a treatment is what I would say like, remember that the ball is actually in your court as much power and influence as doctors hold over us. You actually can say no to something if it makes you really uncomfortable or say that you don’t want to talk about it that day, you know, and honestly, that goes for folks of all sizes with eating disorders as well. Like, if you don’t want to talk about your weight, you don’t have to talk about your weight. And you actually can open the conversation there and go, here’s the one thing I’m not going to talk about today. My size. Let’s move along. Right.

Summer:
Yeah, and looking for I mean, it’s so hard to find alternate healthcare providers, but trying to find health care providers that you know, actually look at what you’re experiencing versus just you know, your body size. And yeah, with the weight, the weight loss stroke thing is quite scary. One of the things that you know, you’ve sort of really done in terms of within like the, you know, the fat liberation sphere is really kind of shifted the language from like fat phobia to anti fat bias. And I’m wondering if you can just speak to why that was necessary, why you encourage people to use anti fat bias as the terminology when we’re when we’re talking about this.

Aubrey:
Yeah, I would say everybody can use whatever terms they want and find useful in different contexts, right, like different terms will land for different people, both the people speaking them and the people hearing them, for me, as someone who is trying to get way more people to think about this way more deeply. What I noticed is that when folks well two things one, there is some fantastic analysis from denari Monroe who is a phenomenal writer who wrote a piece for Everyday Feminism some years ago, essentially arguing that phobias are real mental illnesses. As and that referring to bias and bigotry as a phobia adds to that stigma that exists pretty profoundly against folks who have mental illnesses that really hit home for me. And I sort of took that one on board. And as I was thinking about how to broaden the conversation around fatness and fat people and actually draw in, you know, people who are not fat, who are often some of the sort of greatest sort of aggressors of this in our lives, even if they don’t see themselves that way, it felt important to use terms that invited folks into that conversation them and made them feel like there was something here that they could work through, right? That calling someone fat phobic, to borrow a phrase from Jay Smooth, isn’t dangerous, because you might be wrong, it’s dangerous, because you might be right. Like, that person might just dig their heels right on in. But if you talk about, you know, learned bias that gives folks something to work through and it gives them an other side to get to right. And it categorizes this correctly as something that will be an ongoing process, right? Not sort of a character assessment of like, you are this kind of person, you’re with us or you’re against us, you’re this kind of person or you’re this kind of person, right? But like giving folks a pathway to see how to be more with us, you know,

Summer:
huh, yeah, no, I really appreciate that explanation. And so on the like, kind of on the topic of terminology, one of the other things that you talked about in your book, which was really like eye opening to me is just the use of the word internalized anti fatness, so, like or internalized homophobia, I think, is the way a lot of people have sort of referred to it historically. And so, and how I think, you know, kind of in in like, the anti diet space, like a lot of us, you know, take that and say like I have internalized, you know, anti fatness, regardless of your size, so then people use that term as well. And so I would love for you to just describe like, what internalized anti fatness actually is and really, like, you know, how that kind of just applies to people who are fat and not not a thing that, you know, kind of straight straight says people kind of experience it differently.

Aubrey:
Yeah, totally. This is we’re gonna start with the bitter pill to swallow here, which is when fat folks Express internalized anti fatness, essentially, what we’re doing is doing the work of marginalization for the people who want to marginalize us, right. The concept of internalized oppression has lived a long and storied life in social justice movements. And it refers to the ways in which a marginalized community again sort of takes on the work of their oppressors and the folks who want them to be minimized and marginalized in society, right. So for fat folks, that would be things like making sure that other people know we’re on a diet or that we’re going to the gym, or criticizing people who are fatter than us so that we can align ourselves more within folks, right? Or if someone says to you, I’m just concerned about your health. You say, I know I’m really concerned about it, that like, we sort of beat them to the punch with our own anti fatness, as a way to sort of like ward off or purportedly sort of save ourselves from anti fatness, but that’s not really what it does. The bitter pill to swallow is this. When thin folks when people who are not fat when people who don’t wear plus sizes and have never worn plus sizes, do this. That’s not internalized anti fatness, that’s just anti fatness, right, it might be learned, which I think is what people are trying to signal. When they’re saying internalized anti fatness when streets as people talking about that. They might have learned it, they might have taken it on. But they have not been fat people. So they have not gone through the process of experiencing that specific kind of marginalization and replicating it within themselves and on other members of their community. Right. Again, folks can talk about body image all day long. Absolutely. But I think part of what makes this conversation so tricky, is that when thin folks refer to their own negative body image stuff as internalized anti fatness, it really centers them as the ultimate victims of anti fatness and it sort of crowds out fat folks. And it also sort of discounts their role in perpetuating anti fatness. Right. Again, folks who experience high levels of body dissatisfaction, particularly white women who experienced high levels of body dissatisfaction, get a charge get a protective effect from looking at someone who’s fatter than them and saying at least I’m not that fat, right? That’s going to influence the way that you treat that person whether you mean it to or not. Right, like that’s going to influence how you see that entire community of people. So the idea that folks who are enacting that kind of bias could then claim themselves to be the victims of it is sort of true in part but it’s really ignoring a much larger social context. And it’s really ignoring the social context that folks who are fatter than any of us individually are facing, right?

Summer:
Yeah, no, I really, really appreciate you breaking that down. Because I feel like that’s not talked about enough in terms of, and it’s just kind of a widespread use of that phrase without really analyzing, like, you know, what it really means and your own experience. And one of the like, kind of, you know, coming off of that one of the other things you mentioned in the book is too often in conversations about body image fat people are props for soothing thin people’s feelings, while our own needs are disregarded fat people get hurt, then people get healed. I’d love for you to just I know, you’ve just kind of touched on it a bit. But I’d love for you to elaborate on that.

Aubrey:
Yeah, I mean, I think there is this trope, right, that we see, I think most frequently in romantic comedies, which is like the fat friends, right? The fat that’s, that is a character that I mean, listen, I am personally of the opinion that we don’t end up with the fat friend trope without first having the mammy trope, right. Because in both cases, we’re talking about fat folks, often fat women who do not have a plotline of their own, they are solely there to prop up usually the confidence of the thin person who is the main character who’s living the real life that people really care about, and actually has a story of their own right. And I think that has really seeped into our social interactions in big ways. I cannot tell you the number of times that I have had conversations with than our friends and held what felt to me like an infinite amount of space for them, and then would assert one or two very basic needs or wants for support from them, and face like a really sort of emotional blowback kind of moment, that felt really disproportionate, and I didn’t understand it. And then I came to understand that that didn’t actually happen with my fatter friends, it mostly just happened with my thinner friends. Not all of them, but all the folks who were doing it within people. And that came up most strongly around conversations around body image, right? That it also became clear to me that my thinner friends were bringing their body image insecurities to me because there was something for them about being reassured by someone who was fatter than them, that you’re not really like me, don’t worry, you’re fine. I’m the wretched, right? was sort of part of that. And I think, again, I don’t think folks are coming from a bad place and wanting to process their body image. I don’t think it’s wrong to ask your friends to process that with you. I think it’s important to ask for consent. And I think it’s important to sit with why you want to take your particular insecurities about fatness to one of the people in your life who experiences that so much more acutely than you do. Like feels like a question worth sitting with, for folks because it felt like an incredibly strong pattern to me.

Summer:
Yeah, so on. So like, kind of segwaying from that. What role do you think people have then in ending anti fatness, like, what do you what what would you like to see more of in order to, you know, be a part of it to be like, I mean, I always hesitate to use the word ally, but ally ship I guess more as like a verb.

Aubrey:
Yeah, totally. Totally, totally. This is the bell hooks. Love is an action never simply a feeling kind of train. Yeah. So listen, there’s good news for thin people, which is the bar is low. Currently. There are not a lot of thin people falling all over themselves to like, be great to fat people. So really, and truly the answer to this question is like do anything, do anything, I would say the things that would have made the biggest difference to me and that do make the biggest difference to me, or when my thin friends call people out whether I’m there or not on their anti-fat stuff, whether that’s a gentle call out or a hard one, whatever it takes to get that person through it, even if it doesn’t look pretty from the outside, right? Even if that process is like a little like glue. The folks who have shown up for me in the biggest and best ways in my life are the folks who have moved other people through their anti fatness. I would say Listen, anti-fat street harassment is extremely, extremely common. And it is vanishingly rare for anyone to intervene when that happens. And what that means is that when that happens if you see someone you know, cat calling a fat person or moving at them or talking to them in a really intense way about diets when they didn’t ask for that or whatever it would be be immensely helpful if folks would intervene because when they don’t, it sends a message to the person doing that, that that’s acceptable behavior, which it is not. And it sends a message to that fat person that no one’s gonna stand up for you. You’re in this by yourself, right. And I don’t think that’s a message that most people want to send. I would like to believe that most of us aspire to better than that. So I think we’re talking about like, relatively small things on that front, I would say folks can also contribute to fat justice organizations like NASA, the National Association to Advance fat acceptance. They’re running a campaign to make size discrimination illegal in many more places in the US as it should be. Or as does the Association for Size, diversity and health. The folks who brought us Health at Every Size as a framework. Both of those are phenomenal organizations. Oh, flair for justice, is that sort of legal defense arm of the movement? All of those are organizations that could use your time could use your funds could use your signal boosts all of that kind of stuff. I think there’s a real range here. But again, the bar here is not a high was it?

Summer:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I guess the sort of, like counter question to that is like, what? And I know, this is like a really big question, but maybe you can narrow it down to the field of like, people who are maybe already kind of, like, partially in the anti diet space, like what shouldn’t like then people do are what do you wish, you know, thinner people wouldn’t do in that space?

Aubrey:
Boy, I will say this, it’s both heartening and not a great look. The same time, is I have noticed an uptick lately in thin folks in anti diet spaces, correcting fat people on their language or their experience. So if someone identifies as plus size, a thin person who has been reading more fat liberation stuff might say, No, it’s totally fine. Call yourself fat. And that fat person might not be there didn’t know I would say even for things like correcting people using quote, unquote, fat phobia, instead of quote, unquote, anti fat bias, right? Or anti fatness, like fat folks can use whatever language they want to use to describe their own experiences. And it is, again, really heartening that folks are like taking up the mantle of doing this work. And I would say save that energy for others than people, they could absolutely use your corrections. Let that people be because honestly being corrected on like, no, no, don’t call yourself fat to No, no, do call yourself fat is still sort of the idea there is that a thin person knows better than a fat person how they ought to feel about their body. And that’s like, fundamentally not a super helpful or compassionate approach to take with folks. You know, I don’t know, what would you say what you are deeper in anti diet space than I may be? Talk to me about? Like, what do you see sort of happening around those dynamics?

Summer:
Oh, okay. Sure. I think, you know, I mean, I’ve talked about this on the podcast before. So this is if anyone’s been listening to this for a while, then it’s probably not that new. But, and not all of it is my you know, we I’ve talked about this with other guests before as well. But I think like, you know, taking up space in terms of like, you’re sitting in, you’re bending over and you’re showing your roles, or you’re showing like a before and after picture of like, when you were like a size zero, and now you’re a size six, and like you’re talking about how, and I’m guilty of doing those things many years ago as well. So like I you know, I always try to, you know, tell people that it’s not to make people feel bad, but it’s like, how can we, you know, reflect on the impact that things like that are having on people who actually have, you know, lived experience who are fat. And so I think that that’s probably one of the biggest ones is like, the imagery that you’re using, the way that you’re using your body to market the message, and really thinking about the impact, and similarily like just being more conscious of, of, like, you know, just, you can just eat whatever you want, you can just, you know, just eat a burger in public, but really not, again, considering like that, that might actually be like an unsafe situation for certain, you know, for people depending on like, you know, the environment that they’re in or who they’re around. And so I guess it’s just kind of, you know, what I would love to see as people sort of thinking about, like, what’s the impact on people with different identities than me when I speak about things like this when I talk about things like this, you know, like, we can’t just use our own lived experience in order to talk about this message like it, you know, how can we share other people’s lived experiences to talk about this message and I’m not perfect, by the way

Aubrey:
like, totally, like, yeah, I would totally 100% cosign on Absolutely. All of that. And I also would say on the I think there’s some little like vicissitudes, little ins and outs that we’ve got to figure out and contradictions that we’ve got to figure out in Intuitive Eating world in particular, around like, this idea of like, just eat whatever you want anything less is not liberated, right is sort of the undercurrents of some of that stuff, not all of it, but some of it. And there is some real ableism built into that, right? That like there are folks for whom dietary restrictions are a real and medical phenomenon for them and eating whatever you want. And whatever point is not actually going to be a functional model, that doesn’t mean that there’s not sort of food freedom for that person at any point. That doesn’t mean that they can’t also sort of work through how intuitive eating could work for them. But I think there is sort of, one of the things that we do when we get really excited about a new idea is that we get really defensive about what it really is and what it really isn’t. And we get really defensive about other people using it differently than we do. And I think we’ve done a release a little bit of that death grip on that concept, and make space for people who have celiac or are diabetic or are hypertensive or what have you, and may just have, you know, dietary restrictions around this kind of stuff, as well, which we just haven’t. I haven’t seen very many people saying dietary restrictions aren’t real. But I also haven’t seen very many people addressing that they exist and acknowledging how this might like shift for folks who do experience.

Unknown Speaker 41:32
Yeah, I know IV Felicia has talked about that quite a bit. I don’t know if

Aubrey:
Yeah, she’s fantastic.

Summer:
Yeah. And the other thing I mean, that’s really in meshed with that is classism, right? Like this idea of just eat whatever you want. It’s like but if you can’t afford, especially now, when food prices are just, you know, through the roof, it’s like you that’s a that’s a really hard thing to do, even for people who have you know, who make a living wage. But that’s, you know, then there’s people who are in poverty that is like, just like you, they would probably just laugh at that idea.

Aubrey:
certainly. And there’s also listen, there’s like cultural values wrapped up in it. There’s like all kinds of stuff going on with this. Listen, there’s neurodiversity in this issue that folks who have sensory issues with different foods, that’s like a real issue. There is an eating disorder justice angle to this, which is folks with arfid, avoidant restrictive feeding and eating and food intake disorder. There we go. I got there.

Summer:
Yeah, I wouldn’t have been it I would not have I would not have been able to do the letters in the acronym. I just know what it is.

Aubrey:
It’s an eating disorder that is sort of recently acknowledged. And it’s something that historically we would have just referred to as picky eating as like sort of an issue of willfulness, not an issue of like, a serious sort of relationship with food thing to sort out and ring, that there are lots of like, once you sort of, again, once you pop the hood, on that concept, it gets a lot more complicated when you sort of start to engage more and more kinds of people. I mean, the other thing to add to your classism piece, and I can’t remember who is talking to you might have been Shana Spence, who talked about this, who said that, like, Listen, if you have a 15 minute break every four hours, good luck with your grazing and intuitive eating. Like if you have a job, that is an hourly wage, with limited downtime, you’re gonna have to eat when your lunch break comes up. And that’s kind of that and you’re gonna have to eat what’s around you or what you brought, right? Like this sort of idea of eat whatever you want, whenever you want really does play too. I mean, frankly, folks like me, right, like, middle class to upper middle class white folks who it might get work from home Gray’s away, buddy, go to. And that might not be possible for many, many, many people.

Summer:
Yeah, there’s so much nuance to it. And I mean, I could talk to you all day, but I’m gonna wrap it up here. It’s been and and we can talk about soap operas, too.

Aubrey:
We’re gonna end this record, and then I’m gonna yell at you for 30 minutes about Passions. Just kidding, I won’t put you down.

Summer:
I wish I had hit record when we first started chatting. But where can people find more of you?

Aubrey:
You can get my books wherever you get books. They’re called 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 because I don’t write short titles apparently. You can listen to our podcast maintenance phase where we’re sort of debunking and decoding fad diets and wellness trends and weight loss sort of ideas. wherever you get podcasts, and I’m on social media at yr fat friend. That’s everything I think. Yeah.

Summer:
Don’t you have a documentary coming out?

Aubrey:
Oh, yeah. Oh, be good. Call. All Good catch. Yeah, I am the subject of a documentary directed by Jeanne Finley, who is absolutely incredible. She directed the last watch, which was the Game of Thrones, final season documentary, she directed the seahorse, the man who gave birth or the dad who gave birth, excuse me, like a bunch of absolutely incredible documentaries, that’s premiering at Tribeca. And we’ll keep folks posted when we have details on streaming.

Summer:
That is, I mean, that’s a big deal. That’s amazing.

Aubrey:
It’s real intense. You get to know me, and my parents, and there’s a lot of being an adult fat kid, of two parents who are maybe, you know, who love and support me and struggle with some of this stuff, you know?

Summer:
Yeah. Wow. Oh, my gosh, I can’t wait to see it. Well, okay. Well, it’s been such a pleasure. I really appreciate you being here. This has been amazing. And thank you, Rock on. All right. There was a lot of stuff mentioned in this episode. So you can find all the links to any of the articles that were mentioned, the books, the organization’s doing, work to end weight discrimination. All of those are linked in the show notes for this episode at summer innanen.com. Forward slash 271. I hope you consider going out and supporting those amazing organizations. And I hope you enjoyed this episode. And don’t forget to go grab Andres books. Both of them are amazing. And like I said, I’m really really enjoyed the latest one, you just need to lose weight and 90 and other myths about fat people. All right, thank you so much for listening today. I’ll be back again soon. Rock on.

I’m Summer Innanen. And I want to thank you for listening today. You can follow me on Instagram and Facebook at summer Innanen. And if you haven’t yet, go to Apple podcasts search eat the rules and subscribe rate and review this show. I would be so grateful. Until next time, rock on.